Princess Peach: Showtime! (Switch)

While Princess Peach is best known for her role as a damsel in distress, she’s engaged in enough heroics herself to outclass many video game heroes. In game likes Super Mario Bros. 2, Super Mario 3D World, and Super Mario Bros. Wonder you could play through the entire adventure as her if you so wish, but as their names imply, they were still Mario’s games. Even when Peach headlined her own game with Super Princess Peach, it was more a role inversion where she faced the same enemies Mario usually fought. While Donkey Kong and Wario could completely branch off into games that felt no need to reference their Mario history, Peach still felt squarely tied to Mario’s world, but that makes a game like Princess Peach: Showtime! all the more special. An action platformer with almost entirely new characters and situations save for a brief appearance by the Toads near the start, Princess Peach: Showtime! really does feel like Peach is truly taking center stage this time, and with its theatrical theming, it couldn’t be a more appropriate way to do so.

 

At the Sparkle Theater, small big nosed people known as Theets put on extravagant performances in all sorts of genres. Princess Peach receives an invitation to check out the plays at the theater, but she ends up arriving right as the theater comes under attack by a floating figure known as Madame Grape and her grape-based minions known as the Sour Bunch. Locking away the lead performers known as Sparklas and corrupting many of the plays with mischief and aggression, the Sour Bunch have all but ruined the theater, but they made the mistake of locking Princess Peach in with them. With the help of a little sprite named Stella, Peach is able to tap into Sparkle Power which allows her to embody the leading roles of the different plays right down to their special abilities. Whether she’s becoming a ninja, detective, or dashing thief, Peach uses each play’s unique powers to take out the Sour Bunch members spoiling the shows all while collecting the Sparkle Gems needed to access new parts of the theater that Madame Grape has locked away.

While it is predominantly an action platformer at heart, Princess Peach: Showtime! does spread its attention across a few different ways to play. Each outfit is given three levels you play non-consecutively to show off its unique abilities, and the scenarios depicted in them all play into appropriate elements for Peach’s current getup. The cowgirl outfit for example doesn’t just give you the ability to lasso enemies, it also takes place a Wild West town where the enemies now fire grapes at you from their guns. You can drop into a saloon and even race alongside a locomotive on a horse, the levels like quick tours through familiar genre trappings with friendly characters portrayed by the Theets who guide you through it. Everything does technically take place on a stage, but the game finds a good middle ground for how much it lets that impact things, even if the early Swordfighter stage does perhaps try a bit too hard to emphasize a reliance on props. Whether you’re meant to be flying through space or swimming underwater, the gameplay will dictate things more than making the background look like backdrops and certain things like the Wild West’s horse look like a puppet. Characters can swim freely through the air in the mermaid level without it getting tied up trying to make it make sense, but there’s a nice balance between reminding you this is meant to be a stage play and allowing things to get a bit more involved. Most area do not allow the 3D movement to go back too far to avoid completely breaking the aesthetic and sometimes the Theets are so into their roles it’s easy to forget that technically their actors in plays being warped by the Sour Bunch, but that mix of magically-enhanced authenticity and theatrical performances feels like it gets to enjoy the best of both possible presentation choices.

 

The soundtrack is surprisingly good for emphasizing each area’s theme while being solid music in their own right. It’s one thing to be a cowgirl, it’s another to have adventurous music backing up your ride alongside a train that’s actually trying to run you over. The elegance of the figure skater is further sold by a beautiful song that accompanies your graceful and relaxed exploration of the iced over levels, and while some skills like Dashing Thief Peach’s hacking are basically just pressing a button to open the way onward, the sly music fits the genre theme well. Some outfits even get to cover more than just a basic tale told for their archetype, the cake baking Patisserie Peach having to contend with attendees at a Halloween festival who are practically zombified by their ravenous hunger. You’ll usually get the trappings of a role you’d hope to see for them, but sometimes Princess Peach: Showtime! does stretch its legs on taking its costumed heroine into a slightly unexpected direction, especially considering you’re actually meant to stop a terrorist plot in one of the detective stages.

 

Individually though, the levels in Princess Peach: Showtime! do feel like they don’t get to shine as much as they could have if the game had a stronger focus. For some outfits like the ninja costume, Peach gets a wide range of useful abilities that could have been the core of an entire game on their own, especially since they mix up goals like sneaking past enemies, solving puzzles, and fighting. Then you have something like Mighty Peach, the sci-fi superhero’s basic attack launching her into enemies in a way that makes dealing damage slow and dangerous and the fights as a result are basic to compensate. Mighty Peach has her moments like the flying segments, although even those are pretty easy, which ends up being another thing that holds some of the action back. Having only three levels for a role means the first one is often spent teaching it to you and the second and third levels aren’t always a big jump in complexity. Most combat-oriented outfits at least throw in one break away from button-mashing battles like the Swordfighter needing to time dodges while the Kung Fu costume comes with one-on-one battles where you need to time attacks right to counter, but most of the action heavy stages feel more like they want you to be swept up into the presentation where things are more interesting because of the context rather than how you’re participating.

Not all the costumes hinge heavily on combat though, and the variety is definitely appreciated. Some like Dashing Thief Peach lean more on platforming challenges that involve her unique grappling hook, Princess Peach: Showtime! a bit more willing to demand platforming skills than battle acumen. Death is hardly anything to worry about though, the game not setting you back far and the only penalty is ten coins taken away despite them being fairly abundant and their main use is just for getting new colors for Peach and Stella when they’re not performing a role. Some outfits shift the gameplay away from the usual action too, Detective Peach’s stages more about puzzle solving and Patisserie Peach’s essentially a set of baking minigames. Detective Peach’s mystery solving might be one area where the game’s intention to cater to younger audiences is most apparent with most clues being fairly obvious but it’s not 100% easy, and the baking minigames can actually require good timing or a steady hand if you want to do well at them. The existence of atypical or more relaxed forms of play does feel like it helps the overall package, especially since you’re allowed to choose which of four levels to play per floor of the theater so you can seek out the exciting set pieces of the action levels or the unique gameplay of the other roles.

 

There are times you find yourself playing as Princess Peach without any special costume, Stella allowing you to do a ribbon twirl that serves as an attack of sorts. This is often how a level for a new costume starts off before you earn it in the play’s story, but an interesting choice was made in having there be a floor boss that you fight with just your normal abilities as well. Many of these are animals made out of stage equipment, a spotlight lion and projector cat standing out as cool designs, and the fights can be a bit more involved than most action found elsewhere despite you bringing only the basics to the fight. It is a bit of a shame that the levels didn’t embrace unique or memorable bosses more as there was some room for it, the Kung Fu levels having a recurring rival for example who is handled well but then the ice skating stages squander their antagonist by having him fawn over your fabulous performances while refusing to make him into a true character. Princess Peach: Showtime! can whip up challenges at times that do start to test you a touch even with the outfits, the basement stages all meant to be final tests for outfits while some even get some legitimately difficult rehearsal tests where you need to perform rather rough tasks without getting hurt at all, but then other times the stages end incredibly quickly so you barely have time to appreciate them unfortunately.

 

This should be where optional content comes in to save the day, developer Good-Feel often known for kid friendly titles like Kirby’s Epic Yarn and Yoshi’s Woolly World where the true challenge comes from optional objectives meant for experienced players. Sparkle Gems are a collectible found in every level that will reward you for finding secret rooms, performing quick optional challenges, and doing things like performing perfectly at the baking challenges or saving everyone possible in a segment as Mighty Peach. Sparkle Gems are technically required to unlock boss battles to progress, but even if you weren’t going for them, many are given out freely at set points in stages or not really all that hidden. Rather than these being rewards for putting the outfits through their paces, often you just need to look around a bit or complete simple challenges, and secret hunting isn’t made the most convenient since you’ll have to replay an entire level to try and find any you miss and many feature unskippable chats that slow down the process. After the game’s finale there is more stuff to find added to every level anyway and that feels like an attempt to pad things a bit, but most rewards pertain to outfits or cosmetics for the theater so 100% completion doesn’t feel very necessary, the player best off just getting swept up into the moments of individual plays and shooting for Sparkle Gems when they can rather than fussing over missing any.

THE VERDICT: Princess Peach: Showtime! may take place on a stage, but its outfits are often more like theme park rides than deep performances. They have excellent music and carry you through some interesting situations, but this action platformer doesn’t often expect much out of the player. The gameplay, while technically shallow in terms of what you can do with each costume, ensures the variety is still there to keep you interested enough to see the levels through to the end. Even when some like Mighty Peach aren’t as cleanly designed, it’s hard not to get caught up in the exciting ideas presented by something like the strong theming of the cowgirl levels or the moments it can be a bit more exacting like with the cake baking. The collectibles don’t add that much needed extra substance though, so Princess Peach: Showtime! is more a ride through creative set pieces than a test of your ability to perform.

 

And so, I give Princess Peach: Showtime! for Nintendo Switch…

An OKAY rating. Princess Peach: Showtime! definitely deserves attention from younger or more casual players for its ability to mix together so many play types in a way that is interesting but not particularly demanding, but it does feel like if every outfit got even just 2 more levels to explore their concepts, then you could start to really see their potential outside of the theme park ride styled stages. Some get a moment to really shine in the basement or rehearsal format like Dashing Thief while others like Detective feel a bit afraid to explore how far they could go. Other times, it can feel like a stage wants to lay out extra challenges to test your chops with the specific abilities an outfit has but forgets to make them challenging. If you can wall jump as the ninja or bake cookies as the patisserie, having a room off to the side where you just do that and get a Sparkle Gem feels like wasted potential compared to actually cooking up a way to challenge those abilities. There are definitely times on the main path the game pushes against you enough to keep the adventure from growing dull, and the outfits provide different enough challenges and are spaced apart so they don’t feel like they overstay their welcome or get pushed outside their depth. Funnily enough, Princess Peach: Showtime! might want to look back at Super Princess Peach to figure out how to make an easy game more engaging if it was hoping for more depth, but while having more engaging optional collectible challenges to pursue would bump up the experience, this might just be a case where more stages would have inevitably lead to more engaging play. Three levels is enough to play in the space a genre presents and these levels could be the openers to games based around their mechanics, but a little more time spent elaborating on how an outfit’s skills could manifest would allow for the gameplay substance to grow alongside the effective presentation that can almost distract you from the sometimes shallow interactive elements.

 

Princess Peach: Showtime! does feel like it could be an easy recommendation if it was at a low price too. The different outfits perform their roles well and the levels are designed to quickly move you along to new set pieces. It is a nice little adventure, the soundtrack backing things up wonderfully as the stages are happy to explore a range of ideas tied to each genre. If your actual actions required more thought or skill to engage with these performances than the gameplay creativity might match the thought put into the artistic side of things, but Princess Peach: Showtime! is mostly a tasting menu of some nifty action and minigame ideas. If you want a splendid performance you’ll want to look elsewhere, but there’s nothing wrong with attending a showing that’s just trying to be a bit of fun.