Princess Peach Can’t Get a Break

The release of Princess Peach: Showtime! has me bummed, I’m sad to say, because this new game makes me think Nintendo didn’t learn the right lesson from the last time they tried to give this character her own solo adventure.

The princess formerly known as Toadstool got her first starring role in Super Princess Peach, released for the Nintendo DS in 2005. If you’re thinking this seems late in the run of the Mario series to give the main female character top billing, you’re correct. In fact, she’s not even the first female character in the extended Marioverse to get her own game; that honor technically goes to Wanda, the big-eared block fairy who’s the main, controllable character in Mario & Wario, released only in Japan in 1993. And if you count the Donkey Kong Country games as being part of the same family, then Dixie Kong also beats Peach, because in 1996 she starred in Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong’s Double Trouble. That makes Peach the third female character to star in a Mario game, and that’s actually wild to consider, especially because she’s one of the most recognizable video game characters ever — male or female.

You’ve probably heard that Super Princess Peach is not without its flaws, however. While it does boast some gorgeous pixel art that manages to recapture some of the magic of Mario’s 16-bit era, the game is one of the easiest Mario platformers you’ll ever play.

That is not necessarily a bad thing on its own. The original Kirby’s Dreamland is also fairly easy on its first playthrough, though upon beating it, you get access to a hard mode that Super Princess Peach lacks. Because this game stars a female character and was marketed at female gamers, however, there’s an implicit assumption that girls aren’t as good as boys at platforming video games (if not video games in general), and therefore girl games have to be dumbed down a notch or two.

And then we have the set of abilities that Peach was given for this game. Infamously, she does not use the kind the power-ups that are present in just about any other Super Mario outing. Instead, she rapidly cycles through her emotions: joy to float up in the air, anger to literally set things on fire, sadness to gush tears and calm to regenerate her health meter. For what it’s worth, the game’s setting is Vibe Island, where enemies that express one emotion or the other also behave differently, and the locations are sometimes named to indicate a certain moods — more so with Giddy Sky, Shriek Mansion and Ladida Plains, less so with Wavy Beach, Gleam Glacier and Hoo’s Wood. So it’s not just Peach who’s emotionally volatile, but it does seem like no one involved in the production realized the bad optics making Peach’s first game all about mood swings. Intentionally or accidentally, it embodies the sexist stereotype that women’s emotions are unpredictable and constantly changing.

The four elements: happy, sad, angry and HP restoration.

This criticism is barely mentioned on the game’s Wikipedia page, save for a one reference to “weird sexist undercurrents” in Ryan Davis’ review of the title for GameSpot. A Polygon piece that went up last week, however, notes that Anita Sarkeesian discussed Super Princess Peach in the third installment of her Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series, and dings the game for the mood swing premise but also excluding Peach from the game’s wrap-around story. “Peach is not even featured in any of the game’s narrative cutscenes, instead they all focus on the backstory of her parasol, who it turns out is really a cursed boy named Perry,” Sarkeesian says. “So while it is definitely nice to see Peach starring in her own adventure, the dude in distress role reversal premise here feels like it’s just intended as a lighthearted joke or niche market novelty.” Sarkeesian is correct. Going back and rewatching the opening set-up, it’s genuinely shocking how little a role Peach plays in it.

Back in the day, I played through Super Princess Peach and enjoyed it for what it was: a novelty dressed like a Mario game even if the overall quality wasn’t what we’d expect from a title developed by Nintendo. (It was published by Nintendo but developed by Tose, and it plays somewhat like the Legendary Starfy platformers, which Tose also developed.) Super Princess Peach was something less, and while more than a few “canon” Marioverse platformers had fallen short — especially ones released for the Nintendo DS, including Yoshi’s Island DS and Wario: Master of Disguise — the big difference is that those characters got more chances to hop and bop through new games where they were the main character. Peach wouldn’t get another game with her name in the title until nearly twenty years later.

All this time, I hoped that when Peach got that second game, it would be one befitting her status at Nintendo. Maybe Peach is not the company’s leading lady, exactly, seeing how Samus is the hero of her franchise and the Zelda series is at least named for its princess, but she’s easily the female Nintendo character who’s shown up in the most games. And there’s something noble in taking this character that has for so long been relegated to damsel in distress roles and allowing her to be the hero, vanquish the bad guy and maybe even rescue a captive herself. I wanted Nintendo to give her a proper Super Mario game where Peach just happens to be the Mario. And because Super Princess Peach didn’t quite hit that mark, I was hoping the next one would.

On paper, Princess Peach: Showtime! could have been this. Its previews suggested a sort of Luigi’s Mansion-esque adventure where instead of tiptoeing through a haunted mansion, she’s adventuring through a darkened theater that has been cursed by an evil sorceress, Grape. And importantly, Peach isn’t just saving a male damsel in a one-for-one inversion of the usual Mario storyline, like she did in Super Princess Peach. This time, she’s trapped within the theater and she’s therefore rescuing herself for once. That’s something.

Once I actually got my hands on the game, however, I found the process of her getting to Grape to be something less than what I wanted, gameplay-wise. Each stage show offers Peach a new power-up costume — cowgirl, kung-fu master, mermaid, crossing guard — that she can use in challenges that are sometimes done in the platformer style and sometimes in other styles of gameplay. But the end result of the jumble of different play styles makes this feel more like a collection of mini-games than it does the launch of a new franchise starring Peach. To me, it seems fragmented and piecemeal, rather than a single epic quest for her to undertake. And some of the gameplay styles are tedious enough that I just wanted to get through them. (Detective Peach, I’m looking at you.)

I will admit that the gimmick of Peach donning different costumes seems like a clever way to springboard off the ending of Super Mario Odyssey, which grants her a moment of agency she doesn’t often get. In this game’s ending, Peach elects to pick neither Bowser nor Mario and instead goes on her own vacation, showing up in Odyssey’s various kingdoms with cute new outfits. (She sports explorer gear in Fossil Falls, for example, a gardener’s overalls for Luncheon Kingdom and a swim sarong for Lake Lamode.) People love the outfits, sure, but that’s not the only reason this part of the game was meaningful; in my head, at least, we want her out on an adventure that’s all her own, seeing the world on her terms. What Princess Peach: Showtime! instead just answers the question, “What if there were even MORE pretty costumes?!” (Perhaps underscoring the way Showtime! Seems to echo this aspect of Odyssey, Stella, the Lisa Simpson-looking assistant in Showtime!, recalls Tiara, the little sister to Mario’s sidekick in this game, Cappy, who accompanies Peach on her world tour. They’re far from the only li’l floaty buddies in a Mario game, but I maybe would have preferred if this new game re-teamed Peach with Tiara.)

Honestly, as clumsy as Super Princess Peach was, at least it sent Peach on a proper, Super Mario-style adventure, where Bowser is the big bad. Peach does the whole platforming thing through all the locations Mario normally would before trekking through Bowser’s castle and fighting him on one one. Showtime!, meanwhile, just seems smaller, simpler and slighter — “Here, decorate some cookies. There is zero chance you will fall into lava.” I suppose the party to blame would be Good-Feel, the developer of the game, but they’ve managed to create successful games around Nintendo mascots before, with Kirby’s Epic Yarn and Yoshi’s Wooly World. In fact, their first outing on a Nintendo console was Wario Land: Shake It!, which I liked a great deal because it redeemed Wario after his own bad game where he dressed up in various costumes.

It doesn’t help that Princess Peach: Showtime! follows closely on the heels of Super Mario Bros. Wonder, the best platformer in the series in a long time and one in which you could just play as Peach for the whole game if that’s what you wanted. Her name wasn’t in the title, sure, but it could easily become a Peach showcase. I do wonder what the players who defaulted to Peach in Wonder thought of this new game. Maybe everyone else will love it, and we’ll see Stella as a playable character in the next Mario Kart game. I’m not sure that’s going to happen, however, and I hope Peach doesn’t have to wait another eighteen years to get another starring role. When she does, I hope it’s something as big as any adventure Mario has.

Between this and the very “girl boss” depiction of Peach in the Super Mario Bros. movie, in which she’s so confident and capable that she becomes utterly inert as a character, I am realizing how strange it is that the past year has been so good for another iconic blond with a fondness for dressing up and the color pink. I speak of Barbie, of course. If that movie was able to give dimension to a doll, then surely someone smart can do something with depth and breadth for Peach.

Miscellaneous Notes

If you want to get technical, and we always do, Peach was the main playable character in Princess Toadstool’s Castle Run, released in 1990. But this was not a game released on any Nintendo console. It was one of three LCD wristwatch games available only at McDonald’s restaurants. Peach’s version has her making a mad dash for her castle, dodging Koopa Troopas and rescuing Toads. It’s not much, but if you count this, it means Peach beats Wanda by three years, and that’s something.

There’s also Luigi’s version, which has him deflecting hammers tossed by the Hammer Brothers, and then Mario’s version, which has him catching eggs shot out by Birdo — and that’s perhaps surprising because these toys were designed to promote Super Mario World, and Birdo does not appear in that game.

Apparently this post is my chance to list off my gripes with Super Princess Peach in addition to Princess Peach: Showtime!, so here I go. In the way that Luigi’s Mansion gave Luigi the Poltergust 3000 and Super Mario Sunshine gave Mario F.L.U.D.D., Peach’s assistant in this game is Perry, a magical anthropomorphic parasol that allows her to pick up and throw enemies. As the game goes on, Perry gains new abilities, including allowing Peach to float in the air for a few seconds. This is helpful, for gameplay purposes, but it rubbed me the wrong way because Super Mario Bros. 2 established that Peach can do that on her own, without the aid of an accessory. It’s actually Super Mario RPG that associated her with parasols for the first time, because when she joins Mario’s party, she escapes out her bedroom window floating down with one, Mary Poppins-style. This is the reason that Peach has fought with a parasol since Super Smash Bros. Melee, and 2007’s Super Paper Mario, a platformer/RPG hybrid, has her floating through the air with the aid of one as well. Really, it’s just Super Mario 3D World that restored her ability to do it on her own, and this now seems like it’s more the exception rather than the rule. She didn’t have this ability in Super Mario Bros. Wonder because all playable characters essentially had the same abilities.

What’s especially weird about Perry is that he’s given something of a backstory, where he used to be a human boy but was transformed into a talking umbrella by unknown villains. All of this information is imparted to the player through interstitial scenes where Peach and Perry are huddled around a campfire and Perry ends up dreaming about his own past.

However, nothing seen in these dream sequences pays off in any way in the game. Perry is still in umbrella form when Peach beats Bowser, and the villains who cursed him to be in this form don’t actually show up in the game at all. We’re never told if he got his original body back or if he was ever reunited with the old man he met on a mountain before all this happened. It’s actually a very weird hanging thread that will probably never be answered in a subsequent game.

As far as I know, Super Princess Peach features is the only instance of a Mario game doing the Metroid-style gender reveal. The boss of the Gleam Glacier area is Blizzaurus, which initially appears to be some kind of frost dragon. When she’s absorbed enough damage, however, you see the true form of this boss: an ice fairy. The joke is on you for seeing the creature’s monstrous form and presuming it had to be male, I guess. Blizzaurus is the only female boss fought in the game.

I realized I there wasn’t a decent gif of ol’ Blizzaurus online so I made one.

I’m always down to see a new female villain, and I suppose I’m okay with the big bad in Princess Peach: Showtime! being another female character named after fruit. Yes, Grape does look a lot like a Kirby villain to the point that I’d guess that she maybe was supposed to be one at some point, but at the very least, she does fit in with the Maro series tradition of purple representing covetousness. (Think about it: Wario, Waluigi, Syrup — and Nabbit?)

The notion of Peach weaponizing her emotions did not originate with Super Princess Peach, however. In Super Mario RPG, her most powerful special attack is Psych Bomb, which in the original Japanese version is Hisuterikku Bomu (ヒステリックボム), or “Hysterical Bomb.” That gives new meaning to the description of the attack: “Make me mad and… BOOM!” She’s essentially releasing her pent-up hostility on enemies.

I don’t necessarily hate the ad campaign Nintendo made to promote Super Princess Peach in North America, but it really does seem like someone realized that the game had an obvious sexist reading and then tried their best to hide that fact.

Note that emotions aren’t mentioned once. Hmm.

Miscellaneous Notes

The Legend of Bowser’s Dead Wife