Super Princess Peach (Nintendo DS Review)

Super Princess Peach
Platform: Nintendo DS
Released October 20, 2005 (JPN) February 27, 2006 (US)
Concept by Takayuki Ikeda
Directed by Akio Imai and Azusa Tajima
Developed by Tose
Published by Nintendo
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Listing at Mario Wiki

For the purposes of this review, let’s just take it for granted that there are two screens and, unless I’m talking about one of the touchscreen mini-games, not every screenshot needs both screens visible. The hearts are as follows: JOY (yellow) RAGE (red) GLOOM (blue) and calm (green). Not pictured; unimpressed.

I just did Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, a game famous for its difficulty. Super Princess Peach is on the opposite end of the difficulty spectrum. It’s probably most famous for being perhaps the most breezy Nintendo platformer ever. I think the original Kirby’s Dream Land is far easier, but Super Princess Peach certainly has a case. Oddly enough, the game it WANTS to share the most in common with is Yoshi’s Island. From the graphics style to the end goals to the pacing, this is Yoshi’s Island. Just drop the satisfying egg shooting mechanics and replace them with an umbrella that’s functionally a sword and you have the basic gist of Super Princess Peach. Only it doesn’t come even a little bit close to that masterpiece in level design or enjoyment, but it tried so gosh darn hard that I kind of feel bad for it.

It’s not JUST the end goals that feel like they’re trying to invoke Yoshi’s Island, though they certainly don’t help.

The umbrella-based combat just lacks the satisfaction that you’d normally want from a Mario game. “But it’s NOT a Mario game! It’s a Peach game!” Is it though? Because the level design, enemies, layouts, and game flow are definitively Mario/Yoshi like. Peach’s attack and controls make her like a bonus character unlocked at the end of the Mario game instead of the star of her own game, and that’s even if you factor in the “vibes.” Peach has three extreme emotions that are used for solving the most basic of puzzles, plus a fourth that restores your health. One of them makes her overjoyed, which for some reason causes her to turn into a tornado. One of them makes her cry, which causes her to run really fast, and one turns her into a Karen who wants to speak to the manager right f*cking now, and also she’s on fire and heavier? Neither of those have ever happened to me when I’m pissy. Well, I did catch fire once but I was really mad, and I don’t think she is.

“I ordered the cheddar broccoli, not the clam chowder!”

I think you could probably make a solid action game with this premise, but Super Princess Peach’s problem is that it just has no faith in players. Even deep into the game, if there’s an element that requires one of the vibes to get past, there will almost certainly be an info block that spells out to you how exactly to get past it. Even when those elements repeat, with the same sprites and similar type of layout leading up to it, the game designers apparently didn’t want anyone to have to use even the most minuscule amount of brain power.

I’m almost never on the side of the blowhards who complain about games being too hand-holdy. With Super Princess Peach, I’m siding with the blowhards. This game holds your hand so tightly that it causes necrosis.

Okay, fine, just don’t hit the info blocks, right? Sure, but the game also repeats the “puzzles” with the same sprites anyway. The only way Super Princess Peach wouldn’t grow stale is if it changed-up the look of the things that you use the vibes on. The amount of gates or obstacles that require the vibes are too limited. You also get a limited amount of vibe energy, at least at the start of the game that you can purchase upgrades for. Eventually you can unlock a thing that allows you to recharge the meter by standing still. Even that is botched, as you have to wait FOREVER for it to activate and start recharging. Before getting that, you have to conserve your vibe power, and that means you’re kind of discouraged from using it on enemies. So I found the whole vibe thing to be a waste of time outside the bosses, all of whom require the vibes to defeat.

With the giant wiggler here, you have to weigh-down plungers using the anger vibe, and after a hugely annoying delay, it’ll flip it over and allow you to damage it. This could have been a sweet boss battle if not for the timing issues.

So the main focus of the game is typical Mario platforming with a sword, more or less. If you jump on an enemy, it just tips it over and allows you to either finish it off with a whack of the umbrella or you can pick it up and throw it. You can unlock extra umbrella tactics like a charge attack or the ability to briefly slow your fall. During the main quest, there’s forty stages and eight boss fights. Each level has three toads and usually a puzzle piece or music track hidden somewhere in it. And by “hidden” I mean a ton of them are just laid along the main path you take. Instead of one hit deaths, you start with three hearts, with all forms of damage only taking half a heart, and again, you can upgrade this. Thanks to the “relax” vibe, I find it unlikely the average experienced gamer will die. Even if you fall into a pit, you’re reset with only a half-heart ding to your health, and you don’t even need the vibe to restore your life. Refills are plentiful, as are enemy combos that drop both health and emotional refills.

This “swinging by a rope” gimmick would make for a good one-time set piece. Twice at most. But it’s repeated constantly and never offers any meaty challenge because every section feels kind of samey with only the slightest uptick in “difficulty” via more complicated tracks.

Once upon a time, a minority of players got offended because in a game starring a girl, Peach uses her emotional state to “get her way” because women are too emotional. I think it’s more silly than offensive, and if anything about the game actually is sexist, I’d think it’s how damn easy Super Princess Peach is. The game offers NOTHING in the way of resistance or challenge. If Tose’s intent was that it was the first Mario platformer marketed specifically for girls and so they better tone back the difficulty to suit their delicate feminine needs, that would be gross, but I couldn’t find any interview or really much in the way of any behind the scenes talk on Super Princess Peach. I’m NOT going to assume bad intent on a developer’s part, especially with a game that was obviously made with the best of intentions. And yeah, they sent the game to critics in boxes scented with perfume. What can I say? It was a different time.

At its strongest, the levels in Super Princess Peach feel like early levels in either Mario World or Yoshi’s Island.

I also don’t buy that they would have felt pressure to market towards girls because it’s a female character. Nintendo fans had already been inoculated from cooties since the NES era. Never mind that Metroid is a beloved franchise starring probably the most famous female game protagonist, because Peach herself had already stolen the show in the very first sequel (well, in the US) to Nintendo’s flagship series. I’ve heard from enough Mario 2 fans to know that Peach was THE most popular character for players from all walks of life in Super Mario Bros. 2. So the whole “they made a baby’s game because it starred a girl” thing doesn’t pass the smell test to me. I just think the entire project was flawed from the drawing board. Really, Nintendo and Tose’s biggest mistake was trying to shoehorn Peach into a Mario-style game instead of building off of the popularity of Peach in Mario 2. She was the cool one who could hover for a couple seconds when she jumped. Build a game tailored to the hover! THIS should have been the Mario 2 sequel I’ve been dying for since I played Super Mario Advance.

Before every boss, there’s a touch screen mini-game that there’s really no fail condition for. If you take damage, you just start over with a slightly easier layout until you reach the goal. There’s also some microphone-based mini-games that have to be bought from the store and various other gimmicky things like jigsaw puzzles. I found all the touchscreen usage to be arbitrary and half-assed. If Nintendo were to re-release this on Switch, it wouldn’t take much adjustment. I wouldn’t bother, though.

But, instead Peach stars in a game that feels like it belongs to another character. The majority of enemies and bosses are copy and paste jobs from Mario games. Yoshi Island stood out because it had a healthy mix of Mario staples along with new, original enemies. The only aspect of Peach’s rogues gallery that is unique to her is that the enemies are emotional too. I didn’t even realize this until late in the game, because whether an enemy is crying or angry, a whack of the umbrella is all it takes to stop them. Things like that make me wonder if they had a more meaty, ambitious game and then just lost their nerve halfway through development. Like, the Koopa Kids were originally going to be mini-bosses in Super Princess Peach and their sprites and behavior still exist in the code, but they’re gone completely. They’re not even in cutscenes. The game could have really used some mini-bosses because the levels are so repetitive and uninspired that the forty levels are a complete slog to get through.

It’s not until the final world where the level design gets frisky enough that I sat up in my chair. Like this room does the typical “hide behind a statue” trope only with a twist: you have to be using the umbrella slow-down-your-fall move. Then, they placed enemies close by to make it an actual challenge. Well, challenge being relative. Only once in the entire run did I even get knocked down to my final heart. I was never, at any point, one single hit away from death.

My frustration with the overall milquetoast level design is further compounded by the “post game” content. Among other unlockables are a whopping TWENTY FOUR additional levels. That means over one-third of the levels that made it into the final game are locked until after you defeat Bowser. After the credits roll, you have to re-beat the bosses, giving you three additional stages per world. Some of those stages were much, much stronger than the ones in the main quest. Others were more of the same, but the fact that so many stages don’t happen until after the credits to me is more proof that something changed along the way. I would love to know the real story on this one, because the actual final product of Super Princess Peach is a mostly joyless series of samey levels that feel like the scraps of a better game.

It’s probably the easiest Bowser fight ever. Once he drops the bob-ombs, the others remain on the screen even after you score a hit. You just have to time the explosion so it happens in front of his face, but I scored all the hits in a row except one.

For every good stage in Super Princess Peach, there’s four middling ones. It’s just so….. bland. It took me three days to get through this and it wasn’t even worth it because Super Princess Peach does basically nothing interesting enough or bad enough to even get a decent review out of. Calling it “baby’s first platformer” might actually be accurate. The only audience that I imagine would find it exciting, besides the most never-say-die Nintendo diehards who would convince themselves they love Nintendo-branded colon cleaners, are very young gamers. I can’t review from their perspective and the kids in my life have aged out of being able to test that theory, but I imagine children between the ages of 6 to 8 who have very limited gaming experience might find Super Princess Peach to be the ideal break-into-2D-platforming experience. For me, I played this at some point between the ages of 16 and 17 and I remember liking it a lot more. I was sincerely excited to revisit Super Princess Peach, and now I feel like I want my time back. I was just bored. Playing it now with a critical eye, Super Princess Peach feels like a game designed for people who don’t play Nintendo games. So, I don’t think this was made specifically for girls, because I really don’t think this was made for anyone at all.
Verdict: NO!