Princess Peach: Showtime! is unlike anything else. It be like anything else — the action-adventure game is only the second installment in Super Mario’s 43-year-old history to make Princess Peach its primary protagonist, and it treats her like a proper, petticoated hero. Usually, Mario main games turn Peach’s long skirt and little gloved hands into reasons why she’s best suited to being a fragile lily in a vase. But even ensconced in her majestic brick castle in the vast Mushroom Kingdom in which she rules, Peach is inevitably kidnapped by some irritating guy. In this sense, Nintendo has historically disparaged womanhood as Peach’s biggest liability. But Showtime! doesn’t do that.
Princess Peach: Showtime! reviewPublisher: NintendoDeveloper: NintendoPlatform: Played on SwitchAvailability: Out 22nd March on Switch.
It instead equates ribbons, dresses, and other types of girly-girl magic to legitimate tools. Sometimes, it even seems like Peach finds more power in salt-sized glitter than Bowser keeps stored in both of his beefy biceps. This helps establish Princess Peach: Showtime! as two things: first, it’s an innovative Super Mario installment. Then, it’s hot-pink respect finally paid to Peach, who has spent too much of her life bruising on the sidelines.
Outside its unique characterisation of Peach, Princess Peach: Showtime! is satisfying in its creative level design and varied styles of combat. This dynamism is demanded by Showtime!’s somewhat strange plot, in which life imitates art, which imitates life, which imitates magical realism in a Charlie Kaufman movie (except no one ever gets depressed, because their bodies are made up of 100 percent love).
Peach and her Toad countrymen have been invited to attend a play at the illustrious Sparkle Theater on the Theet species’ island. The lightbulb-nosed Theets – which act as the Theater’s patrons, workers, and actors, or “Sparklas” – are brand-new to the Mario series, as are the rest of Showtime!’s auxiliary characters and antagonists. Populating Showtime! entirely with unfamiliar characters (other than Peach) is a subtle but definitive way Showtime! forces players to identify with its leading lady, while also building out her niche in the franchise. I thought this was clever — the first Peach game, 2005’s Super Princess Peach for DS, was dismissed in some reviews for being aimed at a “less hardcore, girl audience,” as IGN put it at the time. Showtime! doesn’t leave enough space for misunderstanding. When you’re playing Showtime!, you don’t need to worry about being a girl, or a man, or anyone else. You’re Peach.