Princess Peach: Showtime! review - the damsel in distress becomes an RPG queen
Princess Peach: Showtime! is unlike anything else. It shouldn't 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.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
Princess Peach: Showtime! is unlike anything else. It shouldn't 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.
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).
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