You have chosen to read my Princess Peach: Showtime! review. This is on you, now.

I think it's worth reflecting on how Peach wasn't really even a character in the original Super Mario Bros. She was a destination. The MacGuffin you needed to reach in order to rightfully claim you'd won the game. The idea to expand beyond that in any way was largely an act of convience, as Fuji TV's Yume Kojo: Doki Doki Panic was rebranded as the second Super Mario game. They needed a roster of four heroes, and there had only been four sentient things in the Mushroom Kingdom that weren't enemies. They took the spritesheet for Lina and drew "The Princess" on top.

I don't point this out to demean or belittle Princess Peach. Far from it. The act of repurposing and rebranding is at the very core of what videogames are. Mario, himself, was the result of seeing what could be done with an unwanted Radar Scope arcade board, and missing out on the opportunity to use Paramount's Popeye characters. OXO, Tennis for Two and Spacewar! were all experiments to see if large-scale supercomputers designed for complex business calculations and global warfare could be used for the purpose of fun. Peach has quite rightly earned the title of Princess of Videogames. A direct descendant of the cathode-ray tube amusement device.

From her first playable appearance in Super Mario Bros. 2, she was treasured by little sisters, cartoon studios, and boys who valued the float-jump more than the societal pressures of homophobia and gender stereotypes. By Mario 64, her significance to the Mushroom Kingdom was fully fleshed-out, positioning the entire game within her castle, and illustrating her unwavering benevolence, ethereal presence, and also, her sense of fun with the introduction of her personally-commissioned Secret Slide. She was a true representative of videogames, and a welcoming presence for audiences who may have felt uninvited to the games gang.

In 2024, I feel Nintendo are more aware of the weight of their history. Back when they last tried this, with 2005's Super Princess Peach, there was an air of carelessness. It was a throwaway game, fobbed off to Chubby Cherub/Shrek: Reekin' Havoc devs, Tose, and launched to a market whose respect for Nintendo had already taken a beaten from the likes of DK: King of Swing, Super Mario Ball and Classic NES Series: Ice Climber. Now, Nintendo treat Peach with due reverence, having her host Universal Studios meet-and-greets in her own personal bandstand, as the highlight of millions of holidays. People are thrilled to meet her, regardless of how much spaghetti she's made for them.

Right now, we're in a very odd period for the Mario brand, overall. Nintendo have embraced the idea that there's no unified vision of what Mario is. In the last year, we've had a mainline 2D entry closely modelled on the art direction of Masanobu Sato, a major Hollywood movie that denied post-1994 backstories and reinstated the NES-era US canon, a remake of a very of-its-time mid-nineties Mario RPG, and the announcement of the remake of a very distinctly eccentric fan-favourite GameCube RPG. Mario has become Mr. Video again, appearing in all sorts of different projects, merely as a comforting presence. He's a doctor and an artist and a kart racer and an umpire and we're not supposed to take any of it very seriously.

The dynamic sits awkwardly in relationship to why New Super Mario Bros. took its iconography so seriously in the first place. Back then, it was a relief to see the series discard all the bullshit and get back on target, reinstating what was Real Mario Shit. Goombas were Goombas again, and if there were any weird offshot baddies, fans would need to adopt such convoluted nomenclature as "Mega Para-Biddybuddies". It felt like the programmers had taken more control, with the world defined by hard parameter references. There's a stiffness to that approach that I have a lot of affection for, and it was the lifeblood of the Wii U era (particularly in Europe and Japan). It brought us closer to the logic of the software, subconsciously making us better equipped to appreciate and understand it. It was fiercely objective. It's easy to see why this approach wouldn't resonate with the wider public, though. If Nintendo wanted to catch on to mainstream appeal, they'd need to foresake the concrete utility of their playing pieces and expand their surface-level appeal. During the promotion of the New Super Mario Bros. sequels, developers explained that Peach hadn't been made playable in the game because of how her float-jump would affect the balance of the level design. In Showtime, she doesn't even have the float-jump.

Ah - Here we are.

I don't really like Princess Peach: Showtime very much.

I could come out with excuses, justifications, characterisation discrepancies... I just think it's boring to play. Levels are formulaic and repetitive, there's little dexterity to its gameplay, the rewards system feels like you're playing the game wrong if you're not constantly digging at the scenery to find every hidden item, performance and presentation is way below where it ought to be for a game with this focus, yada yada yada... I don't think it really matters. I just didn't want to play the game very much. The first couple of days I had it, I was telling myself I was too busy to calm down and enjoy it. I spent multiple days away from it before completion, and only went back to it out of obligation. I really wanted to care less, and not bother coming back.

As much fondness as I may have for the character, I'm clearly not the target audience for this. And I don't mean to imply that it's a game strictly for young girls, either. But it probably is for fans of recent Yoshi games. I'm certainly not one of them. As I dodder around, looking at the nice artwork, but wondering what I'm supposed to be getting out of it. It's a bit of a shock to see Mystical Ninja's Etsunobu Ebisu come back to a directing role to make something so devoid of spark or humour. Though the different costumes grant Peach a range of diverse abilities, the structure of each introductory level is largely the same, and the bulk of her more intricate actions are automated. In a move that recalls Metroid: Other M, all core actions have been distributed between two face buttons, and if there's anything particularly acrobatic or impressive, it doesn't often feel like you were very involved in performing them.

Showtime is fun in theory. The level themes are bold and exciting, Peach's costumes and in-character voice clips are cute, there's a lot of great art and punny design. I saw one review compare it to Kirby and the Forgotten Land and became incensed. That's a game that loves being a game. It celebrates the medium, embraces all the tropes that come with being a platformer, and sets up young audiences to embark on a future, exploring many wonderful videogames. Showtime is like Paper Mario with all the jokes, strategy and compelling gameplay stripped out. It's an RPG without story or combat. If you wanted to dedicate a budget to having a team design a bunch of charming adventures for Princess Peach to go on, I can totally get behind that, but why make this game when your passions and energy were better suited to a series of YouTube shorts, or a pop-up book?

There's definitely things I wanted to like. I felt like I should have liked. There's several parts of the concept that feel like they're paying off on things they established with Peach's character years ago. The fact that Odyssey ended with her setting off to explore the world in a bunch of cute outfits feels like it was leading up to an idea like this. They're making a game with Cowgirl Princess Peach, for god's sake. How haven't I come away raving about it? It's just all so tame. Mermaid Peach sings underwater to guide helpful fish, and that sounds like something I should have adored, but they never take the next logical step with one of those trademark Nintendo Switch vocal themes. Why didn't they want this game to be brilliant?

Something that surprised me is how bothered I was by the stageplay concept. The notion that to some level, this was all pretend. That Peach is taking on the role of a character for each level. Her voice sounds different for a bunch of them. I don't really feel like this is a game about Peach. It's about her playing the part of generic characters. I didn't feel any sense of drama until the very end, when she emerges outside of the Sparkle Theatre, as herself. It was the first thing since the intro that the game was trying to convey as authentic. Maybe if I just believed in the game - like there was a real throughline that meant each level was an important new part of a story - I wouldn't have been so bored with it. You really don't have to do a lot to get me with this stuff. I honestly found myself crying when I first heard Odyssey attempt to finally convey Peach's perspective on her relationship with Mario. Is this what a good story has to offer a game? As it is, it felt like I'd bought a colouring-in book, and for some bizarre reason, it was important that I finish every page.

This is very much a 'me problem'. I hope I've established my criticisms as fiercely subjective. I can see some folk getting a lot out of this. I've heard some say that they loved Yoshi's Woolly World. I certainly don't want to convince Nintendo that people don't like Princess Peach games. It's just that I had to play through Sexy Parodius and Third Strike before I'd gotten through this, just to remind myself that I do enjoy playing videogames.

Normally if I enjoy a game I'd either try to have fun with my writing and do something corny like roleplaying as a character or go insanely heavy on the showmanship, but for the sake of this I'm actually going to be really vanilla and bore everyone to death.

Before I heel out, I'd like to let it be known that I was rooting for this game. When it was originally revealed in one of the Directs, I clapped, I hooted, and I hollered, for she deserves the universe and everything in it. She's an icon, she's a legend, and she is the moment. I heard it get compared to Wario World, which made me bounce off walls like Spring Wario from the classic Game Boy games. I could imagine it now, Peach womanhandling every bad guy in sight and going on an exciting journey through every genre of artistic theater known by Mushroomy Kingdom history. Unfortunately, comparing Good-Feel to even one of Treasure's lesser developments is essentially like putting silly putty next to an unpolished diamond.

"Engagement" and "difficulty" are two separate things, and it really needs to be stressed that the latter means little in the grand stage of what makes a game do what a game does, which is engage the player and take their mind off life, with the "fun yeah woo" energy replacing all their other thought processes. Spyro the Dragon and Ninja Gaiden are on opposite ends of the spectrum and still manage to be a few of my favorites to ever do it. Just a few days ago, I played Bugs Bunny Lost in Time on stream in a Discord call with one of my friends as she did some programming, and that is a game "made for children" with very little punishment dealt out for mistakes. For how jank and lower budget it was, it was fun with decent puzzles, cool ship combat, car chase segments, and even pretty good boss fights! It's something I enjoyed when I was eight, and still do now as an adult.

Peach Showtime for all of it's poor performing extravagance doesn't even use a lot of the joycon's controls, and many segments are very linear and on-rails with one of the Detective Peach puzzles quite literally having the solution put up on the wall for you. Using a simple control scheme is never a bad thing in itself, I enjoy an Atari game now and then, but the fine art of utilizing that simple control scheme demands creativity that extends beyond auto-scrolling sections that make 100%'ing the game annoying. It would also ask for enemies to master the very tricky art of "moving the fuck around a little" to justify having the world's most lenient parry window. It's frustrating, because for every half-decent powergaming moment that involves throwing hitboxes around enemies that are less threatening than beginner mode Musou soldiers it's spliced between very uninteresting unskippable dialogue, uneventful non-combat plays, auto-scrolling/auto-running sections, and "puzzle" segments that are more trivial than microwave cooking. It makes me drowsy! I've played stuff like Toy Story Activity Center off the Collection Chamber and Number Munchers last year, and that stuff was pretty fun despite the target audience! Hell, I still come back to Wacky Worlds Creativity Studio on Sega Genesis just to screw around with the music maker! It stimulates my imagination, unlike Peach Showtime!

Give kids some respect, or even better give Peach some respect. A little bit of both I feel would go a long way.

....Also, I know I'm preaching to the choir on this subject, but why does the game run so goddamn bad? The loading screen and results screen run worse than a bunch of Atari Jaguar games I've played, was it a bad style choice? It would check out I guess, I may as well be playing a movie game.

A dull direct-to-VHS Disney movie game.

ok lets see, this is one of those temtems yeah? cyber sleuth? …palworld? no guns in this one?

i was a bit optimistic when starting the game up, despite getting jumpscared by a botw stamina bar when hitting the run button. never do this, please. but the tone was ultimately set by the soothing vocal song signalling everything’s going to be alright. sure, i believe you, game i’ve just met for 10 minutes. on that note, there’s a gimmick here where vocals come in when you do the obligatory mega evolution/z shmove/dynawhatever mechanic. or limit break if i wasnt trying to pigeonhole this into pokemon so badly. other jrpgs learn from this please! im deducting points tho because the audio is clearly too high quality to be coming from a cassette player. da diegetics...

upon setting out, you realise you’re going to spend a lot of your time in a fairly humdrum open world, encountering wooden npcs, getting into double battles (colosseum/xd fans eat your heart out) where your monsters have like 8 moves each (half of them unusable while you watch your AP bar filling), being rewarded with like 5 different currencies stuffed into the same menu as your level-up moves. a type system where hits aren’t merely “super effective”, they cause shit like stats dropping, contact damage being taken, induced type changes, leech seed, you name it. and you get some bonus AP? did that sound overwhelming? should pokemon be overwhelming?

a looooot of thumb twiddling in a game where i had both difficulty sliders turned all the way up anyway. i think pokemon is smart in being dumb. you get 4 moves. they are always accessible (unless you have 0 pp. but then you just have to get it up) and predictable. you only get exp and money. i didn’t find the strategising in this game particularly rewarding or necessary, so a lot of the complexity just felt a headache to trawl through. your tms can only be sorted alphabetically, and you get so many of them that i just… stopped wanting to look there. yes my room is still messy.

idk. id probably forgive the excess here (it is an open world game) if i had a stronger reason to keep going. i found the writing somewhat stale, but the political bent funny. area music unmemorable but still vibey. quests sorta boring, but passable. the monsters are cute. i like them. i could finish this and have a decent time. but i probably wont! (it is an open world game)

oh also they added scald to this game. and made it 90 base power. im just saying.

Music absolutely bangs. Cannot say it enough. Had two original songs with vocals in my spotify repeat through the end of the year.
Characters are neat. I love companions having their own storylines, I didn't love progressing a single companion, getting loads of battle benefits then going back to square one to advance someone else. It really limited how much I was able to fuse or leverage high level mechanics. It's difficult to onboard party member options in RPGs like this. The ranger captains all rock, world aesthetic is wonderful. Loads of weird little guys that I really enjoyed seeing, collecting, battling with and as. Fusions rock, fusing everything rocks.
The type chart is informed and inventive, mechanics of buffs and debuffs rather than super or ineffective is great.
Progression stutters and feels very limited at times. I just had a lot of issues playing through the game at times. I love the attempt and want more things like Cassette Beasts (but it speaks for itself that I wasn't compelled to touch any DLC content after rolling credits)

Persona 3 is a game that I first played as a teenager who had just realised they were mortal, this meant that the game meant a lot to me. replaying reload it meant something even more. life is something beautiful and no matter how long it is or how short it is, it's worth living. managing to touch up the game with the combat revisions of 5 eliminated all problems I had with the original game, and the new linked events and extra scenes made me appreciate the entire main cast. everyone should play persona 3 reload, everyone should find out their reason to live can come from just being alive.

Final Fantasy IV, V, and VI might be the perfect video game trilogy. Final Fantasy IV introduces a large cast of characters with a powerful, emotional story while still being pretty strict in terms of character customization. Final Fantasy V returns to a much smaller cast, but refines the job system from III into what might be the best gameplay in the franchise in terms of how free you are to do as you like. Final Fantasy VI combines the best of both worlds: A large, rich cast and a powerful plot, and just enough customization that characters do not lose their identity but still allowing for the player to break the game wide open. Final Fantasy VI is the quintessential JRPG experience.

I think the key standout point in FFVI is that there is always something going on. Each set piece in the story has some unique gimmick that makes it memorable in the plot, and very rarely (though it does still happen) are you in generic cave or generic mountain as part of the plot. It really feels like they doubled-down on the feeling of "adventure".

As I mentioned previously, FFVI also features a pretty robust "esper" system. Every character has their innate abilities (Locke can steal, Sabin can do fighting game inputs for special attacks, Strago is a blue mage, etc.) but on top of that, each character can equip an esper (a summon). Each esper comes with a list of spells that can be earned through winning battles, and so each party member can learn whichever spells they see fit. This is a good compromise from the job system in 3/5, because I didn't really feel like any of them stood out in those games because anyone could do the same things.

There's really a lot to love about FFVI. For everything I already knew about going in (because FFXIV can't go five minutes without referencing VI), there was still tons more yet to be discovered. It was the first of the classic FF games where I really set out to do as much of the optional stuff as I reasonably could. The story, cast, music, and exploration are all wonderful and it's easy to see why this is one of the most beloved in the franchise.

I love this series, so much that I want it to be its absolute best, and while this is a great upgrade from the previous titles, it still has its faults.

The maps have gotten worse overall by being smaller, having fewer routes to flank and also by not using the new awesome movement mechanics at all which is such a shame! While the Anarchy modes are all good, I wish they’d come up with something new since it’s just more of the same. Getting the "Battle Pass" for free is based and is how everyone should be doing it, although unlocking items takes a little too long for me and gives me this wacky FOMO by not collecting everything. The connection is unstable and frequently disconnects you or others, even while on ethernet and on the most stable connections (not to mention the 15hz pull rate doesn’t help at all either).

But aside from that is a game with great personality, a great story, fun Splatfests I like to join and is overall still the best time I've had with a shooter. Hope the DLC’s just as great, and the next title even better!

One of the weirdest and most loved versions of Mario Kart, and I now understand why. This game bumps the Mario Kart series up to a new whole level, with 20 different characters to choose from, 16 amazing tracks, the possibility of two players be on one kart or choose two characters on their own AND up to 16 players can play at once via LAN and multiple GameCubes.

The controls are very heavy due to the multiple characters on the kart, drifting is near perfect, items are balanced but can also get punishing enough for a ton of the Mario Kart frustration™. The characters have rare special items which makes picking a character more intriguing and exciting than just weight and looks.

Almost all courses from this game have all been in newer installment in the Mario Kart series, that's how good the tracks are. An amazing step up and a great entry!

Splatoon is a game that carries the idea of the rebellious teenager. A bunch of rowdy kids competing in hardball sports, making a mess of familiar places and loitering around the plaza space. Everything from the characters, music, clothing, branding and world were meant to reinforce this idea in Splatoon, back in 2015. Something that always irked me in Splatoon 2 is how it felt like this aesthetic was commodified. Splatoon 2 veers itself into feeling a lot more pro-consumerist, taking the player from Inkopolis Plaza to Inkopolis Square, an area more modern and more filled to the brim with advertising, making the centerpiece a literal tower of screens and billboards of ads. The new idols are multimillionaire pop superstars running a news station with sponsored ads (I’m sorry Pearl and Marina I just gotta prove a point I still love you). Smaller things reinforce this too, like the new stages occupying more professional and commercial spaces, and the UI elements being centered a lot on price tags and the like. I know it’s bizarre to criticize a Nintendo™ game as being too commercial, but compared to what came before it, Splatoon 2 feels a lot less rebellious throughout. It comes across as exemplifying punk and street culture in the same way a TikTok guy pretending to shoot people and say he’s an “alpha male” while dressed head to toe in expensive brand name clothing is punk. It’s not just less rebellious, it’s less intimate and it comes off colder than its predecessor.

Splatoon 3 works to recapture the essence of the series’ embrace of teen counterculture, encompassing itself under the idea of “chaos”. Divorcing itself from the comfortable modernity of Inkopolis, Splatoon 3 sees players off to the rougher, louder, densely packed streets of Splatsville. The Japanese names of these two cityscapes, Haikara City (Inkopolis) and Bankara Town (Splatsville) show this divide, as Haikara is a term used for Western fashion that arose in the late 19th century, implying a sense of high-collar fashion, something new and progressive but still professional in nature. Bankara is a term meant to encompass the reaction against this high-collar Western culture that's made its way through Japan, a way for younger generations to wildly and deliberately rebel from Haikara style.

Though “chaos” is Splatoon 3’s generalized mission statement, it’s shown in a way different from how other media would conceptualize chaos. It’s rougher, it’s dirtier, it’s louder, but it doesn’t ever go out of its way to be meaner. Splatoon 3 has an edge to it, but not one that means to harm. Chaos, in this game, is embraced as a city formed of the people who live in it, the warmth of their community and spirit. The new stages you visit are much less developed than the stages of previous games, consisting of abandoned spillways, desert gorges, and factories. These places find life in how the people of Splatsville have restored them as arenas to continue their sport, and the one outlier to this, Hagglefish Market, is a marketplace filled with individual vendors suspended over the sea with various small structures. Opposed to the previous game’s skyscrapers, concert halls, and hotel resorts filling out Inkopolis, the Splatlands’ new stages are much more humble, and make the turf wars taking place on them feel more home-grown.
Splatfests in Splatoon 3 are shown much less as professional, organized concerts and more as festivals, where the game’s idols go through the streets, each performing music home to the culture they represent, and people are scattered through the streets cheering and dancing. Just roaming the streets during the games previous Splatfest World Premiere gave a much more powerful sense of warmth and excitement than either of the two previous games.

Through the course of Splatoon 2, I was a bit worried about the future of the series. Something that embodied itself and built its identity in its sense of counterculture felt like it was slowly eeking towards a dulled sense of conformity as it made its home in Nintendo’s signature lineup. Even with it's lack of new gameplay innovation and a frankly underwhelming story mode, Splatoon 3 truly impressed me with how much it recaptures and succeeds what the original game set out for, forging its identity as still being something fresh and uniquely set apart from any of its contemporaries. I dread to imagine what a Team Order version of this game would be like.