Why I'm not enough of a little girl to love Princess Peach: Showtime!
Princess Peach: Showtime! (2024)
Princess Peach: Showtime! (2024)
The next time I feel my brow furrowing and my blood boiling at the next incomprehensible TikTok trend, or when I'm coming under social major fire because I haven't heard of some ultra-megapopular popstar, then I really must take a second just to remind myself that it's OK. It’s fine to admit that I am not a spring chicken, nor am I the target audience for this kind of thing anymore, if I ever really was.
TikTok and Taylor Swift and Labubu will all get on just fine without me and my support. I will just have to stick to what's appropriate for my age and gender. Which, depressingly soon for me, will be trainspotting, birdwatching and fishing.
I had come to terms with all of that. But I still had to wonder what I was doing when I started playing Princess Peach: Showtime for the Nintendo Switch. By this point in the Switch's lifetime, Nintendo were really running at full throttle. They couldn’t buy a hit during their Wii U run for love nor money, but no such problems during the Switch days.
Princess Peach Showtime is the kind of game that not particularly many people were asking for, so it was a moderate surprise when it was announced. But you just knew it would be pretty decent, and it was exactly the kind of experimental work that a company can make when all their other sales figures and metrics are sky-high.
I should have probably recognised ahead of time that any target audience for this game would be, well, female. And probably under the age of 12. Rather the polar opposite of me, in other words. But I'm drawn like a moth to a flame to any kind of Nintendo-published first party game, so why wouldn't I give Princess Peach Showtime a go?
And from a feminist perspective, it's a decent leap forward. This isn't the first time that Princess Peach has fronted a game, you know. She had her own title, Super Princess Peach, on the DS; another gaming system from Nintendo that sold like hot cakes. But that title didn't exactly scream girl power, being that it was the highly temperamental and changeable emotions of Princess Peach that powered much of the game's mechanics.
Here, in Princess Peach Showtime, there's no such inhibitions, limitations, or any other snide design choices that would seem to subtly suggest, "well, we all know a woman can't really do this stuff, but let’s just pretend". No, Princess Peach Showtime keeps it real - the princess of the realm attends a theatre show one night, only to find it all falling to pieces when she gets there.
That's the game’s story, mostly, but the key point is that this is not some title about having to go and rescue Mario, or any other sucker in the Mushroom Kingdom for that matter. This is a Princess Peach adventure on her own terms, she ain’t leeching off anyone else’s creative endeavours here. Every other character in the game is original, most of them being funny little ant-people who serve as the actors and extras for the theatre's stage productions.
The key gimmick for this game is that each level is centred around a costume change for the Princess. Critically for my own fragile male ego, this doesn’t mean that the game is relegated into being some kind of Princess Peach Dress-up Simulator. Well, you can go and make slight alterations to Peach's pink dress, as well as the accoutrement sported by her helper buddy Stella the Sparkle.
That’s definitely points in the game’s favour. I always love unlockable customisation options, and I’d be lying to you if I said that getting new dress patterns for Peach didn’t make me feel a bit like Waylon Smithers anytime a new Malibu Stacey came out.
But never mind the aesthetic stuff - each level brings about properly functional costumes, each of which changes the gameplay entirely. I won't list all of them, but they are fairly unique - you've got Cowgirl Peach, who romps through Old West settings, often on horseback. There's Detective Peach, who has to solve riddles and mysteries in lieu of actual platforming; there's Dashing Thief Peach, making us all wonder when a top-budget Carmen Sandiego game is gonna come out.
There's even a Patissiere Peach, where the one and only goal is making several cakes and cookies in accordance with the on-screen instructions. Probably the best costume change of the lot is Swordfighter Peach, which enables you to do some fencing with enemies, featuring some slick combat gameplay.
There are some problems here, though. Firstly, even though a game like this shouldn't be terrifically taxing - it's mostly just a 2.5D adventure, going from left to right - sometimes there are frame-drops, lag and generally it can be surprisingly unsmooth. That kind of thing doesn’t bother me greatly though, having grown up in the Nintendo 64 days.
But even if the game was running full speed at all times, you'll find that you can get through the bulk of the game in no time at all. Each of the levels may be about five minutes or more, but there are only a few level-types each - 3 Patissiere levels, 3 Ninja levels, 3 Mermaid levels, that sort of thing. Even at a discount, you mightn’t get too much of your money's worth.
Also, for whatever reason, possibly to bolster the replay value a bit and make the appeal of the levels last longer, it's one of those that’s quite annoying to complete with 100% of the goodies, namely collecting all of the Sparkle Gems in a level. Pretty much every level contains more than one point-of-no-return.
A lot of the time, you’ll only have one attempt at grabbing a particular Sparkle Gem as well. This inability to get up and quickly try again if you miss one, means you may have to repeat a particularly level half-a-dozen times before you can properly get everything.
I'm not saying this is a difficult game, far from it. Yet it's one of those games where you could get a bit bored, your mind may wander, your attention may lapse. And then you take a few too many hits, or you miss out on that split-second Sparkle Gem, and you sort of wonder if it's really worth it to get everything.
Again, we go back to the target audience thing, and I know that when I was 9 years old, princess-loving-little girl or not, I had absolutely no problem in trying some video game level 50 million times before I actually managed to do the business. For a bitter, jaded mid-thirties fool who wouldn't even know how to take a dress off, this is surely not the game for me. But that’s fine, really. I’ve always got my birdwatching and trainspotting.
10 April 2026