Princess Peach: Showtime! came out on the Nintendo Switch awhile ago, and I remember being fairly interested in it. I was a big fan of Super Princess Peach on the Nintendo DS, and at first glance this looked like an unofficial sequel. So I finally played it not long ago and came away vastly disappointed. It ended up being one of the last major Nintendo releases for the original Switch before the Switch 2 arrived.
Just like Super Princess Peach, this one is all about the Mushroom Kingdom’s reigning monarch. She heads to a theater-like venue with all her Toads, and you just wait for something to go wrong.
Sure enough, a weird, dark-looking witch named Grape of the Sour Bunch casts a curse and everything goes haywire. As villains go, she strikes me as remarkably lame, lamer than anything I’ve seen in any Mario spin-off, Paper Mario included.
Peach also runs into Stella, a star with special powers, which gave me serious déjà vu, since Nintendo already tried a very similar concept with Princess Zelda in Echoes of Wisdom and her glowing yellow companion, Tri. I don’t know if it was a coincidence or on purpose, but while I liked Zelda and Tri, I never gave Peach and Stella a second thought.
Super Princess Peach played like a modern Super Mario Bros. 2 with Peach as the playable character, but this one plays remarkably differently. Throughout the game, Peach can take on different forms, like an elegant swordfighter wielding a rapier.
The stages, though, are very odd and very simple, almost like the dull Yoshi’s Island style games. The combat isn’t complex, and neither are the jumps. It looks like a really cool stage play, but metaphorically, I’m not buying a ticket.
Maybe two hours in, I hit the point of asking myself what the heck I was even doing playing this. I’m a father who works full-time, has side gigs, and has very little free time. I did get the game at a discount, and I can always trade it in for another one, so I haven’t really lost any money. I was just disappointed by how boring and vanilla it is. I try not to give boring games a shot anymore because of my lack of time, but I really had faith that Nintendo had a fun product. Unless I’m just getting old and harder to impress, this was a giant, pink, pretty dud.