2024 - the last session of the Nintendo Switch

Is Princess Peach Showtime the last unreleased Nintendo Switch exclusive? This title developed by the Good-Feel studio (Yoshi’s Crafted World) looks like it. Is it a swan song as elegant and spectacular as it is unexpected, or is it just one too many titles from a machine running out of steam?

Princess Peach Showtime!

It’s been some time since Princess Peach finally shed her label as the eternal damsel in distress. In Super Mario Odyssey, her explicit desire to emancipate herself from this role that she no longer wants, coupled with a desire to travel around the world by finally diversifying her wardrobe, was really nice to see. However, at no time would we have imagined that this implicitly announced a future adventure of the most famous “non-Disney” princess, based on her propensity to change her look and the abilities that go with it. Yet this is what Nintendo seemed to promise with this first game based entirely on the ruler of the Mushroom Kingdom since 2005: Princess Peach Showtime!

The show must go on

Not stingy with surprises at the end of the Switch’s life, Nintendo distinguished itself last fall with a particularly exceptional Super Mario Bros. Wonder. We then began to dream of a final colorful feast at the helm of a Peach more liberated than ever, who has become almost a new icon since her role as a determined and courageous heroine in the Super Mario Bros. film. (2023). Princess Peach Showtime seemed to have something of Paper Mario and the Millennium Door in its very theatrical settings, but also Luigi’s Mansion 3 in its 3D perspective with horizontal scrolling and fixed camera. But how does it play, controller in hand?

Princess Peach Showtime!

In the wake of her latest adventures, the princess wishes to treat herself to a little rest away from her domain, and leaves with a few Toads in the direction of the Théâtre de l’Étincelle, renowned for the quality of its performances. Unfortunately, nothing goes as planned, since the place is under the influence of an evil creature, called Lady Syrah. All the planned sessions are then disrupted, their extras are terrorized, and their heroes (called “Sparklers”) are made prisoners of the spell of the frightening new mistress of the place. A little star called Stella, who is reminiscent of the Luma from Super Mario Galaxy, then intervenes and introduces herself to Peach as the guardian of the place. It is she who will support her throughout an adventure whose principle is to expel Syrah and her henchmen from the theater and save all the actors. Progression is then made by exploring rooms that look like giant plays.with a very successful cardboard decoration.

Princess Peach Showtime!

Each of these rooms stages a different universe, where Peach first comes to the aid of the extras thanks to the power of the spark given to her by her stellar assistant, and where she embodies the role of each Sparkler (the missing stage heroes ) to restore the order of things. Alternately mermaid, detective, skater or downright kung fu master, it has a range of actions of all kinds specific to each incarnation, which offer a nice variety of situations, and demonstrate great ingenuity on the part of Good-Feel, who is definitely very creative. What is very appreciable is that in addition to the directional stick, the game is played with only two buttons (jump and specific action depending on the costume), making it very intuitive and extremely easy to use. Thus, Peach ninja favors stealthy attacks, Peach kung-fu close combat, Peach cowgirl attacks from a distance with a lasso, Peach thief aerobatics with a grappling hook, etc. Finally, she then faces a boss (quite original and well designed) once all the scenes on a floor of the theater have returned to their normal state, the long-term objective being to free all the Sparklers and restore the theater to its former glory. yesteryear. A classic structure, a bit repetitive, but effective and without unnecessary length.

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One Punch Woman

We feared that the title’s gameplay would be divided between action phases, like what the swordsman Peach scene highlighted, and more “party-game” phases. Ultimately, it’s a real platform/adventure game, where we never really get stuck, the fault of an almost complete absence of any form of challenge. Peach is overpowered, eliminating almost all the thugs who stand in her way in one fell swoop – knowing that in terms of precision and tolerance, Princess Peach Showtime is VERY generous. He does it very well, by proposing a counter system that is much more stylish in terms of staging than difficult to succeed, as the execution window is so vast. Costumes whose gameplay is based on reflection (Peach detective) or rhythm (Peach mermaid) leave a lot of room for failure, to move forward without ever being frustrated.

Princess Peach Showtime!

At no moment, the game developed by Good-Feel does not intend to offer any difficulty, and seems to handle it very well. We can in fact only deplore a weak lifespan (7-8 hours to finish it, barely double for 100%), artificially inflated by a fairly slow pace, and the regular impossibility of going back to recover a collectable missed, forcing us to replay the levels a few too many times. Regardless, we easily agree to let ourselves be carried away by an enchanting adventure, and to appreciate the variety of very inspired scenarios. Princess Peach Showtime is a treat in terms of artistic direction, carried by a varied and inspired soundtrack: it’s a great video game, which has everything to delight young (especially) and old, and above all, it establishes a real style. With this new game, the heroine emancipates herself much more from Mario than in Super Princess Peach (2005), located in a very “Super Mario” universe and where it was necessary to rescue the plumber in an amusing inversion of clichés but which paid off, in the end, in an avalanche of clichés bordering on sexism.

Princess Peach Showtime!

Is Princess Peach Showtime a feminist game? We are not there, and that’s not really the point of the game: so don’t expect the video game version of Margot Robbie’s Barbie. However, it has a real identity of its own, which allows it to completely distinguish itself from “Mario games” outside of strictly paper role-playing games (Paper Mario, that is). Without trying to play excessive “girl power” while exploiting a few clichés supposed to appeal to a fairly young female audience, Nintendo’s title stands out for its ability to create a new universe, full of charm, coherent and which works very well all the way. Too bad if it recalls (pell-mell) the Luigi’s Mansion, Paper Mario, Yoshi and Kirby licenses. These are pretty good references, after all!

Strawberry peach?

If Princess Peach Showtime looks like déjà vu in terms of production, that’s because it is designed by Good-Feel, author of the latest Yoshi game on Switch, not entirely comfortable with optimization on Nintendo’s hybrid console. So, on the technical side, Princess Peach Showtime seems to display a particularly poor resolution, and especially in nomadic mode where the game is quite blurry. Worse still: its frame rate per second, already unambitious (30fps), lets things down a bit in cutscenes or sequences without big effects on the screen, where it is perfectly stable during passages with a lot of action and/or characters active on screen simultaneously. Worse still: it literally dips to less than 10fps (!) during endless level loadings (sometimes up to 20 seconds). Incomprehensible.

Princess Peach Showtime!

This framerate is not always perfectly maintained, and we can only grimace. Princess Peach Showtime at no point appears to justify such technical limitations, because there are no real concessions to be made anywhere. Good-Feel’s game never seems greedy in terms of resources, and we must face the facts: it is one of the least well optimized Nintendo Switch exclusives on the console, from a studio that had already not been exemplary at this level on his previous creation. Let’s be honest: this probably won’t spoil the experience for the target audience, or even more experienced players used to giving up when it comes to Nintendo’s hybrid console, but still.

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All it takes is a spark…

Faced with this very real imbalance between gaming pleasure and questionable optimization, it is not easy to decide: should we see Princess Peach Showtime as a game for children and (very) casual players, or evaluate it based on a wider range? In the first case, there is no doubt: it is excellent entertainment, not far from being essential for a family audience, because it is easy to learn and which adds sparkle to life. We can only deplore the absence of a two-player mode: without necessarily seeking to offer a cooperative experience as rich and advanced as in Luigi’s Mansion 3, there was a way to draw inspiration from other Nintendo games where the multiplayer is as anecdotal as it is effective for involving a younger player with you. Good-Feel could have allowed a second player to control Stella to assist Peach, like Cappy in Super Mario Odyssey.

Princess Peach Showtime!

The harder players, for their part, will find other reasons to say that it could still have been much better. The overall level of optimization, shaky when not downright shameful, is not always excusable under the pretext that we are on a console at the end of its life and with archaic hardware. Good-Feel obviously has trouble with three dimensions and/or with Unreal Engine 4, with which the Switch definitely doesn’t always get along very well. Finally, a little more replayability would have been appreciated: once the game is finished, the post-game content is much less rich than in other Nintendo games. Its lifespan is a little weak and too regularly artificially extended, and we regret it all the more since the experience offered by Princess Peach Showtime is so pleasant that we would really have liked to extend it. We can only hope that Peach will be entitled to another adventure of the same ilk in the future, even more complete, and above all better technically mastered, because the promise is already very good.