Highlights

  • Princess Peach: Showtime offers fans a chance to play as the iconic princess in a Peach-centered spin-off with familiar Mario series elements.
  • Customization options in Princess Peach: Showtime, inspired by Super Mario Odyssey, allow players to dress up Peach and Stella with different patterns.
  • The game incorporates gravity mechanics from Super Mario Galaxy in boss fights, offering a unique gameplay experience for Peach fans.

Princess Peach fans have gotten a lot of chances to play as Nintendo's iconic princess lately, with titles like Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Super Mario RPG, and, most recently, Princess Peach: Showtime putting her in a playable role. While Princess Peach: Showtime is a Peach-centered spin-off of the greater Mario series, elements of the mainline games can still be felt within both its level and enemy designs, as well as the customization options it offers players. The result allows Peach to stand on her own as the star of Princess Peach: Showtime while still appealing to fans of the core Mario franchise.

Before Princess Peach: Showtime, the only solo Peach game players could enjoy was the Nintendo DS' Super Princess Peach. While this title featured new mechanics unique to Princess Peach, it also leaned heavily on core elements of the Mario franchise, such as series staple enemies and bosses and a more standard Mario level design. Comparatively, Princess Peach: Showtime develops an identity of its own by utilizing its unique theater aesthetic, brand-new Theet NPCs, and villains in Grape and the Sour Bunch to stand out, but some of the mainline series' concepts remain underneath this spin-off title's exterior.

princess-peach-showtime-stage-detective-peach
Related
Princess Peach: Showtime Misses an Opportunity to Reference Another Mario Spin-Off

Princess Peach: Showtime does a great job capturing the theater aesthetic, but it's missing one detail that another Mario spin-off nails perfectly.

Princess Peach: Showtime’s Customization Options Follow Super Mario Odyssey’s Lead

Costume customization options have never played a huge part in the Mario series, as characters tend to be locked to their default outfits in most mainline Mario games, only changing appearance when using a power-up. However, Super Mario Odyssey introduced the option to purchase new outfits for Mario by spending either Gold or Purple Coins at the Crazy Cap Shops found throughout the game's Kingdoms. This customization feature quickly became a fan favorite, with players becoming excited about collecting the over 40 obtainable outfits for Mario.

In Super Mario Odyssey , 10 of these outfits can be obtained by scanning amiibo figures. However, Princess Peach: Showtime does not include amiibo support.

Princess Peach: Showtime features a similar mechanic that adapts this popular feature from Super Mario Odyssey, this time allowing players to customize Princess Peach's outfit. Players can spend coins collected throughout the stages in Princess Peach: Showtime on new dress patterns for Peach, as well as new ribbon colors for her companion, Stella. These patterns can be unlocked in a variety of ways, such as defeating certain bosses or finding the Ribboner hidden in certain levels, and then purchased from the Lobby Shop within Sparkle Theater's hub world, giving players a new collectible to strive for.

Princess Peach: Showtime Incorporates Mechanics from Super Mario Galaxy

Aside from borrowing a similar customization mechanic from Super Mario Odyssey, Princess Peach: Showtime also includes gameplay mechanics taken from past mainline Mario titles. Most notable of these mechanics is the way Princess Peach: Showtime utilizes a gravity mechanic similar to Super Mario Galaxy. In that title, Mario can stick to different surfaces based on the direction of a stage's gravitational pull, often resulting in the player swapping between standing upside down and rightside up, depending on the direction of gravity in a particular area of a level.

Princess Peach: Showtime adapts this mechanic during the first major boss fight of the game against the Sour Bunch's Disco Wing. In this fight, Disco Wing will periodically shift gravity from one direction to another, resulting in Peach having to dodge the boss' attack while standing on the ceiling in a manner reminiscent of certain Super Mario Galaxy levels. While gravity mechanics are not a common feature of the Mario series outside of Super Mario Galaxy and its sequel, the way Princess Peach: Showtime uses the mechanic in this boss fight seems like a clear callback to the way gravity puzzles were implemented as a core mechanic of Super Mario Galaxy.