Ranking Pepper Grinder Levels

 Pepper Grinder is a great game, and it has some fantastic level design. Despite only having 19 main stages, each stage introduces at least one new mechanic to the table which lends the game a ton of variety. With such a strong roster, I wanted to go ahead and rank them all.

19. Breaker Pass

Out of all the levels in Pepper Grinder, Breaker Pass is the only one to kind of be a miss for me. It's uncharacteristically unfocused, trying to juggle multiple mechanics that don't really mesh with each other. The primary mechanic are missiles which you can attack to your drill and fire to break ice blocks in the way, but they're not particularly fun to use and often drag the pacing to a halt. The other main mechanic is a friendly giant who shows up to give you a lift at certain points, but he's not too different mechanically from any other moving platform. Breaker Pass also tries to end with a fake out where the giant catches you just before you fall into a bed of spikes... but it's also incredibly easy to slip off the giant's hand and fall into the spikes anyway, killing the mood. Still, I should be grateful that the worst level in Pepper Grinder is still mediocre at worst and not actively unfun to play through.

18. Wellspring Canyon

I appreciate that Pepper Grinder makes its obligatory bramble level the second stage in the game. Wellspring Canyon introduces the underwater gameplay, but it doesn't really show off the mechanic's strengths. Most of the stage takes place in shallow pools with lots of patches of sand and brambles covering the surface, meaning that you pretty much never get the opportunity to try jet-skiing on top of the water. On the other side, since most of the stage takes place in small ponds, you also don't get the terrifying claustrophobic elements that later water stages delve into. Wellspring Canyon is still a fun stage and weaving through the brambles can be really satisfying, but it definitely suffers a bit from being in the early game.

17. Icemelt Marsh

Icemelt Marsh is very much a literal transition stage, taking you from the icecaps of World 3 to the gross, swamp marshes of World 4. As a result, there really isn't too much to write home about it. There are a few memorable setpieces like a creepy underwater segment where you're dodging tentacles trying to drag you further in or a fun finale where you're drilling your way up a sinking ship, but those are brief instances in an otherwise pretty unremarkable stage.

16. Marauder Beach

Marauder Beach is the first stage where you can really let loose with the jetski mechanic. If you angle your drill right at the top of a body of water, you can start zipping across the waves super fast. It's always a blast to pull off and makes for some very fun speedruns. Most of Marauder Beach is admittedly somewhat empty, but between dealing with the sharks and the final bit with volcanos shooting rocks into the water, there's still a lot to like here.

15. Lost Claim

Lost Claim is the first level in Pepper Grinder so naturally it's going to be a lot simpler than most of the other stages. However, it's still a pretty great tutorial, quickly introducing you to how to use the drill before tossing you into some tight and tricky platforming right from the get-go. Lost Claim doesn't waste your time, it starts testing your skills right after you've learned them, but it's still generous enough that it doesn't feel like much of a difficulty spike. When I tried out Pepper Grinder's demo a few weeks ago, I stopped immediately after playing Lost Claim because it made such a good impression that I already knew I wanted to get the full game.

14. Poison Ridge

 Poison Ridge is your grapple-hook tutorial. Just like with Lost Claim, it keeps the tutorialization quick and out of the way, and by the end of the stage, you'll already be chaining together digs and hook tosses like a pro. The grapple hook in this game can admittedly be a bit tricky to get used to, Poison Ridge is probably the first real spike of this game for that reason, but once you do get the hang of it, this is a very fun speedrunning stage with a great flow.

13. Deeprot City

Deeprot City is the final level in the game, and as such, it tests you on everything you've learned. You got grapple points, cannons, tight digging bits, moving platforms, brambles, the giant robot, the gun, nearly every type of enemy, it's a full gauntlet, and most of it is quite fun. However, what keeps Deeprot City from getting any higher for me is the elevator segment at the end, which floods you with enemies for a smidge too long, on top of already being placed quite a bit away from a checkpoint. It is the final level so I can't complain too much, but I did get pretty frustrated by the end there.

12. Roboburr Pits

Roboburr Pits is one of the less memorable levels for me, but it's not even all that bad, and both of its main gimmicks are pretty solid. The giant sawblades serve as a nice obstacle that can be genuinely pretty tough to sync up with, and using water to create rock to dig through out of the lava is a clever reversal of the volcanic rocks in Marauder Beach. This stage is another notable spike in difficulty, but it's a fair one that's quite satisfying to complete.

11. Witchfire Bog

Witchfire Bog is a stage all about ooze. There's the dangerous blue ooze that you need to carefully squeeze around, and the helpful purple ooze that slings you back if you try to escape. It's that latter mechanic that really makes this level for me, the purple ooze is super creative and fun to use, and trying to find the nearest path of dirt you can use to break out is a fun platforming puzzle. However, Witchfire Bog did feel a bit too short and easy, especially for a secret level. It feels like it ended just before it could really make the absolute most out of its very cool ideas.

10. Magmaworks

Magmaworks is a fairly traditional stage about moving platforms, but man is it well-executed. Instead of making you wait for platforms, these moving platforms are on a conveyor belt, so you need to carefully land on one as you hop from dirt patch to dirt patch. Speedruns of this stage have such a fantastic sense of flow to them as you jump between the land and dirt, and the whole stage just feels great to play through.

9. Headstone Peak

 Headstone Peak is a unique change of pace as it's a vertically-driven level that's more focused on puzzle-solving. The main mechanic are these gates that you can push open with your drill that will shift other gates that they're linked to. The puzzles involving these gates starts out pretty simple, but some of the later rooms had me genuinely scratching my head. It's not all slow-paced puzzle-solving though, as there's also plenty of more fast-paced drilling sequences as you get to try vertical platforming for the first time.

8. Terminal Depths

Or as I like to call it, the Metal Slug stage. Terminal Depths is the second level where you get to wield a gun, and mow down a ton of enemies in a wrecked subway station. The dark and dingy setting is great and compliments the action well, and the sequences where you ride on a subway car as enemies pop out from the ceiling is a nice dose of adrenaline. The whole stage is just nonstop balls-to-the-walls action and it makes finally surfacing to see the sky again feel like such a relief.

7. Brittle Glacier

Brittle Glacier is just pure fun, with two equally enjoyable central mechanics. First is obviously the snowmobile which you can use to absolutely plow through everything in your path, but for most of the level, you'll also be dealing with frozen pieces of rock that crumble as you drill through them. Despite not interacting much, both the snowmobile and ice fragments force you to keep moving, giving Brittle Glacier a real sense of speed and momentum. Props for also having some of the trickiest coin spots to find in the whole game.

6. Sea Of Teeth

Sea Of Teeth rivals the abyss from Rayman Origins as one of the scariest underwater stages I've ever played. It starts off pretty unassuming. You're in an ice world, the ice will freeze you if you stay in it for too long, so the solution is simple: Stay out of the water. You can even use the jetski to make things even easier. But eventually, you start to hit giant tundras that force you to swim under them, drilling into floating chunks of ice to use as a safe zone. The second half of Sea Of Teeth forces you to go deep underwater, and it is immensely uncomfortable. The eerie music, dim lighting, and constant threat of freezing gives these bits such an oppressive and claustrophobic atmosphere. It all adds up to what is easily one of the most striking and memorable stages in the game.

5. Cannoneer's Folly

Cannoneer's Folly was the first level in Pepper Grinder to truly wow me. It's a stage that feels particularly inspired by the DKC games, between its serene atmosphere, tough difficulty, and of course, the fact that cannons are a main mechanic. The cannons in Pepper Grinder are very fun to use too, and add an interesting twist to a fairly common mechanic by forcing you to re-activate your drill before you collide with something. I also have to mention the music, Airy, an absolutely blissful piece of DnB that easily stands out as my favorite track in the game.

4. Cannon Climb

 Cannon Climb is basically Cannoneer's Folly but vertical and even more atmospheric. As you can probably tell from then name, Cannon Climb is all about using the cannons to scale a giant mountain. The platforming is already a ton of fun, with plenty of solid timing challenges and tricky jumps as you bounce between using the cannons and digging upwards. But what really elevates Cannon Climb for me is the mood it creates. The sparse landscape, lack of enemies, and framing that often shoves you to the left or right of the screen does so much to create a feeling of loneliness.

3. Giant's Kitchen

 Giant's Kitchen is the first gun level, and it was an incredibly pleasant surprise. Going from having to poke around enemies for a weakpoint to blasting away at everything in your path is such a fun powertrip, though the enemy count is numerous enough that this stage doesn't feel like a cakewalk either. However, what elevates Giant's Kitchen even more is the setting. A cave filled with giant food and pots you can swim around inside is easily one of the most inventive locations in the game, and really solidifies Giant's Kitchen as one of my favorite levels.

2. Sunken City Limits

 Sunken City Limits is a stage all about destroying buildings. The first half is mostly about digging through the supports that hold up buildings, and then escaping as they collapse around you. It's a fun concept used in some very inventive platforming sequences. However, once you think you have this stage figured out, you come across a giant mech that you get to pilot, and destroy all of the buildings and enemies in your way. Like with the gun, it's an incredibly fun powertrip that ends Sunken City Limits on a very high note.

1. Crystal Falls

Crystal Falls has one of my favorite tropes in platformers, climbing up a waterfall. The main gimmick is that you have to drill up these giant ice chunks that are falling. They spawn somewhat randomly so you have to be on your toes, but they're also big enough that the stage doesn't feel too unfair or unpredictable. Eventually, bombs get tossed into the mix which makes things even more complicated. While I'd still call this one of the easier stages in the game, it has such a fantastic flow to it, on top of a comfy atmosphere to it between the soft colors and bouncy music. Out of all of Pepper Grinder's fantastic stages, Crystal Falls is the one I had the most fun with.

The New Super Mario Bros Games

With Super Mario Bros Wonder having been released, it's interesting to look back at the divisive New Super Mario Bros games. They're often regarded as boring, stagnant games that mark the low point of the Mario series, and Wonder being as fresh and creative as it is only made that feeling grow more fierce. Personally, while I do agree with the general sentiment and vastly prefer Wonder to any of its direct predecessors, I also don't feel anywhere near that harshly about the NSMB series. I grew up with these games so I have a decent amount of fondness for them, but there's also some things I genuinely prefer about them to Wonder like the levels being quite a bit lengthier and tougher, and the increased amount of side content. So, I wanted to look back at the New Super Mario Bros games and really try to see what they did right, what they did wrong, and what sets them apart.

New Super Mario Bros Is Fresh

At the time, New Super Mario Bros was a pretty important and transformative entry in the series. While most of its additions have felt less impactful over time, it's easy to forget that NSMB DS added important mechanics like the wall jump and ground pound to 2D Mario. It's also easy to forget just how original it still feels to this day. 

The level design in NSMB almost resembles the first Mario Galaxy game in just how... spontaneous it feels. This is a game that isn't afraid to toss weird one-off mechanics at you that'll never show up in any other game. From bizarre enemies like the Snailcorn, to strange variations on the question block, to terraforming dunes, to sudden cameos from SM64 characters like Unagi and Dorrie, to a random gag where you pop a cork out of a pipe, to a memorable final stage where you get to flip gravity around, NSMB keeps you on its toes with its frankly unhinged level design philosophy. Even the boss fights are unique, beyond the several Bowser and Bowser Jr fights, most of the main bosses are entirely original encounters like the Mummipokey, Monty Tank, and even a 2D fight with Petey Piranha. Granted, not all of those fights are great, a lot of them can really be cheesed, but the good ones are really good. The presentation is also a real standout here as the usage of Super Mario 64 DS assets helps the visuals pop more than you'd expect, and the energetic soundtrack by Azuka Hayazaki is easily the best out of all of these games, especially since much of NSMB DS's music wasn't reused in later games. There's even a bunch of neat side modes like a bunch of minigames carried over from SM64DS and a fun multiplayer PvP mode.

However, replaying New Super Mario Bros did make me realize that this game unfortunately still has quite a lot of issues, particularly in the powerup system and the collectibles. NSMB has four major powerups, three of which are entirely new: The Fire Flower, Mini Mushroom, Mega Mushroom, and Blue Shell. This sounds like a great expansion of the formula, until you realize that the latter three items are completely rare. The Blue Shell in particular can't even be found in levels, only in item roulettes. As a result, you will be spending almost the entire game with just the Fire Flower and it can feel a bit repetitive. The bigger issue though is the fact that many levels have Star Coins and secret exits locked behind those rare items, particularly the Mini Mushroom, and since there's no way to stockpile items, you will almost always have to do some backtracking to get all the collectibles. It doesn't even feel especially worth it since you don't even unlock a postgame world for your efforts like in later games. Ultimately, I think New Super Mario Bros is best experienced completely casually. Just let yourself enjoy the wacky level ideas and try not to care about the Star Coins and secret levels you've missed.

Still, despite these issues, I would still put NSMB on the upper echelon of Mario games. At its core, this is a very tightly designed platformer with inventive levels and a charming presentation, and it's absolutely the most unique of the four NSMB games. It may not be my favorite anymore, but I still think that this is the one entry that still feels thoroughly "new".

New Super Mario Bros Wii Is Iconic

New Super Mario Bros Wii is one of the most memorable games in the entire series for me. This might sound like a weird statement considering just how much the NSMB games seem to blend together for people, but hear me out. NSMBWii is defined by its standout setpieces, of which there's at least one in every world. There's so many instantly recognizable moments in the first half alone, like the rotating cogs in 1-Castle, the sandstorm in World 2, the fun sliding stages with the Penguin Suit, the switch palace callback in late World 3, and the cloud-riding stage with Yoshi in World 4. World 5 amps things up with the Brambles, the flying manta rays, the boat that sinks with too much weight on it, and Iggy's memorable Chain Chomp boss fight. World 6 has the sewer stage, the giant skewer, the boat stage you can entirely skip with the Mini Mushroom, and the bumper car fight with Bowser Jr. World 7 has the floating bubbles, exterior fortresses, the parabeetle parade, and those platforms you can move by tilting the remote. And World 8 is just straight-up the best world in any of these NSMB games, with every level being a standout in terms of creativity and challenge, and the final two bosses being series highlights. I'm by no means saying that NSMBWii is up there with Land 2 or Wonder in terms of creativity, the biomes themselves are still pretty basic, but Wii has some cool level ideas and it executes these ideas in ways that stick in your memory.

I also think NSMBWii stands out for fixing a lot of the issues that NSMB DS introduced, and adding a surprising amount of cool new mechanics of its own. The spin twirl is a great addition to your movement that helps new players land jumps more easily, and helps veterans speedrun more effectively, the inventory letting you stockpile items make Toad Houses feel more valuable, the new powerups like Ice Flower and the Propeller Suit are some of the best in series history, the world maps are more dynamic, and the shift to widescreen lets you see way more of what's ahead. The Star Coins in Wii are some of the most well-executed collectibles in a 2D Mario game too, usually asking you to carefully examine the environment or complete a tricky platforming challenge rather than having to backtrack for an item, so they all feel really satisfying to collect. And of course, you actually get rewarded with a very fun and very challenging postgame world for collecting them all. It's a real shame that later games stole so much of Wii's thunder, because at the time, I really did add more than enough new ideas to justify itself as a sequel to DS, even down to some of the smaller additions. We all know Wii reintroduced Yoshi and the Koopalings to the series, but did you realize that it also brought back the Monty Moles, the POW blocks, airship levels, along with some cool new enemies like the Huckit Crab, King Bill, and Stalking Piranha Plants.

However, I can't deny that NSMBW has some of the most obvious issues out of any of the NSMB games. I personally love the addition of multiplayer in Wii, and I think the levels in this game are the most well-built for multiplayer madness. However, this does come at the cost of the level design in generally feeling more spread out than in DS. This isn't much of an issue past World 3 once the difficulty does start to pick up, but the first two worlds are pretty barren and I can't blame people for being turned off by those early levels. I also think the visuals are a pretty massive downgrade compared to DS, with more muted colors and blurry 2D assets that just don't mesh well with the Mario cast at all. The Koopalings are definitely a downgrade from the original bosses in DS in terms of variety, though their fights in Wii are easily the most fun. I'd even say that on a purely mechanical level, Wii has the best bosses in the NSMB games, especially if you factor in Bowser Jr's fantastic airship fights. But while all of that is stuff I can look past, I think my actual biggest issue with NSMBW is the weak side modes. Free For All is a pretty useless mode, and while Coin Battle is decently fun, it is for multiplayer only and doesn't hold a candle to DS's Mario Vs Luigi.

Despite all these issues, however, I still feel pretty comfortable calling NSMBW my favorite of the series. It may look pretty rough at first glance, but it makes a lot of great mechanical improvements under the hood, and once the game really gets going at World 3, Wii is nonstop quality all the way to the end. I've played Wii more times than I can count, from speedrun attempts, to secret hunting, to countless hours in multiplayer, and yet it's still an absolute joy every time I revisit it.

New Super Mario Bros 2 Is Weird

New Super Mario Bros 2 is the game that gets accused the most of feeling derivative, and I always kinda just believed people because this was the entry I've played the least of. But upon actually playing it in full recently, I can't disagree more? Dare I say, I even think you can make a case for NSMB2 being the best one.

Like with Wii, NSMB2's perceived flaws are very surface level. It reuses a lot of assets from Wii, particularly the soundtrack which has barely any original tracks this time around. The one main mechanic is solely built on the game encouraging you to collect as many coins as possible, but NSMB2 doesn't actually encourage you to do that beyond simple score-hunting. It feels like the most unoriginal game in the series, but in execution, I actually think NSMB2 is more inventive than many give it credit for. The level design feels like a return to DS's tighter, more experimental design and that makes sense since Nintendo used this game as a place for new employees and people from other departments to learn more about game design. So you get levels that use powerups like the Mini Mushroom in unique and clever ways, far more visual shakeups to existing biomes, and lots of wacky platforming concepts that leave me guessing all the way to the end. Collecting a Star turning the entire level into coins? Sure. A bunch of desert stages taking place atop totem poles and ruins? That's pretty cool. An autoscroller set on a golden ship ala Rainbow Ride? Awesome! World 3 fusing both the beach and desert biomes? Why not? This is especially aided by the fact that NSMB2 actually has three special worlds this time, which means there's even more opportunities for the level designers to go wild with the theming. Granted, I don't think every level idea is a slam-dunk as I'll further go into down below. The first Ghost House unironically being a "pick a door" stage is a noticeable stinker, but the highs here are very high.

Beyond just the level design once again being really fun and fresh, I'd say NSMB2 also does a great job at combining the best aspects of both DS and Wii. Being a handheld game, the level design is more compact just like in DS, and the presentation feels a lot more vibrant. The models carried over from 3D Land blend in really nice with the more saturated 2D assets, and the environments in general feel a lot more varied with most worlds having multiple biomes to swap through. And while most of the soundtrack is reused, the added bahs and leaf beats do make them sound a bit more exciting than the versions in Wii. But on the other hand, NSMB2 still carries over some of the QoL improvements that Wii added. The Star Coins are once again hidden very well and rarely ever require you to bring in items from outside, the addition of the Tanuki Leaf (which feels way better here than in SMB3 by the way) makes the item roster feel a lot more well-balanced, and the optional worlds are unlocked through Warp Cannons rather than having to beat a boss with a Mini Mushroom. But I also think NSMB2 adds some improvements of its own as well. I love the addition of a coin counter for each level since it gives you more of a reason to explore for hidden areas and find setups to maximise your coin output, and the new autorunner minigames whenever you use a Warp Cannon are a ton of fun.

That being said, once again, there are some issues I do agree with. 100 coins still netting you a 1-up in a game that showers you with coins is ridiculous, and while I don't think I ever run out of lives in any of these games, I do still think NSMB2 can feel pretty lacking in challenge. The levels often feel like they're more focused on exploration over white-knuckle platforming, which is fun in its own right, but it is one area where DS and Wii very much have 2 beat. In addition, the Koopaling boss fights in 2 are pretty awful. Half of them are worse retreads of their fights in Wii, and the other half are just plain poorly thought-out. The Koopalings are infamous for how easy they are to cheese, but it's especially noticeable here. And while Coin Rush is a great new side mode, the fact that most of its best content is locked to DLC is a bit of a shame. But I think the biggest issue for me is the sheer amount of autoscrollers that NSMB2 has compared to other games, especially with how many of them have secret exits right at the very end forcing you to do them twice. This has always been one of my biggest pet-peeves in platformers, and it really got on my nerves in Worlds 4 & 5.

In a lot of ways, I think you could make the argument that New Super Mario Bros 2 is the perfect NSMB game, a clean fusion of DS and Wii's design philosophies with an added layer of polish and vibrancy. However, while the level design is indeed super creative and silly, the low level of challenge and abundance of level ideas that just fell flat for me left me preferring DS and Wii overall. Despite this, though, I still think NSMB2 is incredibly underrated. It may seem derivative on the surface, but once you actually play it, NSMB2 proves itself to largely be a joyous bundle of pure fun.

New Super Mario Bros U Is Underwhelming

New Super Mario Bros U came out at the point that Nintendo had really settled into their four-step level design philosophy, and it shows. NSMBU's level design is incredibly polished and thoughtful, with each stage taking a single concept and fully fleshing it out. It lacks much of the spontaneity of previous games, but it makes up for that with a razor-sharp sense of focus. It also actively tries to add something new to the series. We finally have a new main theme, the general art direction is slightly more surreal thanks to the more food-themed environments the characters visit, the plot flips the standard formula on its head by having Peach captured in her own castle, and we even get a fully interconnected world map like in Super Mario World. It also adds one of my favorite new mechanics in the entire quadrilogy in the form of the Baby Yoshis. There's three Baby Yoshis you can find across the game that each give you a unique ability like using one as a balloon and blowing bubbles you can jump across (which basically became Wonder's Bubble Flower). They're fun and satisfying to use, and I even prefer using them to standard Yoshi, they've got a bit more of an interesting skill ceiling and you can carry them between levels. The Baby Yoshis also look absolutely adorable, and even sing along with the level music. If you were to tell me that NSMBU was your favorite New game, I would 100% understand. I loved it to bits as a kid, and sunk a ton of hours into it as one of the ten Wii U owners out there. However, despite its attempts at evolving the series, New Super Mario Bros U kinda feels like the most stagnant 2D Mario game to date.

Let's start with the presentation. While the new backgrounds are certainly nice, the biomes and especially the character animations remain identical to previous installments, so that change doesn't really feel meaningful. NSMBU's new main theme is nice and all, but it's kind of a downgrade from the previous overworld themes in terms of memorability and energy (at least unless the Baby Yoshis are singing because they make every song better). And while the level design in NSMBU is certainly well designed on an objective level... the good level design doesn't mean much when at least 80% of its level mechanics are ripped straight from Wii. Remember the rotating cogs? The skewers? The rollercoaster? The elevator? The boat with a weight limit? The parabeetle parade? The Brambles? They are all brought back in NSMBU and are executed worse. Four-step level design works in games like 3D World when the ideas being introduced are genuinely new and inventive, but in a game that primarily reuses assets, NSMBU's stages feel more restrictive, clinical, and easy compared to Wii's. There are some genuinely unique stages in NSMBU that do stand out as highlights of the game, like the giant beanstalk in World 3, the Giant Land and Van Gogh homages in World 5, and a particularly inventive airship level in World 7, but they're few and far between. And sometimes, U's unique ideas aren't even executed especially well, like the final world which is supposed to be set in a lavafied Peach's Castle, but doesn't actually do that much with Peach's Castle as a location. It really frustrates me because NSMBU seems so refined and polished on the surface, but I truly can't emphasize how much more formulaic it feels in practice. In that way, it's pretty much the polar opposite to Wii.

Ultimately, where New Super Mario Bros U truly shines is in its side content. New Super Luigi U was a genuinely cool DLC campaign with entirely reworked and harder versions of NSMBU's levels. NSLU doesn't stand on its own at all and can feel a bit tired considering most of the levels it rehashes were already reheashes, but its shamelessly tough design and inventive repurposing of NSMBU's level assets does complement the original quite well and covers for some of its weaker spots. NSMBU also brings back Coin Rush in the form of Boost Rush, it's not quite as tough and memorable but it's still a fun time. Coin Battle is back but even better this time since you can rearrange the coin placements in some of the original stages, in what feels like an early version of Mario Maker. And best of all, NSMBU introduces a Challenge Mode which comes with 60 fun, inventive, and challenging missions that easily stand out as some of the most fun material in any of the NSMB games. All this stuff is great, but it can't really make up for the fact that the base campaign is the least interesting to me.

Once again, I don't think any of the NSMB games are bad, and neither is U. However, it easily stands out as the least creative entry of the four, borrowing so much from Wii but lacking so much of its memorability factor. It's incredibly polished and thoughtful in its design, and the sheer amount of side stuff makes for easily the most content-rich entry of the bunch even before the Luigi DLC came out, but it really felt like the last straw for a lot of people and it's not hard to see why.

But it does have the Baby Yoshis though...

New Super Mario Bros Is... Not That Bad

Looking back at all of the New Super Mario Bros games, it really surprises me how different they all can feel, despite their similarities. They all have their own unique strengths and weakness, and the only game I really did find derivative was NSMBU. DS, Wii, and 2 are all still great Mario games in my eyes with strong level design and lots of cool ideas even if they aren't as outwardly wacky as Wonder. I'm glad we've entered what seems to be a new renaissance for 2D Mario with Wonder, but I'm still going to look back on the NSMB games for what they did nail, and the hours of fun they've given me.

If I had to rank the games, this is how I'd rank them:

1. New Super Mario Bros Wi
2. New Super Mario Bros
3. New Super Mario Bros 2 
4. New Super Mario Bros U
5. New Super Luigi U
   

Why I Love The Sly Cooper Trilogy

There was a time when Sony had some truly stellar 3D platforming series on their belt, right up there with the best in the genre. The PS2 in particular had a whopping three major platforming trilogies published by Sony, not counting Ape Escape 2 & 3. I obviously have a lot of love for the Ratchet & Clank trilogy, and Jak & Daxter is good too... well, the first one is good... but out of the PS2's "big three", Sly Cooper is far and away my favorite. With a deceptively compelling story boasting a cast that's almost impossible not to love, a unique blend of stealth and 3D platforming unless anything else to this day, and the aggressive amounts of polish that's defined Sucker Punch ever since the very beginning, the Sly Cooper trilogy is truly something special.

The first entry, Sly Cooper And The Thievius Raccoonus is kinda the black sheep of the trilogy in a lot of ways. You can tell Sucker Punch didn't fully solidify their image for the series yet, but what we got is still an impeccable 3D platformer even on its own merits. Sly Cooper 1 serves as a perfect introduction to the series' world and cast. The titular Sly is a descendant of a family of thieves who has to retrieve the pages of the titular book from a group of criminals called the Fiendish Five. Accompanying him is the turtle Bentley (the brains), the hippo Murray (the brawn), and the squirrel Carmelita (a cop who is hell-bent on catching Sly but ends up having to team up with him pretty much every game). None of these characters have really been nailed yet. Sly sounds like he's whispering for the entire game, Bentley's voice sounds a tad off, and Murray's characterization would get a massive retool in the sequel. However, despite the simplicity of the story and the unrefined characterization, Sly Cooper does do a pretty great job at making you care about Sly and his team nonetheless, and the finale with Sly and Carmelita teaming up and the confrontation with the evil Clockwerk ends things on a high note.

Where Sly Cooper 1 really shines, though, is in its gameplay. This first game can best be described as Crash Bandicoot but with light stealth. You can sneak around opponents and do very basic parkour, but most of the game will have you platforming through linear stages each bringing something new to the table. Sucker Punch's first 3D platformer, Rocket: Robot On Wheels, already demonstrated that they have a knack for design. Rocket was built around a robust and impressive physics engine for the N64, and the level design packed in a ton of fun challenges, vehicles to ride, and physics puzzles. Sly Cooper 1 may be more linear than Rocket, but it has a lot of the same appeal. Each stage is fun and memorable in its own right, with the highlight for me being the excellent casino world which has you platforming through precariously placed buses, atop spinning roulette wheels, and across awnings in a borderline 2D segment. The physics system that defined Rocket feels even more polished here with tons of platformers that shift due to your weight, and even Sly's own tail having a real weight to it that makes jumping feel really satisfying. There's also a fair share of minigames and vehicle segments and while they do get a bit too much near the end, most of them are fun, polished, and not too hard or tedious.

Sly Cooper 1 also probably has the most compelling 100% of the bunch. Each stage has around 30 hidden Clue Bottles to find which encourage you to check in every nook and cranny, which I always love in my linear platformers. Getting the clue bottles also feels worth it because it nets you an extra ability you can learn, accompanied with some fun dialogue between Sly and Bentley. The other big piece of side content are the Master Thief Challenges, basically time trials for all the main levels. Sly Cooper 1 is by far the hardest game in the series, and this added speedrunning aspect only heightens the skill ceiling even further. And once again, doing these challenges is more than worth it as they'll unlock unique bits of developer commentary for each level. The developer commentary in Sly Cooper is up there with the Insomniac Museum as one of my favorite unlockables in all of gaming, I'm always a sucker for rewards that give you insight into game development. Each piece of commentary interviews a different person at Sucker Punch going over pretty much everything from lighting to level design fundamentals to how things came together, and it's just so fascinating to listen to. It's stuff like that which really shows how passionate Sucker Punch is about this IP, and this passion would only grow in the next game.

Sly 2: Band Of Thieves is the game that pretty much defined Sly Cooper. It's almost unanimously regarded as the best game in the series, but even getting into the series decades down the line, I was still stunned at how good it is. Sly 2 changes the series' structure from a linear platformer with minor stealth elements, to an open zone stealth game with light plaforming. Each of the game's eight chapters tosses you into a decently-sized open area and tasks you with doing a bunch of disparate missions to set up for a big heist that caps off the chapter. Some missions take place in one-off linear gauntlets more like the first game, but many take place right out there in the open world. The stealth mechanics are more refined too, dropping the one-hit deaths from Sly 1 in favor of health, proper detection systems, and even the ability to pickpocket enemies for money or important items. As I said above, Sly 2 is a game unlike anything else I've ever played. It's such a fresh and unique take on the 3D platforming genre but it all just clicks together. The blend of stealth and platforming works perfectly in an open world setting, the different tasks you get to do in each world amps up the variety even further, and the way each mission culminates in a grand finale always feels satisfying, like an actual heist movie!

But I think Sly 2's biggest improvement over the original is in the story. Right from the get-go, there's so much more confidence in the delivery of Sly 2's narrative as well as the voice acting. The initial premise is similar to the first game, Sly and his gang needs to retrieve a bunch of parts from a group of villains (the Klaww gang), this time the pieces of the first game's villain Clockwerk. However, the way the story plays out is dramatically different. First off, most of the actual missions Sly goes on are more varied and interesting, like the ball arc or the train heist. It helps that you can now play as Murray and Bentley, meaning they can also get more involved in the missions which once again helps with variety. But even more, things go wrong for the Cooper gang way more often here. Halfway through the game, Sly and Murray get put in prison, and you need to play almost entirely as Bentley for a chapter as you try to break them out. Not too long after, Carmelita gets framed and has to join along with the Cooper gang. And in the end of the game, Clockwerk is reawakened for one final battle, Bentley loses the ability to walk in the fight, Murray quits, and Sly has to turn himself in to Carmelita. Sly 2 is the Empire Strikes Back of the series, and as such, it has some of the most engaging drama I've seen in a video game.

Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves is far and away the weakest of the trilogy, but it's still a great game and it makes some strong additions. For starters, the story is still really good. It's not as dark as Sly 2's, but it does resolve all of that game's cliffhangers in a satisfying manner and ends the trilogy as a whole on the perfect note, especially with its fantastic final chapter. I particularly love how Bentley fares. This game perfectly completes his character arc from 2 as he grows into a fantastic field spy, with his new wheelchair only making him even more badass. There are only six chapters this time rather than eight, but the game makes up for it with far larger open worlds with more missions. The highlight is probably the pirate chapter, which has a full-on open sea to explore and some of the most robust pirate gameplay you'd get until Assassin's Creed IV. While Sly 2 did admittedly have some repetition in its mission design, Sly 3's missions go for full variety with not a single borrowed idea. At its best, there's some stellar missions, particularly the platforming gauntlets which have amped back up in complexity. Though at its worst, Sly 3's weaker missions can admittedly cross the line into gimmickry.

In general, Sly 3 is a bit more of an uneven game than its predecessors in terms of quality, and it has my least favorite 100% campaign. Sly 3 does bring back the Master Thief Challenges, but they're not quite as fun as the ones in Sly 1 which were tailored around that game's linear level design. Sly 3 also removes the Clue Bottles which is a real shame. I didn't mention this earlier but Sly 2 kept the clue bottles in its eight overworlds which gave you a good incentive to fully explore them, but in Sly 3, that incentive doesn't really exist sadly. The economy for buying upgrades is also better in Sly 2 with its hidden treasure collectibles in each world, compared to Sly 3 where it's built almost entirely around grinding money through pirating. That being said, I still do really like Sly 3 because it really does stick the landing for the characters. Sly finally achieves closure and presumably settles down with Carmelita, Bentley finds someone on his same wavelength in Penelope, and Murray... umm... well he keeps just being himself.

 

As far as the presentation goes, all three Sly Cooper games hold up incredibly well. The first game went for a comic book-y cel-shaded look presumably for budget reasons, but it fits Sly Cooper's slick noir vibe so well that it stuck for the entire trilogy and, like many other cel-shaded games, has aged incredibly well. These games nail the style of a heist film like Ocean's Eleven, from the sharp dramatic lighting, to the effortless way Sly moves, to all the little touches like how the title screen always smoothly transitions into each game's prologue act. The voice acting is also really great across the board, especially in the sequels. There's a bunch of memorable performances like David Scully as Dimitri, Kevin Blackton as Clockwerk, and especially Matt Olsen's legendary work as Bentley. Sly Cooper's music is also pretty fantastic. Ashif Hakik's more funky soundtrack for the first game is probably the weakest of the three, but it's still got some bangers. Peter McConnell's more traditional orchestral heist scores for 2 and 3, on the other hand, are absolutely phenomenal. The Paris theme in particular is easily one of the PS2's best themes, it perfectly fits the tone of these games.

Overall, I absolutely adore the Sly Cooper trilogy. Despite how different the first game is and the weaker elements of the third game, they all click together perfectly into a cohesive whole that perfectly shows the growth of Sucker Punch as a developer. The Sly Cooper games feel like playable heist movies in a way that no other game has ever been able to replicate, they're stylish, fresh, emotionally enthralling, and just plain fun.

2024 Games I Played: Pepper Grinder

Pepper Grinder was another game I've been eagerly awaiting ever since I say a trailer for it in a Nintendo Direct. The pitch of an intense, heart-pumping action platformer where you drill through everything in sight just felt so appealing, and the footage we saw looked super clean and polished. So, is it good?

The story is simple. Pepper crash-lands on an island and gets all her treasure stolen by thieves. She comes across a giant drill named Grinder, now take back your treasure by any means necessary. And by that, I of course mean by drilling through everything in your path. The controls are pretty simple, you can jump, dig into dirt, boost into the dirt, and occasionally just a grapple hook for certain stages. Drilling around feels incredibly tight and responsive, with a small turn radius and a perfect balance between chaotic speed and refined movement. This feels like the type of game that would completely fall apart if the controls felt even the slightest bit off, but thankfully, Pepper Grinder just feels perfect. When I first saw footage of Pepper Grinder, I immediately jumped to thinking about Drill Dozer, which is one of my favorite games. In some ways, they share a lot of the same appeal in terms of the sheer joy to wrecking everything with a giant drill, along with how you interact with pretty much everything through just that drill. However, in terms of the actual gameplay, Pepper Grinder is a much faster-paced game with a stronger emphasis on tight platforming.

The level design is also impeccable across the board. Each stage takes one or two central concepts and fleshes out as much as it can before moving onto the next. From a stage about launching yourself from cannons DKC style, to a stage where you climb up falling ice chunks, to a level where you drill through collapsing buildings to make yourself a path, to stages about attaching your drill to objects like a gun or a giant mech you can control, the levels feel consistently unique and varied without getting too varied. Every mechanic feels fittingly fleshed-out, and most of them even pop up again in later stages with the assumption that the player has already mastered them. The combat is also simple but effective, most enemies go down in a single hit so it's all about finding an opening and not getting hit by their own weapons. As for the boss fights, they're pretty solid too. Large-scale, brutally tough encounters that can feel like massive spikes in difficulty but are ultimately still pretty satisfying to defeat. On pretty much every level, Pepper Grinder is a thoughtful and masterfully designed game, challenging but fair. It perfectly nails the design sensibilities of the old-school Nintendo titles it claims to take inspiration from.

That being said, there seems to be one common criticism among most reviewers and it's that Pepper Grinder is too short. With only four worlds, each boasting around four levels and a boss, this is not a long game in the slightest, roughly comparable to Wario Land 4. While I don't feel Pepper Grinder is undercooked, and I'm glad it ended on a high note, I did find myself desperately wanting more by the time it was over. Just an extra world or two would've really rounded out the package. However, just like Wario Land 4, Pepper Grinder manages to mostly make up for its short length with lots of replayability. Each level has five big coins to collect, and three times to beat in Time Attack Mode. I'm not someone who usually does Time Attack, but I actually got really into it in Pepper Grinder because of how snappy the controls feel to use and how tightly the levels are designed. There's also a lot of stuff to buy and unlock, ranging from a secret level in each world, to costumes for Pepper, to stickers and sticker pages, to music track you can listen to while planting stickers. Since a lot of this stuff is locked behind Time Attack and a gacha machine, getting full 100% will definitely take you a while even if the campaign will probably be done with after a few hours.

As far as presentation goes, Pepper Grinder looks incredible. It goes for this chunky yet hi-res pixel art style, and it just looks so clean and fluid, so colorful and detailed. The explosions are massive, the drilling looks so intense and visceral, there's this really compelling fusion of serene-looking environments and unhinged action that I absolutely love. The character designs are also quite cute, from the charmingly animated Pepper to the goofy Narlings she faces off against. That being said, I do have one gripe and that's with the rumble. Pepper Grinder does have rumble and it definitely helps make the game feel more intense, but I honestly feel like there isn't enough of it. Taking full advantage of the Switch's HD Rumble may admittedly be a bit too much for a single indie dev, but I think this really could've been the perfect game for it, though that's a very minor nitpick. The game is still perfectly fine as it is. As for the music, Pepper Grinder sounds pretty great. It's got a pretty eclectic soundtrack that jumps around in genre quite frequently, but it's primarily composed of lo-fi and some absolutely gorgeous DnB music. I adore the DnB tracks, and they show up more and more as the game goes on and gets more intense. I'm very happy to see this genre making a comeback in games lately.

So yeah, Pepper Grinder is a really great game. It feels amazing, looks amazing, sounds amazing, and the level design is absolutely on-point. While I do wish we got just a little bit more of it, what we did get of Pepper Grinder is polished to a sheen. Once again, Devolver Digital found a good one.

4.5/5 Stars

2024 Games I Played: Duelists Of Eden

One Step From Eden is one of my favorite games of all time, a fast and frenetic roguelike that takes the fun battle system of the Mega Man Battle Network games and amps everything up to eleven. Duelists Of Eden is a sequel/spinoff that focuses purely on PvP matches. I'm not even going to pretend like this game might be bad, it's very obvious that Duelists is a worthy sequel to OSFE, a great PvP battler in its own right, and a game that you should just get because it's only $5. Seriously, get it.

As I mentioned, One Step From/Duelists Of Eden is pretty much an expanded version of Mega Man Battle Network. You and your opponent are on a 8x4 arena divided into two halves, meaning each player has 4x4 squares to move around on. You get a deck of cards that you can use as your main attacks, along with a primary attack you can do whenever you want (OSFE has one, DoE gives you two). Compared to its predecessor, Duelists is a bit slower-paced to accomodate for the PvP battling. You can't upgrade your stats like in OSFE, so your deck size stays at around 8-10, and your mana for using attacks stays at 6. However, where Duelists evolves the formula is in its focus on comboes. Right from the tutorial, this game encourages you to chain cards in a way that can allow you to deal large amounts of damage. The most common example is closing the distance between you and your opponent before doing a close-range attack, but there's a lot of potential combinations and builds you can come up with since you get free reign to make whatever decks you want. Despite the slight change in focus, Duelists still feels incredible to play and will get just as frenetic as OSFE before long. Battle Network has always worked perfectly for PvP play, so it shouldn't be much of a surprise that One Step From Eden made the transition very comfortably.

Duelists Of Eden brings back all the main characters from its predecessor, though with some slight moveset tweaks to balance them out for PvP play. There isn't as much disparity between the characters as in One Step From Eden, so I feel like most if not all the characters in Duelists feel pretty viable to play as. The creator of these games, Thomas Moon Kang, made a point to redesign the cast to look a bit older than OSFE to give off the impression that time has passed, and I think they look pretty great. In addition, there's six new characters. Chiretta and Harissa are the two new original characters to the cast, with the latter being one of my new favorite characters in the series for her fun design and chaotic movement. The other four are cameos from other indie games, including Dreadwyrm from Maiden & Spell, Queen from Quantum Protocol, Maypul from Rivals Of Aether, and Neera from Freedom Planet! Once again, they're all fun to play as, and I particularly like the heavy-hitting primary attacks of Dreadwyrm and the aggressive frost attacks of Neera.

As far as content goes, Duelists is fine for a $5 PvP game. The online functionality is great as it includes rollback netcode, ranked and unranked matches, lobbies, tournaments, and local play. There's a leveling up system that gets you banners and titles and over 100 different color palettes you can buy for the characters (many of which are references to other media ranging from Mega Man to Touhou to Ace Attorney to Bocchi to vtubers). The offline content, on the other hand, is a bit lacking. There's a solidly robust training mode that lets you fight bots, but no standalone VS CPU mode. The only real mode for offline play is the Gauntlet Mode where you face off against 10 bosses with increasing amounts of health. It's fun and I appreciate that you can get coins and XP from it, but I do wish there was a bit more to do outside of online battles, especially as a person who generally really dislikes online gaming. I also wish there was a way to customize which music plays. Duelists has an incredible soundtrack and it's a shame tracks seem to play somewhat randomly.

Speaking of which, Duelists Of Eden has as strong of a presentation as its predecessor, if not even better. The spritework is even more impressive and fluid than in OSFE, with some truly lush and visually-impressive character animations. I did have a few issues with the UI, though, like a bit of overlapping text and the resolution button not working for me. I'll assume it's an issue with my computer, though, because it usually is. The soundtrack is once again done by STEEL_PLUS, who has been becoming one of my favorite video game composers between One Step From Eden, the Crosscode DLC, and his tracks in Cotton Fantasy. While most of Duelists' music is reused from OSFE, we did get a bunch of new tracks for the new characters and stages, and they sound as fantastic as ever. The high-energy techno that defined OSFE's music is completely intact, and it's cool to see the cameo characters get OSFE-sounding remixes of music from their games, with Dreadwyrm's Starry Night and Neera's Avalanche being the best examples of this. However, my favorite track by a country mile has to be Harissa's theme Wildstyle, a funky sampled track that sounds unlike anything else in either game. Man, we're only a third into 2024 and there's been some truly stellar soundtracks.

So yeah, Duelists Of Eden is great, a fantastic compliment to One Step From Eden that perfectly capitalizes on the potential it had for PvP play. It's super polished, solidly balanced, has great online and incredible music, and once again, it's only $5 and you can even play it on Mac, so there's no excuse.

4.5/5 Stars

Why I Love Kirby's Epic Yarn

With GoodFeel's newest game Princess Peach Showtime having just released, I thought this would be a good time to revisit my favorite game of theirs, and one of my favorite games in its respective franchise: Kirby's Epic Yarn. In a lot of ways, it's a very influential game for me, it really broke my previously conceived notions of what a game could even be.

Let's get this out of the way first. Kirby's Epic Yarn was my first Kirby game, and frankly one of the first games I owned that wasn't in the Mario, LEGO, or Wii series. Considering that Kirby is my favorite video game series and the series that shaped my tastes in video games more than any other, that alone should really say a lot about this game's impact on me. Epic Yarn was a game that looked and felt unlike any other game I've played up to that point too. It didn't even bother trying to emulate real life, instead it crafted an entire world out of yarn and knitting material. The music wasn't the soaring orchestral scores or upbeat pop I was used to, it was almost all played by a soft, tender piano. At the time, and especially as a kid, Kirby's Epic Yarn felt so fresh, so unusually artistic. It captured my attention in a way no other game had back then.

I really can't talk about Kirby's Epic Yarn without starting with that presentation. As I mentioned, Epic Yarn is designed to look like it's entirely made out of yarn, and GoodFeel really committed with that vision. All the levels are stitched together with visible seams, and all the characters move with some remarkably fluid rope physics. Everything feels so tactile and comfortable, and there's so many little details like how Kirby can pop behind the curtains that make up the background, or how the knitting style itself varies depending on the world. The incredible soundtrack by Tomoya Tomita also really helps to give Epic Yarn such a comforting and cozy atmosphere through primarily using the piano for most of its tracks (as a piano kid myself, I actually wanted to learn how to play some of these). There's something so touching and soulful about Epic Yarn's OST, tracks like Big-Bean Vine, Mushroom Run, Melody Town, and Frosty Wheel just hit so hard. That's not to say there also weren't some more energetic or intense tracks though, and they perfectly balance heightening the stakes while keeping the cozy energy intact, like Lava Landing, Vs Squashini, and Outer Rings. But of course, I can't go without mentioning all of the phenomenal remixes of classic Kirby themes that populate the last world. Ripple Star - Map, Butter Building, and Boarding The Halberd in particular stand up as my absolute favorite versions of their respective tracks.

Kirby's Epic Yarn has a fairly silly plot about Kirby teaming up with a blue-looking Kirby named Prince Fluff to stop a wizard named Yin-Yarn who turned the entire world into yarn. It's got none of the wild lore or hidden creepiness that the series would eventually become to be known for, but I'd say it more than makes up for that with some of the funniest cutscenes in video game history. Like with Kirby 64, there's cutscenes in between each world and they're all narrated in the most sincere, serious voice. So you get ridiculous lines like "This grass feels like pants" or "Only I can be mean to my Waddle Dees" or "Kirby! Forgive me! I blame the yarn" delivered completely straight. Even as a kid, my friends and I got a serious kick out of these cutscenes, and quoted them constantly. It's all in good fun though, the lighthearted atmosphere and abundance of puns in the script give off the vibe that GoodFeel was absolutely in on the joke, and it helps make Epic Yarn feel even more comfy and likable of a game.

The yarn aesthetic isn't just for show though, it informs every aspect of Epic Yarn including the gameplay. Since Kirby has turned into yarn, most of his new moveset is built around the fact that he can't swallow enemies anymore... but he can twist his yarn-like body around to transform. So now, Kirby can jump by turning into a spring, dash by turning into a little car, and use his arm as a lasso to unravel enemies and even parts of the scenery. I have no idea what kind of black magic physics model GoodFeel used to make Kirby shift between these forms so fluidly, but it makes for one of the best-feeling platformers I've ever played, to the point where I eventually became interested in speedrunning it because of how good jumping in and out of the car form felt. There's also quite a few larger transformations that pop up every once in a while that turn Kirby into more limited forms like a giant tank, a dolphin, a UFO, and a rocket. Barring the train transformation (playing Canvas Curse with a shaky Wii pointer does not a fun stage make), most of these larger transformations are a ton of fun to use and break up the pace well without distracting from the base gameplay or dragging on too long. Special props go to the dolphin for just how fluid and fun it feels to swim around, making for some of my favorite underwater levels in all of gaming.

The level design is pretty fantastic too, all of them are varied and fun to mess around in. The yarn theming manages to take even the most basic world biomes like grass and lava and make it way more interesting, and that's before getting into the weirder worlds like Toy Land, Space Land, and the final world Dream Land being entirely made up of yarnified versions of classic Kirby stages. But I don't think anything tops Snow Land for me, a stage so drenched in blissful Christmas cheer that it single-handedly made Kirby's Epic Yarn my go-to Holiday game. I mean, just listen to that music. The bosses are also quite fun too. From the Halloween-y game show host Squashini, to the multi-phase battle with the kraken Capamari, to fun rematches against Dedede and Meta Knight, to a frenetic final boss fight with Yin-Yarn. Apparently, Yin Yarn's boss theme was a carry-over track from Kirby GCN and thus sounds far more like standard Kirby compared to the rest of the game, but it fits pretty well as Kirby's last stand in this game.

That being said, I'd be remiss not to mention Epic Yarn's most divisive element. You can't die, you only lose beads upon getting hit or falling into a pit. As I've said countless times before, this doesn't affect me in the slightest. I don't need challenge for a game to engage me, and Epic Yarn's strong presentation already more than makes up for it. But on top of that, Epic Yarn has some of the most rewarding 100% a game could have. Each level has three chests to find and a medal for how many beads you get. These levels are often filled to the brim with hidden nooks and crannies that can earn you beads, and carefully combing through an entire stage while also trying to get hit as little as possible to hang onto your beads is very fun and can be genuinely tough at times. There's also 100 mini challenges you can take on the side which can also get quite difficult and precise later on, so Epic Yarn definitely has challenge for those willing to go for it. There's also pretty fun couch co-op multiplayer, and the ability to customize Kirby's room however you want, which helps to round Epic Yarn up into a complete package.

 Overall, I adore Kirby's Epic Yarn on every level. It was such a fantastic introduction to the Kirby series. It's a tight and polished platformer with fluid movement, inventive level design, and rewarding completion, but it also has some of the freshest and most unique art direction of its time that feeds into and improves on every other aspect of the game. It's one of the comfiest video games ever made, and a game I'm always happy to revisit come December.

2024 Games I Played: Princess Peach Showtime

Princess Peach Showtime is a game that had me pretty excited ever since its second trailer. The reveal didn't show much, but once we learned that Peach was gonna be swapping costumes each with different gameplay styles and participating in plays, the game looked really fun. I was also excited by the fact that the game was revealed to be developed by GoodFeel who's almost always hit for me. Wario Land: Shake It, Kirby's Epic Yarn, Yoshi's Woolly/Crafted World, these guys know how to make a charming gaming experience. While the release of the demo did leave people split on its simple gameplay and easy difficulty, everything I've heard about the game seemed to really appeal to me. So, is Princess Peach Showtime as fun as I was hoping?

Princess Peach Showtime's main premise is that an evil sorceress named Grape has taken over a theater called the Sparkle Theater and hijacked all of its plays. Princess Peach gets stuck in the building when this happens, so she goes into all of the plays to save them by assuming the role of lead. Each stage starts with you as base Peach exploring the stage and finding a pad that'll let her transform into one of ten costumes depending on the play type. This ranges from swordfighter to thief to patisserie to straight-up a mermaid, and the gameplay changes accordingly. If you're a fan of Ape Escape 3 like I am, this concept probably sounds very familiar, though it's far more fleshed out in Peach's case. While it may initially seem that with ten costumes each with unique gameplay styles, Princess Peach Showtime is stretching itself a bit thin, but rest assured that this isn't an issue. Each costume is built off the same core platforming moveset, they each get at least three levels to shine, and they're all fun to use, there's never a point where I was like "ugh, that costume". My favorites are probably the ninja for its fast movement and steatlhy gameplay, the thief for its grapple hook, and the detective for the adorably charming light puzzle-solving. Showtime is not a game with much mechanical depth or complexity in that the controls mostly just use two buttons, but I think this was entirely intentional on the part of GoodFeel to make it easy to jump from costume to costume without getting lost and keep the gameplay feeling consistently fun. It's a lot like the captures in Mario Odyssey in that respect, only more fleshed out.

The stages are pretty impressive spectacles, often long and dynamic with a ton of setpieces and moving parts. The first stage for example starts with you as base Peach exploring a garden, before you find the swordfighter costume that allows you to begin fighting your way up a big castle culminating with a mini boss fight against a giant plant. Soon enough, you'll start getting to stages where the environment destroys itself around you and you have to platform to safety, and it's always exhilarating. There's so much variety too, with a solid balance between 3D sections and 2.5D bits not unlike the perspective silliness in Yoshi's Crafted World. You'll be flying a giant makeshift dragon up a tower, running through a rushing train as it keeps falling apart, climbing a clock tower to find and disable the bomb at the top, hijacking a blimp, stopping a "zombie" invasion, traveling to space, the list goes on. Showtime's stages are often flashy and filled with fun but linear setpieces, though to balance that out, GoodFeel added a ridiculous amount of hidden costumes and secret bonus rooms. I wasn't expecting Showtime to have some really engaging exploration, but I'm glad it does because it makes up for the otherwise easy difficulty in my eyes. As a fan of games like LEGO Star Wars and Kirby's Epic Yarn, hunting for studs and beads is what makes those games fun for me even when you can't actually die. 

That being said, Showtime isn't mindless. I think a lot of people got the wrong impression from Swordfighter Peach's quickdodge in the demo, and how automated it feels. Trust me when I say that no other costume has a move like that, and it's very quickly made clear that the swordfighter is meant to be the basic tutorial costume. You're pretty much done with it in the first hour of the game. Frankly, that's probably my biggest issue with demos in general. They usually just include the tutorial or opening stages, and since that's typically the easiest part of the game, people immediately jump to assuming that the whole game is going to be that easy. It always happens with Kirby and it drives me up the wall because it's as if people forget that a difficulty curve exists. Don't get me wrong, Princess Peach Showtime is still a very easy game, but as I said above, it's not mindlessly so. While the game never gets genuinely difficult at least outside of some of the side content, you will have to do actual platforming and combat soon enough, and careless mistakes will cost you hearts especially in some of the chase scenes, as well as the quite fun and trippy boss fights.

That being said, my biggest issue with Princess Peach Showtime is the 100% completion, which isn't a new issue for GoodFeel. As much as I love their penchant for adding collectibles, I do feel like they can go overboard at times, with Yoshi's Crafted World being by far the worst candidate since you'll have to visit each level roughly five times at least to fully complete it. Showtime isn't nearly as bad in this regard, but it does have other issues. Looking for the main collectible, the Sparkle Gems is really fun, but if you miss one, you'll have to go back through what's usually a roughly 10-minute gauntlet filled with unskippable cutscenes to retrieve it. A chapter select would've been nice. The postgame also asks you to revisit every level to find three Theets (the game's NPCs) and that also feels like pretty blatant filler. That being said, a lot of the side content is still very fun. There's a ton of ribbons and dresses to unlock for Peach, short challenges for some of the costumes with trophies to get, boss missions like the ones in Crafted World, and plenty of cleverly-hidden Sparkle Gems to hunt down. Beating the game casually shouldn't take more than 10 hours, but going for everything can definitely push that playtime up to the 20s.

However, I can't deny the fact that the best aspect of Princess Peach Showtime is easily its presentation... mostly. I'd be remiss not to mention that the performance is not too great. The game runs at 30fps and stutters somewhat often, though thankfully this is mostly an issue in the hub and transformation cutscenes rather than the stages, and it never dips far enough to detract from the experience. From an art direction standpoint, though, this game is absolutely phenomenal. GoodFeel really went all out with making each stage feel like an actual play, from the Theeds' dramatic acting, to be able to see the strings holding everything up or the inner seams of each set, to the loading screen music sounding exactly like the orchestral score you'd hear while waiting for a play to start, to the fact that all of the bosses are anthropomorphized stage props. This game fully commits to the bit and it's all the better for it. Peach also has so many charming animations, a lot of which are entirely context-sensitive and often entirely optional. Walking up to a stair rail in a stage and watching as Peach suddenly slid down was the moment where I knew this game was genuinely a labor of love. It really is the little things, all the references, all the little details, all the adorably subtle gags, you can tell the team behind this game loves and understands the medium of theatre. I genuinely don't understand how you can play this game and not be completely and utterly enchanted by it.

Peach's voice actress Samantha Kelly also did a great job here, she has a surprising amount of unique voice lines, and she even modulates her voice depending on the costume Peach is wearing. When Cowgirl Peach started busting out a western accent, I immediately fell on the floor laughing. And while GoodFeel's music has been a tad hit or miss lately since Tomoya Tomita left, rest assured that Princess Peach Showtime's soundtrack by Castlevania alum Soshiro Hokkai (Harmony of Dissonance, Aria Of Sorrow) is absolutely fantastic. There is a surprising amount of genre variety from country to orchestral to jazz, and the way all the costume themes are built around the same single motif but branch off in completely different directions is genuinely masterful stuff. It took several hours of gameplay and several soundtrack listens outside of the game to even realize there was a leitmotif to begin with, and that's kind of impressive. I can't even believe I'm saying this in a year where Penny's Big Breakaway exists but this may genuinely be my OST of the year so far. There are so many incredible tracks like the quintessentially Peach-sounding Time For Tea?, the Mario Party 5-esque It's Up To Me, the energetic Gliding Across The Snowscape, the smooth Under The Cover Of Night, and the freeform jazz bop Darkle Battle, though my absolute favorite has to be Ninja Peach's theme Assassin Disco, a Japanese/dance fusion banger that sounds straight out of Goemon.

Speaking of which, this segues into a pretty interesting thing about Showtime and GoodFeel as a whole. Something I've discovered recently with their Goemon spiritual successor Mameda No Bakeru is that GoodFeel is actually an off-shoot of Konami's Goemon team, and while it's not something that you could really tell with Kirby's Epic Yarn or the Yoshi games, it's been really showing lately, especially with Goemon's co-creator, Etsunobu Ebisu, in the director's chair for Showtime for the first time in 25 years. The Goemon games (and possibly SNES era Konami as a whole) have such a quirky charm to them, with a lot of attention being paid to minute details, silly NPCs, random minigames, and unnecessarily banger soundtracks, all of which are elements Showtime has in spades. I'm by no means saying that this game is the next Goemon (we already have that... at least only in Japan) or a return to SNES era Konami glory, but it does have a lot of that same charm and it really elevates the overall package for me.

Princess Peach Showtime is not a game for everyone. If you want something with a lot of depth and a decent level of challenge, you're not getting it here. But I also don't think Princess Peach Showtime is a game that's just good by the standards of a game for little girls, it is a genuinely fun time with a lot of visible care put into it. The gameplay while simple is consistently fun, the level design is dynamic and inventive, the exploration is engaging, the art direction is fresh and weird with a strong attention to detail, and the soundtrack absolutely bops. I've always stood by the fact that games don't need to be challenging to be fun, they can just be fun, and Princess Peach Showtime has an infectious sense of fun.

4.5/5 Stars