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
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