Super Princess Peach Preview

The guy has been saving the girl for 20 years. It started with Mario saving the damsel in distress Princess Toadstool in the original Super Mario Bros. It has continued to this generation, with games constantly having the well-built male characters coming to the rescue of the opposite sex. Not every game has been that way, but the male dominance over doing the saving is far greater than the female character. Now the tables have turned. Instead of always being unusually helpless while being carried away on Bowser’s back, it is now Princess Peach’s turn to fight back.

The game’s story is obviously set yet again in the Mushroom Kingdom. But instead of Mario getting that “again?” news of Peach’s abduction, the plot is different this time. Bowser and his group of trouble-making Koopas are plotting a diabolical scheme to capture the infamous plumber brothers. Mario and Luigi are the very defenders of the Mushroom Kingdom, so with them out of action, someone must step in. But who? None other than Princess Peach, the usual captive, has to step up and save the day. From the import, the beginning of the game has a lengthy intro cutscene displaying Bowser’s plot being carried out. It is after this that you are given control of Peach as you make your way through the castle and towards the eventual rescuing of your friends.

Now a lot of you ‘male’ gamer types might be laughing already. You’re probably thinking, “I wouldn’t be caught dead playing this chick game!” Well regardless if you feel that way or not, this seems to be shaping up to be an excellent platforming game. It might be wise to suck up that masculine pride and give this a shot. The game features your standard platforming mechanics seen in franchises throughout the years, as well as some very unique touch screen uses. Before even getting to the touch screen uses and special abilities, Peach already has a healthy set of actions ready to be performed. She can jump, slide, attack with her parasol, and scoop up enemies to either throw them at others…or even eat them. Yes, eat them, and your emotion meter will be replenished.

You will also collect a number of coins in each level, taking from Mario’s platforming games. But instead of them gaining you bonus lives like before, they are actually used for something else. Instead of gaining more lives, you actually keep your coins at the end of each level to visit Toad’s shop. Here you can use your monies to purchase new items and moves for Peach to utilize. Based on the import demo, you could purchase anything from Peach’s floating move like in Super Mario Bros. 2 as well as a butt stomping attack. But this is Peach, female royalty, so she doesn’t actually use her butt to stomp, she dives down with parasol underneath.

Before we talked about an emotion meter, but what does that have to do with the gameplay? Super Princess Peach is all about emotion, and Peach has plenty of it. This is where the touch screen comes in, as Peach’s four emotion derived powers are accessed by tapping a certain face on display. Her powers are happy, sad, angry and content. Happy allows her health to regenerate over time. Sad causes her eyes to become Old Faithful, allowing her to make plants grow rapidly. Anger causes Peach to be engulfed in flame, allowing you to burn impeding obstacles. Then you have the seemingly ‘content’ emotion, which allows our Mushroom Kingdom’s prim and proper to float. Utilizing any of these powers will cause Peach’s emotion meter to lessen, which is why you need to devour enemies to replenish it. There are also blue crystals scattered in the game’s levels, which offer more energy to be regained.

The good thing about this is the game doesn’t make it entirely difficult to get your emotion back. There are a lot of obstacles for you to get past or remove, so that will eliminate tedious backtracking. What also makes SPP great is some of Peach’s abilities are just plain convention, while others have been given truly creative uses. Peach’s hover ability naturally allows you to clear high standing obstacles or big gaps. For instance from the import demo, there are wooden bridges with some nice goodies lying underneath. You can use your anger ability to light the bridge ablaze, and once it turned to ash, descend to grab your desirables. In another example, there are areas in which you will encounter plant sprouts in the ground. You can use your sad power to water these babies and make them grow into full adult vines that you can climb. SPP not only relies on a great core platforming engine, but it contains a very nice mix of puzzle-solving requirements to keep things interesting and fresh.

Not everything in this is completely brand new though, as the way the entire game is presented in SPP is very Mario-esque. Peach’s adventure is broken up into several worlds, sporting their own themes, which in turn are divided into numerous sub-stages. If the first world from the import demo tells us anything, it’s that you encounter a boss battle at the end, which is preceded by an off-track action stage utilizing the DS hardware. In the first world, you have to navigate a series of platforms plagued by enemies moving back and forth on and between them. What’s different here though, is that you can’t control Peach directly. You simply use the stylus to pull down some spring platforms she’s standing on. Doing so will display a neat dotted line that represents what Peach’s trajectory will be if you let go of the platform. After going through that, you face a giant piranha plant that continually sends enemies and shockwaves at you. What makes these battles unique is you have to be creative in the use of your emotional powers to achieve victory.

Super Princess Peach is a game world presented in a simplistic 2D fashion. It’s somewhat similar to Yoshi’s Island of the SNES and GBA. It has a very colorful storybook feel to it, which both kids and older gamers alike can come to appreciate. It seems to really bring the Mushroom Kingdom to life, which is always a great thing in Mario titles. The game doesn’t look exactly like other Mario platformers, but there’s nothing wrong with that.

This upcoming platformer DS title really looks like something to look forward to. Despite it looking to be extremely easy to play through, difficulty doesn’t seem to be Nintendo’s intention. The puzzles don’t seem hard to solve, enemies don’t offer much challenge and how easy it is to recharge your emotion meter may put off some people. What can be said is the joy of playing through this game won’t be through simply beating it, but experiencing the true color of the worlds and utilizing the innovative control scheme. The story itself may be heavily text-driven, but when has that ever really failed in a Mario game? Come next month, experience a different side of the Mario saga by taking on Peach’s role to do the rescuing.