Super Princess Peach Member Review for the DS

ADD Gamers – Game Review

By: Luke Harris

Game: Super Princess Peach

Hell hath no fury like a princess scorned.

Letter Grade: B-

+ It’s-a her!

+ PMS at my control!

+ Colorful, pretty visuals

+ Many mini-games and unlockables.

+/- Annoying bi-polar difficulty.

- Short, unfulfilling.

- Those damn toads…

- What do I do now…?

   The mid 1980’s… The years that changed gaming history forever… With the invention of Metroid and Zelda, it’s no wonder why Nintendo has been immortal since its creation… But there’s one mascot that is more popular than Micky Mouse, and cooler than the arctic. It’s-a him, Mario Mario. His good ol’ jumping, coin collecting, and abusing turtles have amused us for years. And that damn Peach. Get a bodyguard or something. I’ve been rescuing you for 20 years! Oh, wait a minute…it’s MARIO that’s been kidnapped. Wait, what’s that? I need to get Peach together with a jumping umbrella, an item called a vibe wand, and collect threesomes of toads? …Sign me up, baby!

   The entire game is played out as if it has a story, but come on, nobody cares about your talking umbrellas’ past history. You play as Princess Peach. Hopping, floating, sliding, and smashing her way through the levels. This sounds like it could be a GBA game, but what makes it fit into the DS category, is of course, the touch screen. Through this, you activate her four vibes, all with different attributes. These can be used to open doors, solve puzzles, or defeat enemies. Anger makes her heavy and sets her on fire, calm makes her regain health steadily, joy makes you fly and spin around like a tornado, and sad makes you cry like a baby, tears flying, and doubling your run speed. Using any of these depletes a yellow meter below your health that you must collect little diamonds to restore. …Makes sense I suppose. Diamonds would make ME happy.

   The game itself is very pretty. Everything is colorful and happy, as if you don’t even know you’re being attacked by flying turtles. Peach is adorable as usual, the music is classic Mario, and the backgrounds are pretty to look at. During gameplay, you collect coins that are flying around, defeating enemies, or destroying boxes. These don’t give you extra lives…because in this game, you have one life, but several heart containers. (Think Zelda) You use coins to buy upgrades. Things like more hearts, a longer vibe bar, new umbrella attacks, and so on. If you don’t feel like doing levels over and over, there are a couple of mini-games you can play, over and over, with no negative consequences. They’re kind of boring, but there’s 10 different levels of each game, so it can’t get too boring too fast.

   The game gets annoying when it’ll be one level where you have to simply hop, skip, and jump to the end, without taking damage once, then the next level will be trial and error, with no help, constant dying with little checkpoints, and no vibe diamonds around to help you. There’s nor warning for this, and there’s no difficulty switch in the game, it only has one: Default. The game really falls apart when you can NOT even fight the final boss until you collect all three toads in every single level in the game. As if some of the levels were hard enough, or boring. Now you have to do them over again, collecting all three toads, which are hard to find, without dying. Thanks, Nintendo. Once you get there and it’s all said and done…there’s not much to do. By then, you’ll have every upgrade, every unlockable, and every level. …Now what? …Well, um…I can do it over again in a different save file. Sweet…

   All in all, this is a breath of fresh air. I get to spend time with Peach, when she isn’t driving a car, or swinging a tennis racket. It’s good to look at, and if you have some free time on your hands, go ahead and give it a look. But don’t expect a long-term relationship.