The Princess Blog

I was late to the party with my review of Super Princess Peach , so I decided to be more timely with her latest installment, Princess Peach™: Showtime!  for the Nintendo Switch that launched last Friday. The game is a mix between the dress-up elements of Time Princess  and the gameplay elements of Disney Princess Enchanted Journey / My Fairytale Adventure . Although it provides more of a challenge than the Disney Princess games of the past as one might expect of a Super Mario Bros.  title, it can easily be completed in a full day, which makes the steep price tag questionable. Still, Princess Peach's newest title is visually pleasing, entertaining, and fun to play. The game begins with Princess Peach entering a large theater run by the Sparklas, generic muppet-like creatures  that populate the Showtime! worlds. As soon as she arrives, a magic tornado blasts her tiara off her head. A talking star named Stella appears and replaces it with a magic hair ribbon that a...

Princess Peach is one of the most famous video game princesses  of all time, so it's only fitting that she has her own movie . Okay, technically, it's The Super Mario Bros. Movie , but there was a lot of focus on presenting Peach in a way that would be acceptable by both fans and  modern feminist standards . While I have been critical about the decline of femininity  in the past (and still am), there was a lot that I found charming about the way her character was represented in this film. Yes, she was a badass "girl boss" who was able to do everything perfectly on her first try, but the new movie also expanded upon her backstory of how she became the princess of the Mushroom Kingdom, something that often got glossed over in the massive video game franchise because it typically focused more on gameplay than plot development. Aside from that, it was just a fun time at the theater in general. The Super Mario Bros. Movie  begins with the ordinary lives of Mario and Luigi...

When I heard that Illumination was teaming up with Nintendo to make a Super Mario Bros. movie ,  my first thought was "Well, it can't possibly be worse than that live-action one ." I'm far from a hardcore Mario Bros. fanatic, but I have cosplayed as Princess Peach and recently reviewed her game , so there is some interest there. Unfortunately, the initial teaser trailer  did not show the classic pink and blonde princess at all, so I had little interest in learning more about it. All of that changed when the second trailer released yesterday, and Peach was all over the place. She has significantly more dialogue in this trailer than Mario himself, so there's a lot to dive into. Let's get started. Right off the bat, I love that this movie keeps the brightly colored cartoony feel of the games, something that is impossible to capture in live-action. Illumination is not exactly known for their stellar animation, but their comical designs are a good match for the...