YMMV / Super Princess Peach

• Accidental Innuendo:
  • The term 'Vibe Scepter' was a rather questionable choice by the developers. While 'Vibe' can mean one's emotional state, it also can mean 'vibration' which when combined with scepter can lead to accidental innuendo. One has to wonder why they didn't make the Artifact of Doom the Vibe Crown or the Vibe Star instead?
  • Then there's this text in the ending cutscene: "The Vibe Scepter has strange and mysterious powers, that's for sure... Somewhere, someone might possibly be using it right now... Your mom's been laughing happily a lot? Maybe... Just maybe... The Vibe Scepter is hidden away in your house right now..."
• Alternative Character Interpretation: During the final battle with Bowser, he seems pretty willing to not hold any of his punches against the Princess, and isn't even perturbed when one of his minions called her a "brat". Perhaps in a state of Vibe Scepter-induced Calm, Bowser temporarily realized the futility of constantly pursuing Princess Peach, and that the only way to ever truly take over the kingdom is to stop kidnapping her and to actually defeat her?
• Annoying Video Game Helper: Some people dislike Perry simply because he will always tell you exactly what you need to do to solve a puzzle or how to defeat a boss, thus making the game too easy and taking away a lot of the exploration potential. Then again, to even get these hints you have to hit his blocks, so all of his tips are completely skippable.
• Awesome Music: Both of the Fury Volcano themes, which are extremely upbeat and energetic and go perfectly with the athletic sections of the volcano levels.
• Catharsis Factor: For the first time in the Mario series, Peach gets to fight Bowser, getting revenge for all the times he's kidnapped her.
• Common Knowledge: People often claim that all of Peach's Vibe Powers are from her own command, but in reality, this is the result of Bowser causing all of Vibe Island to go haywire through the power of the Vibe Scepter, with Peach's emotions being enhanced to become weaponized; not anything that would be considered normal for her. At most, she's freely able to control which emotion she's in, as opposed to all the other enemies, who have no control over their emotions.
• Cult Classic: The game is not as popular as the other character sub-franchises, but it still has a very devoted following who appreciate it for its uniqueness, presentation, artstyle reminiscent of the Yoshi's Island series, and fun mechanics as well as the fact that it shows that Peach is quite the Action Girl when she wants to be.
• Fan Nickname: Most commonly, Peach's Vibe Power is "PMS Power". And that often leads to the game itself being called "Super PMS Peach".
• Game-Breaker:
  • Practically every upgrade is one of these. Each one makes it more and more difficult to die. The most broken one, Endless (Infinite) Vibe Gauge, is at least optional and can be turned on/off anytime.
  • The Calm Vibe is one that you start the game with, since using it gives Regenerating Health until you get hit or run out of vibe energy, which is hard to do since Perry can eat most enemies to restore Vibe energy. You should rarely be in any danger of dying if you decide to use it.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Super Princess Peach sold very well in America and Europe, compared to its home country Japan, where the game had the weakest sales.
• Goddamned Bats: Fortunately while the game is lacking in true Demonic Spiders, but there are still a few enemies that still aren't the most pleasant to run into:
  • Lakitus aren't as threatening as before due to not throwing Spiny Eggs, but they move faster than Peach and throw bombs at her, and will harass you until you defeat them or move to another room.
  • Sad Nipper Plants aren't that dangerous until you approach them, then they suddenly bounce around like a jumping bean, making them annoying to hit.
• Good Bad Bugs: Normally, to defeat the final phase of Bowser you need to time Bob-ombs to explode in his face. However, it's possible to take him down in less than a minute by using Joy Vibe to fly up to Bowser's face and pressing X to lift him when in front of his eyes, which obviously doesn't lift him but does damage him.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: Considered the easiest 2D Mario game due to its numerous Game Breakers, SPP is rather easy to finish, other than the final fight against Bowser and the obstacle course sections before bosses.
• Moment of Awesome: The whole game serves as one great big moment of awesome for Peach. After spending 20 years as one of the most prolific examples of the Damsel in Distress trope, she gets to act as an Action Girl, defeat King Bowser Koopa by herself, and rescue Mario and Luigi.
• Older Than They Think: Believe it or not, this isn't actually the first game overall where Princess Peach was the protagonist. It was all the way in 1990 via an LCD game watch called Princess Toadstool's Castle Run released through McDonald's Happy Meals along with two other games. It was, however, the first game on a dedicated video game console where she is the protagonist.
• Scrappy Mechanic: As with many DS games that utilize this, the mic controls during submarine levels, in which a player has to blow into the mic to get Perry to shoot bubbles at enemies. Not only is it clunky having to tap the A button to keep afloat while trying to do this, but during these levels all the other buttons are unmapped, so it would have been just as easy to have the bubbles be controlled by one of those buttons, or even the shoulder buttons, instead.
• Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • A common way of counteracting the game's easiness is to avoid buying Heart and Vibe Gauge upgrades. Avoiding using the health-regenerating Calm vibe also helps bring the game closer to standard Mario difficulty.
  • Then there's the Mario Playstyle Challenge, in which the only permitted methods of attack against regular enemies are things Mario does, like the Goomba Stomp, sliding, and kicking Koopa shells. No upgrades purchased. Avoid using Vibes whenever possible.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • The second Hoo's Wood theme really sounds like the Sonic 3 & Knuckles title theme.
  • The first Giddy sky theme sounds an AWFUL lot like the theme to the 1987 Beauty and the Beast TV series.
  • As Alpharad pointed out, the Subrella theme sounds very similar to the first part of "Komm, süsser Tod".
• Sweetness Aversion: It's an exceptionally adorable and cheery game even for Mario franchise standards, starring the very sweet, feminine and cute Princess Peach and her yolk-yellow umbrella friend Perry with a cheerful smile. SPP is filled to the brim with sugar in its presentation. Even Bowser's Castle doesn't have the usual intimidation it carries due to the atmosphere of the game.
• Take That, Scrappy!: During the introduction cutscene, Bowser's general captures Toad (along with Mario and Luigi), referring to him as 'that mushroom-headed loudmouth'.
• That One Boss: Bowser. Has hard-to-dodge attacks and it's hard to figure out how to beat him. Luckily, you're healed between his two phases. That being said, all of Bowser's attacks do have a pattern to them as well as a tell, and if things get rough Peach can always camp out in the corner and use her Calm-induced Healing Factor to restore her health. Really, the hardest part of the fight is trying to time the bombs to explode right in the sweet spot of Bowser's giant face while simultaneously dodging his attacks.
• That One Level: The sections before a boss level, where you have to get past an obstacle course using the stylus. To elaborate further, some of them are Unexpected Gameplay Change where you lose control of Peach and have to protect her from an onslaught on oncoming enemies and obstacles. Get hit a single time, just one single time and you're doing the whole sequence over again. These sequences are particularly lengthy too, adding to the frustration. It speaks volumes that even the developers give you the option to skip them after completing them once. They made a come back in spirit in the Rehearsal Levels in Princess Peach Showtime!, and became just as annoying there as they were here.
• Vindicated by History: While Super Princess Peach isn't the most famous title around, it was always considered good overall, and fans have grown to appreciate it a little more after over a decade, being a very unique title with fun mechanics, if only too easy. Plus, being able to play as Princess Peach on her own adventure was a really cool novelty for her fans. The game also retrospectively received praise for its mechanics by doing away with Video-Game Lives, and finding a practical use for the coins by offering a shop with purchasable items, well before Super Mario Odyssey did it over a decade later. Super Princess Peach's uniqueness has let the game stand out favorably among its contemporaries, being viewed as a worthy follow-up to the lineage of classic Mario platformers, especially in light of the controversial latter two installments of the New Super Mario Bros. series. Several fans hoped for a sequel, if not for it to become an entire Peach-centric series like Wario, Donkey Kong, Yoshi, and Luigi before her. The June 2023 Nintendo Direct announced a new Princess Peach game in the works, with the title Princess Peach: Showtime! being given in the September 2023 Nintendo Direct developed by Good Feel instead of Tose, and fans of this game hoped it was a Spiritual Successor of sorts or acknowledged the original game in some way, which Showtime does slightly.

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