The Princess and the Peach.

My previous post was about video games, too. Clearly, I am just on a roll in this department.

As I said in the previous post, I've been a gamer since the inception of gaming. My most recent system is the Nintendo DS, Nintendo's answer to the next generation of hand-held consoles. I love my DS. The games are unique and a number of them are quirky, but hey, I like a healthy dose of quirk with my gaming. Especially given that the Super Mario Brothers franchise has been healthily recreated for the system.

One of these new Mario games is a game called Super Princess Peach. The plot is simple: Bowser, the great and evil cretin of the Mario series, has kidnapped Mario, Luigi, and most of the Toadstool people. Because there is no one left to defend the Toadstool Kingdom, Princess Peach and a talking umbrella named Perry set off to save the Toadstools and rescue the Mario Brothers.

At a surface level, I was exceedingly excited for this game. I may love the franchise, I may adore Nintendo, but the facts are these: most Nintendo protagonists are male and those who are not tend to be painfully androgynous. (Samus, anyone?) The classic "princess is captured, man must rescue" plot is followed by a number of the games, and even the Mario franchise's newest version--The New Super Mario Bros.--follows this cookie-cutter outline. It's a formula, but the formula works, and I'm not overly offended by it. I mean, it's a video game, and while I would have loved Tetra in Legend of Zelda: Windwaker to be a little more like Shiek in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, I can't complain that she's not. It's the nature of the game.

But here is Super Princess Peach, a game that promises to have a female protagonist and give Peach a chance to shine for the first time in Nintendo's history. I want to say that the game was all that I, almost a feminist but not really a feminist, if you catch my meaning, was craving.

It fell short.

For one, Peach's abilities and "powers" aren't the usual head-stomping, fireball-shooting fare. While Mario jumps on creatures, Peach uses her umbrella to smack them, and many of her enemies don't die as much as they are smushed down and wander harmlessly around. (She can jump on the enemies, but the results are not the same.) There are no flowers for fireballs or raccoon tails for thwacking enemies, either. Peach's powers come from emotion. Let me repeat this: emotion. She can cry and drown enemies, get angry and set them on fire, feel calm and restore her strength, and be happy and fly through the air. None of these are actually as effective at hurting her foes as they are at destroying blockades that hinder progress through the stages. But then again, that's all right, given that the enemies are never hard to beat and power restoration gems are, quite literally, everywhere. If you do "die", there's no immediate repercussion other than restarting the level, either; there are no lives, and if you die, you just start over. That's it.

Another of my issues lies in the fact that the entire game is "cute". It's not subtle, either. Even the big baddies are adorable, like the smiling caterpillar in the fire level. Mario games are no paragon of terror, but the ghosts and some of the creatures in the later games were at least a bit menacing. Peach's world is sunny, happy, pastel-colored, and with soft corners. I was shocked in a recent level that spears were being thrown at me because it was the first time that it wasn't something cute and harmless trying to cause my downfall.

The talking umbrella, Perry, is just as ridiculous. Mario never needed a talking piece of rainproofing to help him on his quest. Sometimes, he had his brother, who kicked equal amounts of butt. That was it. Now we have talking umbrellas? Oh, come on. At least give her an animal companion or something else that has a prayer of, well, being menacing to the forces of evil.

I know that Super Princess Peach is and was marketed to girls in the sort of eight to twelve range. I'm all right with that; my cousin, who I think is ten now, got it two Christmases and so did I. But the fact remains that it characterizes girls as emotion-drive "cutiepies" who need help from any and all sources possible, up to and including animated inanimate objects.

I'm not sure I can really tolerate this as a creative movie. Shiek in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was a woman taking her own fate into her hands, but she was a.) androgynous for most of the game and b.) not a playable character. Several other popular games have playable female characters or, indeed, female protagonists--Touch Detective and its sequel, Nancy Drew and the Secret of Olde World Park, the Mia Fey level of Phoenix Wright: Trials and Tribulations, a number of the other RPGs available for the system, Trace Memory, and probably others that I've never played--but the fact remains that they all end up tripping over this fatal flaw. I'm a character writer and a character buff and frankly, I love stories and series about and heavily featuring men. But I also want to be able to look at a girl and see more than a cute thing in a pink dress running through puffy worlds of clouds and defeating the big bad lizard with an umbrella.

Don't get me wrong. The game is addictive in a way that only Nintendo can manage. I just wish there was more to it for me to appreciate. Or, barring that, no umbrella.