Every Main Costume in Princess Peach Showtime Ranked

During Princess Peach Showtime, our main protagonist, Princess Peach, gets several costumes that grant her new abilities and powers. If we're going to go spoiler-free, we're gonna talk about the main 10 that she gets. Each of these 10 introduces an entirely different play style from the others making each of the 10 its own separate game of sorts.

To do this review we're going to need to focus on three things.

1) The visual appeal of the costume. How creative it is, how well it looks, like, if you saw it in a store how it would hit you.

2) How the actual gameplay mechanics behind the costume works. Sure, the costume might look cool but is the game mode behind it fun?

3) How does Peach pull it off? Not like that, weirdo. I mean like when she wears it how well does it work for her specifically. Does she look comfortable in it? Does she, in fact, own it?

I thought about these three factors for each of the ten main costumes to an embarassing degree and have come up with an order for them. So here they are from my least favorite to the numero uno. Starting with...

10) Mermaid Peach

Mermaids are already weird. At some point we collectively decided to forget the reason mermaids sing all the time is to lure men in to die. Regardless, this costume equates to an all singing all swimming nightmare.

First, Peach is not comfortable in this. The outfit looks weird for her and the lack of shoulder straps for that top makes it look like something she'd just lose if swimming fast. Also, being under water is not the time for a big chunky necklace. I feel like that would just bap you in the face.

Also, this game puts a lot of care into animation for each character...except here. The hair doesn't really move underwater which is something that anyone with hair and access to water might notice isn't a thing that happens.

And her controls are terrible. You'd think she'd have free flowing movement where she could freely swim in whatever direction you tilt the joystick but instead she has stiff 8 directional controls where if you tried to swim in a loop she'll give you an octogon.

Her ability to control fish is also bad because the camera doesn't follow the fish, meaning that if you need to do something far away you control the fish to the edge of the screen, swim forward a bit, control the fish again, move, continue. It's clunky and awkward. And in some puzzles the fish constantly trigger the last damn thing you want them to move making you have to go back a step or two.

And the music games at the end of each stage? No. They introduce a bunch of different fish that require you to do different things that they NEVER explain to you meaning it's almost impossible to get everything in the stage on one go which means if you're a completionist like me, you're going to have to go through the mind numbing simple game play a second time just to try to max out the rhythm game at the end.

The only plus side of this is that I think this might be one of the only times we see Peach's belly button which at least lets us know she's human which, given the lack of story is the most we've gotten from her origin thus far.