Princess Peach Showtime Shows Off Ninja Skills, Pink Joy-Cons

This March we receive the triumphant return of the ruler of the Mushroom Kingdom, Her Majesty Princess Peach. Princess Peach: Showtime, the resilient monarch’s first headline game since 2005’s Super Princess Peach, is a stage-based action-adventure, as shown in new footage released by Nintendo today.

Nintendo has been remarkably vague about exactly how Princess Peach: Showtime will play, but from this latest collection of snippets, it seems like it’s a difficult question to pin down. As Peach changes costume, from chef to ninja to cowgirl to detective, the way you’ll play the game appears to change with it.

This much-belated outing for the character takes place at the Sparkle Theater, where Peach was hoping to see a show, when a dreadful lot called Grape and the Sour Bunch come in to ruin everything. The theater’s guardian hands Peach a magical ribbon, which gives her the ability to transform from archetype to archetype, gaining the skills of her chosen outfit/career.

As a ninja, we see Peach leaping, dashing, hiding, then launching deadly strikes against enemies. As a cowgirl, she’s shown using a lasso to attack enemies appearing from holes in the stage, then in a horse chase across a rickety wooden platform (complete with adorable visible strings moving the horses). In swordfighting mode, we see her both side-scrolling around the side of a tower, but then rushing away from the camera from an overhead view.

In detective mode, Peach appears far more calmly following footprints, then running between characters in an apparent investigation. As “Patissiere Peach,” she’s shown in what looks like a collection of cooking minigames. Kung Fu Peach looks as though she’s involved in a puzzle game, but then is spinning around and kicking enemies in the face while collecting coins.

So perhaps it’s fair enough that Nintendo has been so ambiguous in pinning the game down.

More good news appears in the form of some accompanying Joy-Cons, finally allowing us to buy a matching pair of pastel pink controllers. A combination of pink and yellow was previously released, but you can now pre-order lefty and righty, due to release March 22—the same day as Princess Peach: Showtime. The Joy-Cons will cost you the usual and enormous $80, while the game will release for $60.