Princess Peach: Difference between revisions

Peach has an affinity for the color pink, which accents her gentle personality and kind temperament. Peach's gentle nature and role as the damsel in distress are often represented with her heart abilities and crown emblem.

Since her debut, Peach has appeared in installments related to the ''Super Mario'' game series for over three decades, even appearing in more games than any other female character in video game history. Peach is occasionally a supporting character in mainstream games and almost always playable in spin-off installments. Her most prominent appearances to date in which she is given a lead role opportunity include ''[[Super Princess Peach]]'' and ''[[Princess Peach: Showtime!]]''; additionally, the most recent mainstream game where she appears as a playable character rather than a damsel-in-distress is ''[[Super Mario Bros. Wonder]]''.

Peach has always been depicted as a blonde in video game artwork, although it was originally a darker, more strawberry-blonde shade (or in the case of the Japanese packaging, a dark blonde shade). However, due to the graphical limitations of the NES hardware, her on-screen sprite in the earlier ''Super Mario Bros.'' games displayed her with reddish-brown hair, and as a result, she was depicted as a redhead in the DiC Entertainment cartoons, as well as reddish-brown in Mario-related merchandise such as a 1988 toy box artwork. Starting with ''[[Super Mario World]]'' for the SNES, her in-game appearances had her proper hair color. On a similar note, her dress had always been depicted as pink in video game artwork, although because of the aforementioned graphical limitations of the NES hardware, her on-screen sprite in ''Super Mario Bros.'' and ''Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels'' depicted her as wearing a white dress with red highlights; this depiction of her old dress would later be reused for her Fire form in ''Super Mario 3D World''. She only gained a pink dress in-game starting with the overseas version of ''Super Mario Bros 2''. Peach's classic main dress had a normal pink high collar, a sash around the waist instead of panniers, and was darker pink from the hem to her knees, but otherwise does not differ greatly from the modern/current main dress introduced with the GameCube-era games, starting with ''[[Super Mario Sunshine]]'' and ''[[Mario Party 4]]'', although the subsequent ''[[Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door]]'' installment marked the original dress's final appearance. Although the key artwork featured Peach in the Japanese versions of ''Super Mario Bros.'', the instruction manuals for both the Famicom and NES versions of the game hid her sprite behind a question mark in order to keep her identity a surprise for players as a way to motivate them into completing the game.

Peach usually wears a pink floor-length dress with puffy sleeves, magenta panniers at the waist, a high collar and a frill of the same color at the hem. Most games include a white petticoat under her dress. From ''Super Mario Bros.'' to ''Mario Kart: Super Circuit'', her dress had a band around her waist rather than panniers and was colored magenta from below her knees. Peach wears a golden crown with red and blue gems, round blue earrings, and an oval blue brooch on her chest. She wears long white opera gloves and red high-heels. Her dress is far more elaborately designed in recent ''Super Smash Bros.'' titles, but is otherwise the same; the ''Super Smash Bros.'' games have also given her minor proportion changes such as the size of her head and the thickness of her eyelashes.

Early in her history, while Peach did speak, it was largely done via text dialogue. It was not until ''Mario is Missing'' where Peach got some dialogue, and it would not be until ''Super Mario 64'' onward that she maintained having voiced dialogue. In ''Super Mario 64'' and the international versions of ''Mario Kart 64'', she largely spoke with a mature, feminine tone, though in the Japanese version of ''Mario Kart 64'' as well as all versions of ''Mario Party'', ''2'', and ''3'', and ''Super Mario Advance'', Peach spoke with a slightly higher-pitched, somewhat shrill tone, and also possessing a slight Italian accent in the case of the last game. Starting with ''Super Smash Bros. Melee'' and ''Super Mario Sunshine'', she was given a very soft, high-pitched voice. In the Japanese versions of certain games, such as ''[[Itadaki Street DS]]'' and ''[[Fortune Street]]'', Peach tends to end her sentences with "ですわ" (desu wa), a stereotypical trait in Japanese media reserved for noble upper-class women and even simply haughty and arrogant women.

Like other ''Super Mario'' characters, Peach can [[Jump]] and [[Ground Pound]]; she also slaps opponents, which is her specialty, rather than [[punch]]ing. While not very strong physically, she makes up for it in technique and skill, and many games reveal her to be fast and agile as well. She is also shown to be very graceful, often embellishing attacks and victory scenes alike with elegant movements, twirls, and dances. With the release of ''Super Mario 3D World'', Peach is able to use power-ups, such as the [[Fire Flower]], [[Super Leaf]], [[Super Bell]], and [[Double Cherry]], among other power-ups and items. She also has the unique ability to [[Floating Jump|float in mid-air]] by means of her skirt, first seen in ''Super Mario Bros. 2'', and can also use [[Peach's Parasol|her parasol]] to achieve this same effect. This ability returns in ''Super Mario 3D World'' and the ''Super Smash Bros.'' series; in the former, it is also revealed that Peach can still glide even when she doesn't have a skirt on. In ''New Super Mario Bros.'', ''New Super Mario Bros. Wii'', and ''New Super Mario Bros. 2'', she is also shown to slow down her descent from a fairly large height.