This is so transparently a "we don't want to release anything big before our next console so let's make something cheap but kinda pretty in a year" game that I'm surprised there's anyone defending or genuinely enjoying it.

An immediate instinct might be to compare it to the latest Yoshi games, and I mean, yeah - both Showtime(!) and Woolie/Crafted World are ostensibly kids' games and are even made by the same developer. Both are kinda small, easy, chill experiences for da babies.

But the obvious difference is that the Yoshi games had...things? Impessive and creative visuals, solid gameplay, memorable music and/or set-pieces? Something? While Showtime(!) has, what, cool costumes for Peach to wear?

This is not a bad idea for a game, or even a Peach game, it's just that for the level of variety this one tries for, you need the various themes and levels to be distinct. Instead, half play the exact same with minor aesthetic differences that don't do enough to make you feel like you're even playing functionally different levels, let alone doing different "plays". Every theme is surface level and boring, to the point that I struggle to imagine myself be engaged by this even if I was 4 years old again.

The play performances thing was also super underdeveloped, with unclear rules or motivations for...anyone, really. I guess Peach is doing magical stage plays in a magical theatre where you need to follow the story to make things progress, but then what is that villian? Who are the henchmen? The bosses?

I'm not asking for the antagonist to have a deep backstory and complex motives for fucking things up, I'm asking for anything to engage with. And since all the narrative or audio-visual stuff is just plain dull, the gameplay is left to fend for itself. And it ain't doing good. That's cause, like I said, most levels basically play the same: you have a few minutes of dull-looking beat-em-up gameplay, then either the beat-em-up'ing continues and culminates with a "chase" scene, or you do some level-specific minigame that's impossible to lose. The only deviation from this, really, is the Boss levels, which are mostly pretty boring too. Just the standard "do a thing three times, but it's a bit harder each time", only I don't know who would struggle with this stuff besides literal 2 year-olds.

There are some other annoyances and gripes I have with Showtime (!), like how almost all of the few different transformations get repeated at least once, and never with any meaningfull new mechanics or twists, how Nintendo literally didn't tell us who was making this until it got leaked with the demo (maybe so we don't discover it's the Kirby's Epic Yarn guys and that this is a toddler game), or how this is clearly a cash-grab made in a year instead of a genuine attempt to make a good spin-off. But most of all, it just sucks that Nintendo keeps insisting on throwing together shitty barebones spinoffs into empty release windows instead of just making cool games that aren't their flagships.

Good thing I didn't buy it!

Has some cool ideas, but is so cheap it hurts. It especially becomes apparent with the dub and the different localization options, where the dub is inconsistent and feels like it was done remotely and with little direction, and the localizations lack quality assurance. There are some confusing things that have to do with how quests work, and fights feel like a cakewalk or an impossibility sometimes, but the cheapness really is the biggest issue. This team might've bit off more than they could chew. Or I'm just stupid and impatient idunno

A few missions in, this feels...wrong. On a few levels.

Mainly, the fighting mechanics feel unfinished: I've yet to encounter a single enemy type that would give me any grief if I just continue wailing on them, and dodging or parrying is strictly useless. There are a few combos you can input, but their effect feels homogenous, and doing them seems pointless, in part because the style system doesn't seem to understand what made Devil May Cry special. There it feels 1-1 with your actions: many cool and varied moves = good, a few repetitive moves = bad. Your rank changes every other second in direct response to your gameplay, and, especially in DMC 5, it feels good to maintain a high rank. In Slave Zero X, I can't figure out what even effects rating, because the only thing that I can always reference is the combo counter, which depletes WAY too quickly. Other than that, I'm not sure what's so different between my E-rated battles and my S-rated ones (the only two ratings I managed to get).

The second big "wtf" thing is the story. I don't know if I'm dumb, or shoud've beaten the game, or listened more closely to radio chatter, but I'm not sure this narrative makes sense. After a scene where two Guys talk about Things You Don't Know About and then Do Things You Don't Understand, you just take control of this guy with his sentient exo-sceleton acting as comic relief. The game doesn't try to establish...anything, really? All dialogue feels like exposition, and yet nothing is stated concretely. I almost felt like my (admitedly pirated) version was fucked up, until I looked up some playthroughs and no. It's just incomprehensible.

Looks good, doesn't work.