Unpopular opinions about the Mario series

Playable?

You ain't giving these guys a Yoshi moveset, nope!
 
It wouldn't be much of a difference because both are capable of some of the worst noises known to Shroomkind.
 
Noises don't make you who you are, LGM.

Which in this situation is a bad fact to bring up.
 
Roll and Maria Renard said:
Peach is not completely useless.

I am honest with it. Peach may look like a shit character most of the time, but she's not all that shit once you consider SMB2USA, Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, her own game, Super Mario 3D World, Super Mario Run, and Mario + Rabbids into consideration. Her floating in SMB2 along with her slight slowness makes World 4 in SMB2 a complete non-issue. Man are Ice Levels difficult without Peach. She makes those a complete non-issue as well. She should get some love for that.
I mean yeah she appears to be defenseless and doesn't do much outside of baking cakes, and getting kidnapped. But when she's playable she's awesome. She's not all that bad. Granted I am tired of Peach being depicted as a mostly useless character 90% of the time and I want Nintendo to have her be playable and get better security. I also want Peach to be able to fight more often like she does in her own game and Super Mario 3D World, that would be a way to not make her look completely useless and even let people like her more. I mean a lot of people love to hate Peach as character for this reason and say she sucks and that her looks are the only good things about her.
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Here's my unpopular take on this opinion: why does Peach need to be super combative to be considered useful?

She has something really cool going for her that other characters don't, which is her purity, her connection to the stars, and magic that she's clearly able to wield that other characters cannot. It would be interesting if, instead of simply making her have the same moveset as everyone else + float, that got explored in some way. Super Princess Peach attempted this, but mainly relied on the cliché to diversify her moveset rather than focusing on her star connection. Hell, what would be interesting for Peach is actually what Mario + Rabbids did to her, which was make her a healing tank. Granted, I wouldn't say that was her most useful appearance; Luigi is more useful than her in 90% of situations and thus I barely use her (you can't use both in one team, unfortunately; if you could, that would make Peach's utility skyrocket as she is undeniably the best healer in the game), but I think it certainly could at least give her a sort of identity, and one that would set her apart from Daisy as well (who's more of a brutish hard-hitter), since Rosalina has gotten enough combative diversifying treatment of her own.

I think that's my central problem with Peach. I don't mind her getting kidnapped, if I'm honest with you. My problem lies in the fact that Peach as of now doesn't really get much of an identity outside of being a dainty princess, and the few times she does, it's to emphasize her 'secret temper' as if we haven't seen that a million times (cough Super Princess Peach). This is probably what leads to people growing tired of her perceived 'uselessness'; it's not that she actually is, it's that she really doesn't stand out next to the other two princesses who have a really clear identity going on with their personalities and abilities.
 
The problem with her "Star Powers" and Magic is that they are more Fanon then anything else. They're often used in one game for plot convenience before being thrown away, yet fans cling onto this stuff as if it's an all important defining trait of the character when it really isn't. Her uselessness comes from the fact that most of this stuff just isn't important enough to people who aren't super hardcore fans of the Mario series, and I think fans just need to let go of some minor detail that rarely ever gets referenced.
 
王馬 小吉 said:
Here's my unpopular take on this opinion: why does Peach need to be super combative to be considered useful?
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I think because outside of physical utility, Mario characters in general don't have defining qualities, hence why that's a barometer for Peach's usefulness. You're not going to see Peach influence Mario's emotional developments in the storyline.
 
But in Super Princess Peach, note that everyone has emotional powers, not just Peach, and Peach is the one who can actually control them. So in a way, it's a nice spin on the sexist cliche of emotional women.
 
王馬 小吉 said:
she really doesn't stand out next to the other two princesses who have a really clear identity going on with their personalities and abilities.
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Rosalina I get but Daisy? Daisy's got even less going on for her than Peach does.
 
Putt-Putt said:
The problem with her "Star Powers" and Magic is that they are more Fanon then anything else. They're often used in one game for plot convenience before being thrown away, yet fans cling onto this stuff as if it's an all important defining trait of the character when it really isn't. Her uselessness comes from the fact that most of this stuff just isn't important enough to people who aren't super hardcore fans of the Mario series, and I think fans just need to let go of some minor detail that rarely ever gets referenced.
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She does use magic, she just never does it for anything useful.
Why else does she just float down from her cage every time she gets rescued in the more recent games?
 
Mcmadness said:
Rosalina I get but Daisy? Daisy's got even less going on for her than Peach does.
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She has consistency, for one thing. We know definitively what kind of person she is outside of her princesshood; we know that she likes sports, that she's super competitive, and that she could totally punch Bowser in the face (and has). She also has a very obvious flower motif that has stayed the same for a long time.

Daisy has fewer appearances than Peach and has been underutilized, but even then her character is far more blatantly obvious than Peach's.

To be fair, it's true that her identity got watered down a little when they changed her design and I still wish Nintendo hadn't done that. Even so, everyone recognizes Daisy as that loud, obnoxious one, and while such traits are negative they're still very overt traits. Peach, on the other hand, is commonly described as that one who gets kidnapped - she's not described by anything in her personality but what is done to her.

Luigi actually used to have a similar problem to Peach in that he was just "Mario's brother", or "the palette swap", but he started getting more and more of an identity and a personality base that separated him from Mario.

Saltman said:
Whenever people say Waluigi is a Wario/Luigi clone or that he has nothing going on for him, I look at Daisy.
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The problem with Waluigi is a good amount of his ambitions and motivations are defined by Luigi. The centralizing factor for his character, as even cited on the wiki itself, is his self-pity, which is generated by the amount of attention/good fortune that Luigi receives. In a way, Waluigi is trapping himself within Luigi's shadow. While it's true that Wario is a rival to Mario, Wario has other things that define him that don't relate to Mario himself at all, which makes him stand out more.

That being said, I wouldn't really argue that Waluigi has no character. He and Daisy are similar in that respect, actually - they have something that separately defines them, but because of their underutility it isn't as noticeable as, say, Wario or Rosalina.
 
"she likes sports" is about all I can say about Daisy.

But when everyone and their mother (or father) in this series plays sports that's not really saying much of anything.
 
Saltman said:
Whenever people say Waluigi is a Wario/Luigi clone or that he has nothing going on for him, I look at Daisy.
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So what about Daisy? Just because he looks good in comparison to Daisy doesn't mean he's not a clone. I wouldn't say Waluigi is a clone either, but "but Daisy" isn't a rational comeback.
 
He looks as similar to Wario as Mario does to Luigi. Daisy meanwhile almost looks like a palette swap if take off her hair.

Waluigi also has his whole fabolousness and dance gimmicks and he's A LOT more of a loser (yeah I don't hate this) than Green Mayro. I find these traits more tolerable and unique than Daisy's screams.
 
Of course he's a A LOT more of a loser than me.... HEY.

But it's not really Daisy's fault that she's so similar to Peach? Rosalina for instance. I just think what they do matters a little more, and Daisy was never really given that chance to do more.

BTW I like Daisy's yelling, it always makes a Mario game feel a little bit rowdier and hectic, but maybe I just like her "NOOOOO!!" from Mario Party that has been reused in Smash Ultimate as a Star KO.
 
Mcmadness said:
"she likes sports" is about all I can say about Daisy.

But when everyone and their mother (or father) in this series plays sports that's not really saying much of anything.
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She doesn't just like them, she's aggressively competitive even compared to the other characters. And I already mentioned the floral motif. I also mentioned her being loud and boisterous, and yes, a lot of the others make typical yippees too but there's a reason Daisy gets memes around hers.

She is, by all accounts, the purest definition of a tomboy, and a loud and brash one at that.

That's still more than you could say for Peach, by the way. Other than she's a princess who gets kidnapped but you can say that about any of the princesses. The "more going for her" is simply that she's in more games. And that she did that thing in Odyssey, which everyone acts is revolutionary and not simply keeping the status quo. A woman showing basic human emotion of being fed up in a video game does not a huge drastic leap in character make.

Daisy's problem is that she isn't in more games. Her character already has more than enough foundation that she could hold her own if she was given a game. Peach's problem is far, far deeper than that.
 
I don't really see how Daisy is more or less competitive than other players. The most I can take away from Daisy is that she's energetic, very enthusiastic, feisty, casual, and loud. But more aggressive and competitive? Not really, doesn't stand out from the rest, and I don't think there's a single character in the Mario sports that I'd deem more competitive, takes the competition very seriously.

I don't think she's really a tomboy either. She's too girly to be one. Flowers? Smooching? Winking? They're girly actions.
 
All Mario characters are aggressively competitive in sports. Have you seen half the shit they do to each other?

And Peach's personality is that she's the prim and proper princess. She's well spoken, she's polite, likes girlish things. All that junk.

The fact that I can say Peach likes to drink tea is more than anything I can say for Daisy.
 
Mario Party X said:
I don't think she's really a tomboy either. She's too girly to be one. Flowers? Smooching? Winking? They're girly actions.
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I keep saying this. She is more tomboyish than Peach. That doesn't mean she's full-on tomboy. It doesn't mean that she's not allowed a number of stereotypically girly qualities. Heck "more" can even be relative.
 
Mcmadness said:
All Mario characters are aggressively competitive in sports. Have you seen half the shit they do to each other?

And Peach's personality is that she's the prim and proper princess. She's well spoken, she's polite, likes girlish things. All that junk.

The fact that I can say Peach likes to drink tea is more than anything I can say for Daisy.
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Of course I have. To be fair, though, LGM did describe what I was getting at a bit better than I did.

I don't really think liking to drink tea is that earth-shattering a trait... And yes, it's true, Peach is very stereotypically feminine, of that I'm not contesting. I just think that there should be, you know, more established about her. In fact, this has gone pretty far off the point I was trying to make... If anything, her being feminine is something I encourage. Someone else was saying that Peach should go right into combat in order to stand out, and I was disagreeing that that was the way to do it when they've technically already done that before with Daisy.

I'd like it if those traits that you just described did anything more than be superficial traits that are just there to be a template for a personality. Be incorporated within her identity in some way, or something that she actually does outside of baking a cake at the end. If they want to talk about her being this serious, proper princess, then perhaps explore that more. I already said I liked her being a healing tank in Mario + Rabbids. Going more in that direction is something I think could greatly benefit her.

Odyssey is actually a good example of what I'm talking about on this. Peach has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to float even in mainstream titles and yet she doesn't think to do that any time she's on the ship with Bowser?

Snow J said:
Mario Party X said:
I don't think she's really a tomboy either. She's too girly to be one. Flowers? Smooching? Winking? They're girly actions.
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I keep saying this. She is more tomboyish than Peach. That doesn't mean she's full-on tomboy. It doesn't mean that she's not allowed a number of stereotypically girly qualities. Heck "more" can even be relative.
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I don't think I ever suggested that she's not permitted girly traits. A tomboy isn't a girl devoid of girly traits, a tomboy is a girl whose general disposition is more masculine (being loud and boisterous is not typically considered feminine personality traits). But I suppose you have a point that the other characters exhibit some similar traits in sports games.
 
I don't associate being loud and boisterous as exactly traditional masculine traits either. Daisy doesn't exhibit much masculine traits to begin with. She is a girl, very. J does have a point in saying that Daisy is "more" of tomboyish, but I think that's a little pedantic, but it's probably more accurate to describe her.

王馬 小吉 said:
Odyssey is actually a good example of what I'm talking about on this. Peach has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to float even in mainstream titles and yet she doesn't think to do that any time she's on the ship with Bowser?
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Welll, uh, it's best not to think about continuity. You could've asked the same question in Super Mario Galaxy. Peach helplessly stares at the ground when her castle is being slowly lifted up. Oh, and in New Super Mario Bros.. Did I also mention that falling damage doesn't even exist in those games?
 
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