Is There a Vibrator Joke in Super Princess Peach?
I can probably guess what you’re thinking. You saw the headline for this post and assumed that this was a desperate ploy for clicks. And you may be correct, but also there was enough of a mystery here that I decided to write about whether the plot of Super Princess Peach might revolve around a sex joke.
The below video brought this matter to my attention.
Released in 2005 for the Nintendo DS, it’s the first Nintendo game to have Peach as the main playable character — and for my money, it’s the only good one. Sure, the game was marred by the decision to forefront Peach’s rapidly changing emotions as a central gameplay feature, undercutting any feminist cred the game could have had. But Super Princess Peach looked good and played decently, at least. It was too easy — and that’s a little insulting, if you think of it as a game that was marketed to female gamers — but it had the feel like a Super Mario-style adventure that just happened to star the character who was more often the damsel in distress.
Apparently, Super Princess Peach didn’t sell well enough to warrant a proper follow-up, and most of the elements introduced in this game didn’t show up again. The weaponization of Peach’s emotions did not become part of Peach’s moveset in Smash Bros., for example. But we’ve also yet to reencouter Perry the sentient parasol, the setting of Vibe Island and the item at the center of the game’s plot:the Vibe Scepter, a magic wand that can be used to control emotions and that was stolen by Bowser. When Peach defeats Bowser in the final battle, the Vibe Scepter goes flying off into the distance, apparently lost forever. But as Peach and her friends are returning home to her castle, an epilogue predicts that perhaps this mystical artifact has ended up in the home of the person playing this very video game.
That vaguely ominous-sounding epilogue:
One thing about that scepter: no one knows who created it or why but…
Somewhere, someone might be possibly using it right now…
…What?
Your dad got mad at you the other day, you say?
Your mom’s been laughing happily a lot
Maybe… just maybe… the Vibe Scepter is hiding away in your house somewhere…
As the topmost video points out, the wording seems to be hinting at something that the video game doesn’t want to come out and say. And per this one particular reading, tha\t thing is that your dad has been upset lately even though your mom has been in an unusually good mood — and both of these circumstances could be explained by the fact that your mom has been using the Vibe Scepter as a marital aid.
I know, I know. Just reading that now, it seems like the creator of the video might be taking a bit of a logical leap, but part of his reasoning has to do with the name and shape of the artifact in question. It’s called the Vibe Scepter, after all, and sometimes even just the Vibe Wand — either of which sound like they might be marketing names for some kind of device used for sexual stimulation. To be clear, Super Princess Peach is using the word vibe as a synonym for “emotion.” It’s vibration in the groovy, far out hippie sense and not in the sense of a thing that’s literally vibrating, but you have to admit the semantic distance between these two meanings is not all that far.
Obviously, I had to email Fatimah, but please know that I did so with the subject line, “I already regret asking you to research this” — not because Fatimah is a prude but more because I, as a gay man, am sometimes discuss sexual matters a little more frankly than, say, straight men do ever or women are used to doing with men regardless of their sexuality. Fatimah was a trooper regardless, and responded by explaining that the Japanese version of the ending describes the emotional state of the player’s house slightly differently, with the dad being angry but the mom being sad. Fatimah: “So the English makes it sound like the mom is making do without her husband and he’s mad about it. The Japanese makes it sound like their emotions are just a mess. The English sounds like the mom is using the Vibe Scepter while the Japanese sounds like it's in the house and affecting their moods.”
What’s more, the original Japanese name of the Vibe Scepter does not seem like it’s describing a personal massage device at all. It’s キド・アイラックのつえ or Kido Airakku no tsue, more or less meaning the wand or staff of Vibe Island. More specifically, the Japanese name of the game’s setting is a play on the words 喜 or ki (“joy”), 怒 or do (“anger”), 哀 or āi (“sorrow) and 楽 or raku (“ease”), which are the four emotional states Peach has in the game. (The English version translates the fourth one as calm, FYI.) But this means the whole concept of vibes only becomes part of Super Princess Peach in the English localization. With that considered, it feels pretty safe to say that none of these sex toy implications were present in the Japanese version of the game.
So the next question is this: Was someone who worked for Nintendo being a bit cheeky in tweaking the localized English version of the game in a way that could be read as a joke about vibrators? Or is this all in our heads, because Nintendo simply wouldn’t do something like this?
As a lifelong Nintendo customer, I’m inclined to say the latter is more likely, but as the video points out, this is not the only time that something of this nature has been connected with Princess Peach. In the original Super Mario RPG, released in 1996, there’s a cut scene that involves discovering an object in Peach’s bedroom that she is embarrassed about. The item in question is not seen and is referred to in English as “Peach’s ???” and in Japanese as ピーチのＸＸＸ or Pīchi no XXX.
While a lot of people online theorize that this item is a vibrator or some other sort of sex toy, I say it’s impossible to tell what we’re supposed to think it is. It’s clearly something Peach doesn’t want Mario knowing about. But if you examine the hiding spot before Peach is returned to the castle, Peach’s maid will take it from Mario in exchange for a healing mushroom. And I feel like a sex toy is probably something Peach would also keep secret from her household staff, so maybe this mystery object is actually a little more PG-13 — say, a diary or underwear or something. Whatever it is, I don’t think there’s enough evidence in the game to tell for sure. But I suppose it’s possible that the person responsible for the apparent double entendre in Super Princess Peach might have been aware of how this scene in Super Mario RPG was read and decided to go further with the joke.
The weird thing about all this is that the Super Mario RPG scene kinda sorta has a sequel in which it is implied that a similar mystery object offers proof of gender. If you’ll recall from my big post on the history of Birdo’s gender, the 2008 Wii game Captain Rainbow takes place on an island inhabited by various B- and C-tier Nintendo characters, including Birdo. One of Birdo’s plotlines involves her being arrested for using the women’s bathroom, and the player character has to go into her home and retrieve an item that proves she is not male. When you check under Birdo’s pillow, you find an object that is only represented by a question mark and referred to as オンナの証 or onna no akashi, “proof of womanhood.”
Because this object can be heard making a vibration noise the entire time you’re exploring Birdo’s house and only stops once you’ve retrieved it from under the pillow, most people read the object in question as a vibrator. I will admit that Birdo owning a vibrator doesn’t necessarily prove her gender one way or the other, but the entire game runs of wacky, dream-like logic and for the residents of this island, Birdo’s ??? seems like proof enough.
I’m not sure that Nintendo putting a fairly explicit vibrator joke in Captain Rainbow makes it more or less likely that they would try doing it several years earlier in Super Princess Peach or Super Mario RPG. Birdo gets treated like a joke character in ways that Peach almost never does, after all. I almost read the Captain Rainbow sequence as one that riffs the Super Mario RPG scene in a way that makes it explicitly sexual because it’s not Peach; they can get away with Birdo because she’s not as famous, as demure or as representative of Nintendo as a company. But it least is territory Nintendo is willing to explore, at least in games that are targeted at an older demographic. Super Princess Peach definitely was not intended for older players, however.
But if whoever did the English localization managed to sneak in a vibrator joke? That’s actually pretty funny. And if it was done innocently, and no one caught it until people started picking up on it online? That is infinitely funnier.
Miscellaneous Notes
This is not a Mario blog, and I promise I will write about non-Super Mario stuff soon. The combination of the new movie coming out, various podcast appearances that resulted from the movie and this large Mario-related project I’m trying to finish up mean this is just where my mind has been lately, but I promise I will open up the scope of this blog before too long.
I was going to write up how the backstory of Perry, the umbrella buddy in Super Princess Peach, is actually weird and dark, with an implication that he’s actually a dead child trapped in this form in a way that the plot never resolves, but I realize that I actually wrote about that already in the miscellaneous notes to this post. Still pretty weird, when you think about it.
Have you got more suggestions for off-color or seemingly off-color jokes in Nintendo games? Because I really do enjoy writing about this. I’m thinking of this one as the third entry in a series that began with “Is Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga One Big Fart Joke?” and which was followed up by “Is There a Sex Joke Hidden in Plain Sight in Zelda II?” More, I say.