If you’re anything like me, you probably came across Peachy Derby  purely by chance, and then got drawn in by a lot of boxes being ticked without comprehending what it all meant. Derby in the title, making you think of the Pretty Derby games/horse dating simulation. Very specific anime poses of the characters on the iconography. Promises of Japanese voices and character models. And yes, some random snapshots of the sprites in swimsuits that raised an eyebrow as to the full intent of the game. More importantly, the promise of this being both a racing game and a JRPG, which could spell fun and excitement! As bizarre as everything seemed, it felt like it was worth taking a swing on Peachy Derby.

The storyline is a bit threadbare and nonsensical, so please bear with me. Natsuki is a ninja girl in training who also happens to be narcoleptic. She is in debt to the demon horned Mephisto and needs to pay that money back ASAP. There’s a ninja tournament race…thing, and the grand prize happens to be exactly how much Natsuki needs to raise! So she makes friends with a bunch of other ninja girls who all have their quirks (eating all the time, owning a gun for reasons) and races against other ninja girls with quirks (a faceless nun, a literal homunculus), and we’re off and going with no further explanation needed. Or given. Even though it says “sixteen chapters” in terms of story, that translates to “sixteen races with exposition at the beginning and end,” so you can knock out the story in about forty five minutes.

World’s fastest. Out of only eight contestants. And one of them is clearly an Egyptian Goddess. got it.

For Peachy Derby, you’ve got a racing game that, sadly, is single player, so that automatically removes some of the fun right away. From Story Mode to Bounty Mode (a post story unlock mode), you race against anywhere from one to seven other characters. The general controls are straightforward: you’ve got a run button, a slow down/run backwards button (which I never use), the ability to drift and the ability to pick up different powerup attacks. Drifting recharges a dash meter that you can have two charges of, using an item often triggers a dash, and leaping after hitting a speed booster can also, bingo, make a dash. Story Mode has you do multiple laps to determine the winner, whereas Bounty Mode is four tracks with a single lap each. Run, drift and leap your way to the finish.

There’s a lot to be said for Peachy Derby if you’re willing to dig into the details of it all. For one, there appear to be hundreds of lines of Japanese dialogue for six of the racers, and you’re able to hear all of them through the Lounge Mode (more on that in a moment). While it might seem like a minor detail, the fact that Cattingames made a point to have individual, unique lines for all the different iterations of how a character might react during a race – excited, hurt, weirded out – is quite a level of world building to inject into what is ultimately a very repetitive and short game. The voices, though, do not actually read out the totality of the exchanges during the Story Mode, but are utterances and short blurbs that match the sentiment of what a character is saying.

Awww, why didn’t you say so instead of trying to make us indentured servants? Come here, you!

The story itself is a fun one, full of unrepentant silliness that doesn’t always pay off, but it’s charming anyways. There’s a subplot about superpowers that makes no sense, but is there because why not? You’ve got all these odd characters who don’t add anything to the game other than to be strange. The power of friendship brings us all together in the end, and I’m pretty sure it’s meant to be farcical, yet I’m genuinely not sure. It’s interesting, but not necessarily well written, and it can get tiresome a bit quickly. In that same manner, you’ve got stuff that never pays off. Like Natsuki saying the Mystic Nun feels familiar, but no explanation ever as to how or why. The game also can’t decide if the character is a Masked Nun or Mystic Nun, which is just a QA confusion point.

Moreover, the design depth in Peachy Derby is pretty decent. You’ve got several tracks with decidedly different course directions and placement for ramps, hazards and items. The items all have their own advantages to the races, though the shuriken and invincibility tornado are arguably the best thanks to the impact they have on you versus what they do to the competition. While the initial AI for both Story Mode and Bounty Mode is fairly simple and even purposely bad, it really gets quite cutthroat the further along you get. If you play through enough Bounty Mode to reach the second season, you’ll find yourself fighting for your life along the course. If you make a misstep and hit a laser, smack a wall or get felled by an enemy’s attack at the wrong time, you’ll swiftly drop to last place.

The flying Takoyaki sisters!

But some of the difficulty of Peachy Derby stems from the execution, not necessarily the intent. For example, if you get struck by a projectile while moving up a ramp, there’s a chance you’ll get stuck in the terrain for a moment, which is not intended to happen. If an explosion occurs when you’re in the middle of a drift, you may be trapped in the crouching position for another few seconds, wasting valuable time. Even as a Switch game, Peachy Derby appears to have a few bugs in it that make for frustrating moments of delay and even failure that aren’t as the game intended, just what happens to happen. 

Additionally, once you finish story mode, all that’s left is Bounty Mode, which is an ever increasingly difficult race circuit to unlock different perks for the Lounge Mode. Lounge Mode is where you have the characters chilling in front of a waterfall and gradually harvesting coins. The coins harvested are important to unlocking Mephisto as a viewable character in the Lounge, as a mishap in Story Mode prevents you from fully paying off your debt. You have to have the game running for ten real time minutes to reach the next harvest, in any section of the game. So you can either stare at the characters as you cycle through different voices, poses and dances (which you unlock from Bounty Mode) or you can go race. Racing will also grant you coins, so why not?

Ah, the thrill of dancing with your friends in front of a waterfall while your mom waits on a bench.

Peachy Derby has a singular end point of unlocking the part where everyone is in their swimsuits so you can pose them around, watch them emote and move the camera in a very Senran Kagura motif. The only way to do this is to grind, for hours, by both Bounty Mode racing (to get all the aforementioned emotes and voices) and to continually check into the Lounge, because you’ll get tens of thousands of coins every ten minutes. But Mephisto demands ten million coins, so, if your goal is to get the horned character swaying in a bikini, you’ve got a long and boring road ahead. Which I guess begs the question: how much time are YOU willing to invest in trying to see a CGI character in ocean appropriate underwear?

But, I mean, top shelf interactions.

Peachy Derby is fun, short and has its moments, however brief they may be. The target audience will impulsively pick this up when the time is right, but I don’t think it’s anything that will keep you invested after the story mode is over. The DLC outfits have some stat advantages, but I don’t feel like dropping cash to still get stuck in walls when the game freaks out. The Workshop option for the Steam version makes for better longevity, but, for obvious reasons, the Switch won’t let you access the homemade costumes. In short, pick up this Happy Meal for a quick bite and a fun toy, but don’t think it’ll tide you over any longer than your average snack.

Peachy Derby is available now on PC and Nintendo Switch.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

A copy of Peachy Derby was provided by the publisher.