You ever wake up and think it’ll be a normal day only to discover that literally everything you thought you knew about reality is wrong? That’s what happened to me today when I woke up, sat down to work, and then read a post stating that Mario and Peach are apparently “good friends” as opposed to, I dunno, anything else I might have thought they were to one another.
“Princess Peach and Mario are good friends and help each other out whenever they can.”
Via: Nintendo Today app. pic.twitter.com/IsyQqe2KLz
— Kābī (@KirPinkFury) July 23, 2025
This aggravating discovery comes from the Nintendo Today app. The post that originally included this information is now gone due to the app’s regularly updating, but has since been preserved in several spots including by Twitter user @KirPinkFury, who originally surfaced it online. The post, which was a profile on Princess Peach, included the sentence, “Princess Peach and Mario are good friends and help each other out whenever they can.” Good friends, you say? What about all those times they definitely smooched?
“Look,” you might say, “they could be good friends and in a relationship. It’s important to be friends with the person you love also.” Sure, you’re correct. But who’s describing a relationship like that? I don’t go around referring to my husband as my “good friend”. That would probably confuse several people, including him! The only conclusion I can come to here is that Nintendo is trying to distance Mario and Peach from the previous very, very, very direct ways in which it indicated they were, at minimum, romantically interested.
Nintendo admittedly has been deeply inconsistent about this over the years. Peach has been referred to as Mario’s “special someone,” they’ve been shown on multiple occasions to have some level of romantic interest in one another. Nintendo’s Yoshiaki Koizumi has directly said in an interview before that Mario “carries a torch” for Peach. Nintendo celebrated them as a romantic couple, pink hearts and all, for Valentine’s Day at least once. And Mario even tried to propose to her at the end of Super Mario Odyssey. Though she refused at the time, she had also just gone through a wild ordeal with Bowser where he tried to kidnap her and force her into marrying him. If I had just been kidnapped into an attempted forced marriage and then rescued and my boyfriend tried to propose to me the second I was rescued, I’d probably tell him to take a hike too.
But whatever! I guess they’re just friends or something. Just like Link and Zelda, two characters who live together and definitely sleep in the same bed. Next they’re going to try and tell me there’s nothing going on between all those people in Fire Emblem.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
