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Fumihide Aoki, the character designer who brought us the legendary Waluigi, has dropped a bombshell on the gaming world today. Aoki designed Wapeach for 2004's Mario Power Tennis and now, two decades later, he's revealing those designs to the world.
Aoki shared several images of his Wapeach design on Instagram, including a handful of sketches and even a few renders showcasing what the character might've looked like in-game. She's short, childlike, clad in a purple dress, and occasionally trades her tennis racket for a giant ax. Maybe the weirdest part is how much she looks like a much younger version of Bowsette - a fanart meme who wouldn't be invented until many, many years later.
If you check the comments on these Instagram posts, Aoki has been quite responsive to questions, offering quite a bit of insight into the character's design. Apparently Wapeach was considered for Mario Tennis on N64 - the game where Waluigi first appeared - but didn't get this visual design until the development of Mario Power Tennis on GameCube.
"What I was thinking about in her setting is that she sees Peach as her rival," Aoki says. "She treats Wario and Waluigi like her minions. She has a scary personality when she gets angry." He adds, "I thought about it as a child. I thought it would be interesting to combine Wario and Waluigi to create a gap."
Aoki says his memories of the design process are a bit fuzzy these days, but he's pretty sure Wapeach was cut because "there were no characters to pair with." But he also suspects that "the concept of an evil version of Peach itself may not be acceptable" within Nintendo's halls.
An interview earlier this year suggested that Shigeru Miyamoto himself shot down the idea of Wapeach, suggesting that she'd be too similar to Doronjo, a villain from the '70s anime series Yatterman.
How can we look at the best Mario games the same now that we know what we've lost?
