Angel_Arle Sailor Moon reviews
Part 2: Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon for Super Famicom & Mega Drive
Part 3: Nakayoshi to Issho for Famicom
Part 4: Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon R for Super Famicom
Part 5: Welcome Nakayoshi Park for GB

I've always wanted to go and review every Sailor Moon game I can. If you don't know, I love Sailor Moon and it's one of the many great Magical Girl series out there. It was my first anime and I've been a fan since 2015. Wow was it really that long...but yeah you may know that I reviewed this game so long ago. I decided to remove it and give it a better one. A lot of my old reviews are very sloppy. I wanna sit down and go over every Sailor Moon game I can do. Some will get new reviews, some will get reviews for the first time from me and some are ones I'll be playing for the first time in general. Let's start with this game on the Game Boy.

So this was the very first game, for some reason this site mislabels the date. This actually came out in 1992 on December 18th. The anime was still airing at this point and this one was developed by...umm developed by...hmm.. (checks notes) actually I don't know. The game doesn't actually credit anyone. The closest we really have to a developer is maybe Angel? They were a subsidiary of Bandai. Their logo is in the bottom right corner and they did mention this game in an interview in a strategy guide for the Super Famicom game and they were the ones to develop the GB sequel. But one thing you might go and say is "But Angel_Arle, it says Arc System Works worked on this game!" honestly I don't believe that. There is actually no proof from many places I've tried checking. In fact the one source for this claim was a random online article in a different language no less claiming it was them with no evidence of their own. Anyway enough about that. We got a game here and does it succeed? Well you probably know the answer.

This game is rather interesting when it comes to gameplay. It's not just a stage by stage action game. This game tries to recreate what the Anime does and have you start levels as Usagi living her normal day life and by the end you'll be doing action stages as her transformed called Sailor Moon. It's a rather novel idea trying to make it like the Anime. It even represents a couple of the very early episodes of the series albeit in a very short contained way of doing them.

When it comes to the first half of levels it starts out rather interesting, you can see a couple of notable characters like Umino and Naru and there's some things to do. You can play a Sailor V minigame in this level which is very easy to do and you sadly get nothing for it. You can even go to this fortune teller which I'm guessing is in reference to Episode 2. Progressing through the level isn't really hard either. It's a fun way of integrating the world of the show into a small contained world. Sadly this is the only one that feels this way.

The next 2 involve the school and the fitness place Usagi went to for an episode to hopefully lose weight. Oddly the school level is odd for what episode it's meant to represent. Correct me if I'm wrong here but I'm pretty sure the Youma you fight here was from EP 6 which involved her having to go sabotage stuff at the recording company to steal energy but she's just now here in the broadcast room in the school? I don't really understand. Sadly the school itself is hard to navigate at least for me it always has been and you'll begin to realize a lot of the NPCs are the same and none of the small activities you did in the first one are here. The fitness place is also just way too linear and just consists of nothing but talking to the same people once again. There's not even a 4th one for the final level but now let's talk about those parts.

Once you transform you'll be punishing any enemies involve by doing...a kick. Yeah Sailor Moon kicks enemies. Ok I'll give the team the benefit of the doubt, maybe it's a reference to how Usagi did a Sailor V kick in the first episode even if she wasn't Sailor Moon in that scene. It's not a bad kick though sometimes it doesn't want to register for me. If you hold down then you can cry which can break stuff that hold a pen (I think its the transformation pen?) that gives invincibility, a clock that stops enemies from moving, a 1-up, and a pendant that let's Sailor Moon use her iconic move Moon Tiara Action. You'll be going to the right of each section till you meet with the boss for the level and once you defeat it, the level is over obviously.

When you start the game the way it determines the difficulty is through a boy and girl difficulty. Boy gives you 4 HP max and 3 lives while Girl gives you 6 HP max and 5 lives. I'm not really sure why they did it this way. The game is pretty easy for the most part anyway. Sadly the action stages are pretty bad. They are all complete straight lines, it actually reminds me of Spartan X for the Famicom. What kills it though is they all look the same graphically and I swear a lot of rooms like to repeat especially in the last stage. The enemies are all just made up for this game. Some almost feel like they would make more sense for a Sailor V Arcade game like the cartoony bats. It probably was just a limitation of the source material but they would just use other Youma as enemies for future games which works a lot better.

The bosses are not too interesting either. They all have very simple patterns and for some reason you have to fight Jadeite three different times all in a row might I add! You even fight Queen Beryl in the end which is just odd. In fact a lot of things strike me as odd. Why are Ami and Rei in level 2 and 3 respectively despite the fact the episodes these are based off of were before they were even in the Anime? Jadeite also just dies after the third fight like that's not what happened in the Anime! Where the heck is Mamoru? Tuxedo Mask shows up in a couple of cutscenes but no Mamoru?? The worst part of all is the game just ends on Queen Beryl retreating, Tuxedo Mask and Luna congratulate Sailor Moon, she will continue to fight the Dark Kingdom, the end. Yeah it really just ends there and you're back on the title screen. I know this was probably a game made in a couple of months with a little budget but I guess I just like to nitpick.

Here's a couple of fun facts for the game. Did you know there's a level select in this game? It's only usable if you do a Game Genie code and there's even an option for a level 5, it doesn't actually take you to anywhere new sadly. Maybe it was meant to have 5 levels at one point? Also be careful if you choose stage 2-4, it glitches up your health and stuff seeing as you skipped the option at the beginning. Did you guys know this game apparently sold well? At least that's what Angel said so that's kind of neat I guess. It's not really surprising. There's a song I swear that isn't in the game that I heard in a Youtube playlist that will be linked in the next paragraph (it's BGM #12). I don't really have more fun facts for this game I'm sorry. ._.

The game graphically looks good enough. I'm actually surprised it looks nice though it's probably because they got away with using the same look for every action stage. The sprites look alright and the portraits for dialogue look...inconsistent. I'm actually convinced some of it was traced from the Anime but I'm wondering why some look rather bad. The music isn't too bad but it has one huge problem, it restarts everytime you enter a room. You'll be hearing the beginning of songs a lot because of this damn issue. You also better get used to hearing THIS a lot because it plays everytime you get a powerup which you'll get a lot and it even plays for the continue screen for some reason. The title screen music is Moonlight Densetsu from the Anime but it's lacking the beginning part and a last few bits from the end of the song. I'm not sure why they did it like that. The presentation really is all over the place.

Now with all that talked about I should say, was I too harsh on this game? Maybe, I do understand that not every game should be like in the same standards as like Super Mario Land 2, Rockman World V, or Kirby's Dream Land but I just think it's too flaw to even be above a 4/10. It's not really offensively bad in a way but there was just better games out by now. It's a game that only Sailor Moon fans are going to get anything out of which isn't surprising tbh. I will say this, there's oddly something fun about how easy it is to just breeze through this but outside of that, it's all a bunch of neat ideas that don't really make for a good game. A second game for the GB would be made based off of Sailor Moon R but next time I'll talk about the Super Famicom and Mega Drive game (because they aren't seperate pages sadly.) So see you next time when that happens and remember, The Moonlight is a Messenger of Love!