FGC #428 Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon

Dragon Ball Z has seen a new videogame every seven seconds since the controller was invented. Sailor Moon hasn’t seen a legitimate console title since the Playstation 1.

And can we please admit that Sailor Moon is just Dragon Ball Z for girls?

No, wait, you know what? That’s bullshit, and I regret even typing such a thing. If my backspace key hadn’t been cursed by a particularly cantankerous and evidently magical Eskimo woman, I would delete that entire sentence. Sailor Moon is not Dragon Ball Z for girls. Yes, it seemed to rise to prominence around the same general time; yes, it seemed to work in parallel in that “6 am Japanimation” timeslot for a lot of impressionable youths; and, yes, Sailor Moon certainly seems to be the “girls fight stuff” counter to Dragon Ball Z’s “boys fight stuff” premise. There are a lot of similarities between the two franchises, and probably some sort of muscular chests vs. bare thighs ratio chart could be composed by someone with a degree in graphic artistry. But the important difference between Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball Z? Sailor Moon had a plot.

Wait, no. My bad, again. Sailor Moon’s plot was just as dumb and superfluous as “Goku must beat Vegeta for raisens”. Collecting the seven shards of the Millennium Crystal is just as ridiculous as collecting the seven dragon balls, and, ultimately, both situations end with characters switching sides and a boss fight or two. But there is an important difference between the OG Sailor Moon animated series and the oft-remastered Dragon Ball Z: Sailor Moon had a different monster every episode. Every single one! Or thereabouts! Sometimes they just fought a general or the final boss! But that means that, more or less, for 200 episodes of Sailor Moon, there are 200 random moon monsters running around!

And that is awesome fodder for a video game bestiary!

Dragon Ball Z lends itself naturally to a fighting game. You’ve got Goku and his posse, four or five “prime” villains, a little bit of crossover between the two (Vegeta have an “M” on his forehead this week?), and maybe you can throw in a henchman or two because everyone seems to love the Ginyu Force. There! Done! You’ve got the perfect fighting game roster, and you even picked up a few weirdos like Piccolo so you can have a stretchy guy. The end. You’ve got an eclectic cast and all you need is some kind of excuse for everyone to pummel each other (I don’t know, maybe a robot has a case of the munchies?). But, as anyone that has ever played the Dragon Ball “spin-off” titles will attest, the DBZ setup doesn’t exactly lend itself to the typical videogame format. DBZ has very few “goombas” or “mets” running around, and you can only spend so many levels battling those stupid vegetable monsters from planet Vegeta (oh, I just got that). Maybe your DBZ RPG has to add a panda with a gun or something, but, ultimately, the limited number of DBZ “mooks” makes anything but a fighting game for DBZ rather pointless.

And, while the franchise had at least one very good SNES fighting game, Sailor Moon, has literal hordes of minion monsters for its other digital outings. Usagi fought a different marginally-human-shaped creature every week, so that allows for not only a full bestiary brimming with elemental and animalistic options for opponents, it also naturally lends itself to situations where a monster is promoted or demoted according to battle-party readiness, so, yes, Final Fantasy, you have an excellent excuse to recolor various sprites and claim Imp is actually General Imp and totally a secret boss right now. And that means you can do anything with Sailor Moon! Usagi can fight hordes of monsters with four-seven allies (and maybe that damn bubblegum chibi-creature), and, frankly, you can fit that kind of full cast into any genre of videogame. Want the Sailor Scouts to live in a shoot ‘em up? Sure! Beat ‘em up? Why not! JRPG? Why, you’ve got a battle party right there! And more random monsters than you could shake a crescent moon wand at! Everybody wins!

And, given Sailor Moon seemed to be at the height of its popularity roughly around the era of the SNES, we did see a number of variations on what could be done with the Sailor Scouts. Well, “we” is kind of a misnomer: Japan saw a lot of Sailor Moon games, and Western countries got a random smattering of whatever was available and easily translated. The United States of Dumberica was clearly not worthy of the Sailor Moon JRPG… which is probably just as well, as it seems to rely heavily on one-person parties, and that is exactly zero fun in your average JRPG. And Europe saw a random beat ‘em up or two. But, if you were really lucky, you might have been in one of the approximately 0.0002 arcades in the world that contained the Sailor Moon arcade game, Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon.

Superficially, Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon is another arcade beat ‘em up from an era chock full of ‘em. You have your choice of five Sailor Scouts, they all have special attacks that boil down to “this defeats enemies”, and those enemies are hordes of the same opponents over and over again in slightly different configurations. It’s a beat ‘em up. You’ve been through this all before.

But, assuming you are a student of beat ‘em ups from the 90’s (which I, a beatemupologist, clearly am), you will notice some significant variations from the norm. For one thing, this is (probably? Prove me wrong!) the only beat ‘em up out there with a completely female cast. Yes, it’s a “side-effect” of the source material, but that means there are no Haggars or other heavies to find on the character select screen. Thus, there are no characters that are based exclusively on piledriver-timing, and everything moves at a much zippier pace than you’d find in your typical accommodate-for the-guy-that-uses-throws beat ‘em up. But don’t let that make you think that each Sailor Scout is just a recolor with a slightly different elemental attack! Every Scout has their own unique animations and movements, and you can really feel how Amy maybe has to put in a little more effort than Sailor Jump Kicks for Days… errr.. Jupiter. This is a Sailor Moon game that feels like a Sailor Moon game, and that’s more than I could ever say for Spider-Man’s outing.

But somehow more miraculous than all of that is the title’s bestiary. While the average beat ‘em up might have a memorable boss or two (that might even wind up in a Street Fighter title for years), the generic guys of a beat ‘em up are traditionally as forgettable and indistinguishable as a flock of seagulls (or A Flock of Seagulls). Inevitably, you’ve got a skinny nerd, a fat guy, some tall dude that is a makeshift leader, the female of the species, a demoted boss from the first level, and some kind of heavy that is used sparsely in early levels, but shows up in droves toward the end. And that’s it! Maybe there’s a robot somewhere in there? That’s about the best you can hope for. Sailor Moon, meanwhile, employs:

• An Amazonian monster woman with gnarly teeth
• Some demon imp creature that will haunt my nightmares
• A water nymph
• A creepy walking marionette
• An inordinately creepy walking doll
• A ninja
• The living embodiment of the Gemini Zodiac Sign with electricity powers
• A dick with a tennis racket and flaming tennis balls

And those are just the normal enemies! We haven’t even gotten to the boss with axes for hands! Or the gargoyle that decides to fly up Tokyo Tower for no apparent reason!

But, as with the other titles from this batch of FGC entries, Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon is remembered by a whole six people, and is only available to modern audiences through illicit methods. This is a beat ‘em up that puts the likes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and its army of identical foot robots to shame, and it’s forever lost to the annals of history because some people believe “girl anime” doesn’t translate to videogame bucks. And, despite the rebirth of Sailor Moon Crystal right alongside Dragon Ball Super, we’re still going to see a million DBZ rehash titles before we get so much as a Sailor Moon mobile gatcha.

Sorry, Usagi, sometimes the forces of the Negaverse win.

FGC #428 Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon

• System: Arcade. Any Sailor Moon beat ‘em ups for any other systems will not be acknowledged.
• Number of players: It’s a 2-P, but it looks like 4-P was intended at some point. Which brings us to…
• Cutting Room Floor: It seems obvious that this title was somehow rushed to the arcades, and a few random features and tidbits were dropped. For one thing, the game doesn’t have an ending, despite the fact that there appears to be text for such hidden in the code. Additionally, an entire level sees the Scouts fight their way to Nephrite’s cabin, and then the boss of Nephrite’s cabin is… A reused boss from two levels earlier. And Sailor V sprites lay hiding in the rom, too. We could have had an official, real-life Sailor V title!
• For the fans nerds: If you’re a dedicated Sailor Moon super fan, and demand to know the timeframe for this adventure, Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon is basically a retelling of the Negaverse/1st Season of Sailor Moon, though with all the Inner-Senshi available from the start. Luckily, the entire cast doesn’t completely die in this version (assuming you don’t run out of quarters).
• Favorite Sailor Scout: Sailor Mars, no questions. … Come to think of it, I have pretty much based my entire dating history going back to high school on… Oh Lord, I’m not going to finish this sentence for the sake of my own sanity.
• Favorite Scene in any piece of media, ever: Yes, it is preserved.
  

  The noble Hercules is here for us all.

• Goggle Bob Fact: The first Playstation game I ever played was… a Sailor Moon game. The Japanese Playstation 1 was available initially for rent at our local videogame rental spot, so I rented an entire Playstation and only one game… the Sailor Moon fighting game that is, incidentally, pretty terrible. And that’s why I didn’t purchase a Playstation 1 until the release of Mega Man 8.
• Did you know? The author of Sailor Moon married the author of Yu Yu Hakusho. Speaking of underrepresented franchises that would be ripe for some modern videogames…
• Would I play again: Probably! If I had a way to play this game with some Sailor Moon superfans, I would be all over it. As it is, it’s just a fun, completely impossible to play videogame.

What’s next? With God as my witness, I will not allow a theme “week” to go by without a Mega Man game. Please look forward to it!