Sailor Moon

You know, something's been bugging me about Naoko Takeuchi's recent change of stance regarding how the term Sailor Senshi should be rendered in English. If Sailor Senshi is supposed to be rendered as "Sailor Guardian", then how are we supposed to render Shugo Senshi (守護戦士), the title of the four Inner Senshi in reference to their main duty as Princess Serenity/Sailor Moon's personal bodyguards, which was so far rendered as "Guardian Soldier(s)"? Or the fairy-like custodians of each Sailor Soldier's planetary castle that incarnate as hand-sized versions of their designated Sailor Soldiers, and whose names were all of the format "Guardian X", with "X" being the name of their affiliated planet?

edited 9th Aug '15 9:34:32 AM by MarqFJA

Did I hear right? That The dubbing already started on S?

They've at least been allowed to announce a few cast members from season 3 probably due to the recap/preview episode right before that.

edited 9th Aug '15 9:38:25 AM by PikaHikariKT

I guess they're Guardian Guardians now!

Guys, Dubbing started months ago. I cant believe you guys believe dubbing can be sone in so little time that it can start so late.

Don't even joke about that! God, what if it comes true?!

Seriously, though, one reason I like "Sailor Soldier" is because of the alliteration that comes with the Solar System ones' full title. "Sailor Soldiers of the Solar System" or "Solar System('s) Sailor Soldiers", doesn't matter; they both abbreviate to "SSSS".

edited 10th Aug '15 4:29:25 AM by MarqFJA

See the SuperS Special Starlight Sailor Senshi Soldier Scout Sonic Search & Smash Squad!

OK, I laughed at that one. Very funny!

... So, how come the Sailor Moon fanfic thread seems to have abruptly died off? I've been posting some ideas every couple of weeks in hopes of reviving discussion, but so far no dice. It used to be more active when I first came in last year or the year before, IIRC.

edited 10th Aug '15 10:43:10 AM by MarqFJA

That's a lot of S's.

Sailor Scouts probably sticks around for a similar reason, too catchy to throw away.

Man I've fallen way behind on the dub. Only got around to finishing the Doom Tree arc a week ago. Which by the way, in hindsight was pretty entertaining.

Moonlight Knight passionately proclaiming preposterous piles of pretentiously-pronounced Purple Prose,, proceeding passed predictably-plotted, (presumably parodic), poetic planetary presentations provides plentiful perverse personal pleasure.

I know, right? I really enjoyed the aptly-named aliens' hijinks.

The Sailors getting their memories back while still finding common ground before they remet was pretty effective, along with Usagi's own reawakening of her powers. The villains were entertaining and at their core sympathetic, Mamoru became even more hammy and over the top, and there was a happy ending for the villain.

It seems pretty underrated as an arc in its own right. And technically, not all is filler as it explains how they were readjusting after the Reset Button was pressed.

I can't believe I only just noticed that Sailor Moon was able to use her "feather barrettes" as darts in chapter 2, to stop some of Garoben?'s papers. They must be the equivalent of roses

Uh, so since I'm bumping this topic, did anyone want to hear observations about the Game Gear game?

Heard it's a balls hard platformer.

Nah, it's one of the easiest platformers. And yet, the option to play as Sailor Chibi Moon is an Easy Mode for the game, where you can already kill standard enemies in one hit instead of three and bosses in four hits instead of eight despite not turning Super, you can crawl into smaller tunnels in the first world to hide from enemies, your non-powered charge-up attack is a straight shot, and there are subtle differences in the four mini-games too... But only Sailor Moon gets to say a line of audio, fight Kaolinite, and see Professor Tomoe in the ending. The mini-games might be the hardest things in there, although it can take a while to learn the turn-around timing of moving platforms that often go off the small screen when your jump takes so long, and it's also common to get caught off-guard by Tiren in some places. Aerial kicks don't work so well against Tiren, who bounces around erratically in tire form at all times after appearing, so it's better to see whether you can back away or rush underneath and then punch. Aerial kicks do work well at catching most of the bosses off-guard, however, so long as you don't misjudge when they become invulnerable by performing their special attack again!

Tiren only ever takes one hit to destroy though, and she tends to obliterate herself before long anyway (I just discovered one who spawns inside a pit in 3-2), just as those falling object hazards often fail to threaten you at certain elevations of the screen. The other three Daimons are Osoji, Nekonell, and Die-Heart, who all have three hit points when you're regular Sailor Moon and all have the same "Walk back and forth or stop and swat the air if you're near" pattern, and for some reason you have to fight all three in a row before every boss, each popping out of the center of the floor at you. The weird thing about combat in this game is that your regular kick attack is replaced by a punch attack whenever an enemy is nearby (or as Super Sailor Moon, your punch becomes... an uppercut? A headbutt? A knee attack? I can't tell from the sudden animation frame), so you almost never actually hit an enemy with the attack animation you were trying on the air unless you do it just early enough that the enemy walks into it at the last moment. And if you attack a standard Daimon as you get completely on top of it as regular Sailor Moon, then she may suplex that Daimon over onto the ground for double damage, so I like to try to do that as much as possible. It's even more satisfying if you can toss the Daimon into a pit, although I don't know if that actually despawns it or counts for score, just as I don't know how many points anything is worth because I can't see the score until the tally at the very end of each world. It took me a long time to realize that the number under the tally was the password, not a number of bonus points, which explains why it never ended in hundreds or indicated the Witches 5's Power Levels or anything. And now I've forgotten how I learned the Sound Test password, 9999.

The early levels have some horizontal wires strung up for you to climb across as a sort of alternate path, but you can't jump or attack from them, only decide to continue climbing forth or drop off. World 2 takes a break from the Spikes Of Doom in its posh (academy?) building, and stage 2-1 has a bit of a secret I found just yesterday, where you can walk past the front of the stairs you're supposed to climb so that you fight a Die-Heart to find power-ups against a pillar. Much earlier on I had found a similar but useless stretch of dark-dithered background in 2-2 by walking back to the left after falling down all the way and finding nothing but the unbreakable pillar... But elsewhere I did find a Daimon that could only be encountered by backtracking for some reason!

World 3's city represents some of the pits as open manholes, and one funny thing in stage 3-2 is that there's a falling box positioned directly over a hole. Since falling objects can't be destroyed by anything but the ground, that box always respawns when scrolled up to again, so you can make it fall into the hole repeatedly by jumping repeatedly. Then at the end, if you time it just right, you can jump into a manhole at the same time as you catch the Deep Aqua Mirror, but the death doesn't count. Yeah, all stages -1 and -2 force you to collect a Talisman at the point where the screen stops scrolling to end the level, but every -3 is a short stage where you have to search for the Garnet Orb or you won't get the Holy Grail when you trip the arbitrary point that sends you to the boss arena. Generally it's always "Did you see the footholds in the background leading up and to the left?". Stage 3-3 has one more funny thing where you can climb all the way over an awning and drop down before the Holy Grail forms in the center, even as Sailor Moon transforms way over against the right edge.

World 4 is some under construction building, but the ping-pong path required to climb it means a missed jump is more likely to make you lose some progress than to lose a life in a pit. And no, I don't think they ever hid anything behind those foreground pillars. Toward the end of 4-2 was some proof that Sailor Moon can do the "You can just walk over one-block gaps" trick, and the ceiling there made it look as if there were more level... Then world 5 would look very dark and grim if it weren't for the stacks of colored flasks in the background.

This time around, collecting a red rose lying around results in temporary invincibility to everything but those pits; other video games have had the rose refill life or provide an extra life, so yeah, an unseen Tuxedo Mask's power can vary with what you're playing. You start with only three hit-point hearts out of a maximum of four, and you don't get them refilled for clearing levels, so it's important to pick up more when you can, either just lying in certain places where little hearts refill one and big hearts refill all, or from randomly receiving a little heart from a defeated Daimon. You can only fire projectiles as a Charged Attack, either a heart that flies forward from Sailor Chibi Moon, or Sailor Moon's boomerang glow-disc which might be fun to play keep-away with. If you've collected any of the scepter items lying around, you can spend one by holding the attack button longer, sending four hearts spiraling away from you—likely a Moon Spiral Heart Attack from the spinning animation. It actually hits whatever's on screen instantly, and the hearts are just a special effect that will not proceed to hurt anything, although they can be used to reduce the number of projectiles Mimete and Tellur throw at you via the system's object limit. I don't generally find the charge-up time is worth it when you can't move and you never face more than one enemy at a time in an attempt to minimize lag, though, and you lose all your scepters after a single death.

Oh and even although it's got anime-based portraits, you fight Viluy before Tellur like in the manga, and on my latest game I found it is valuable to attack Viluy with your projectile as her own shot is rather short-range but she can get into attack mode quite spontaneously. The final bosses are a little underwhelming when instead of special attacks, Cyprine has jumping from the other side of the screen as a Palette Swap and never turning around, and Kaolinite teleports to a random spot after every hit, so you just have to learn to jump so that you can try to get away if she teleports right on top of you; otherwise, they're only doing the "Walk slowly and punch you" routine. At least Mimete made it fun by spinning toward you and having music notes as her projectiles.

Okay, so for the mini-games, you have to play each one after each of the first four worlds, unlike the Game Boy games that made them optional stops in the adventure areas. The first one's the only one I find to be somewhat fair and intuitive, where you've got to line up each hero's portrait with a line of them slot-machine style, so you need to hit the button right after the previous portrait starts to pass. I think Sailor Moon has just barely enough time to match all 8 for a "PERFECT!!" This mini-game and the third one award more of those scepters for every success, so you could already have the maximum of 9 spiral attacks by the second world. Now the second mini-game I think has been misidentified as a memory matching game on the wikis, because not only is it extremely unlikely to find two that match in the tries you're given (4 for Sailor Moon, 5 for Sailor Chibi Moon), but I found with savestate-cheating that the order in which you encounter Sailor Senshi is predetermined no matter which doors you open, even seeing different ones if you keep choosing the same door, and the one time I did find the same Sailor behind two different doors, it didn't count for anything. Instead, I believe this is a "Find Tuxedo Mask" game, and the Sailors are giving you hints in Japanese as to where to search next. You get a multiplier on your bonus points for how many tries you didn't waste.

The third game has a similar problem in that it's a three-choice quiz game in Japanese, although I like how the final question's answers are always little picture clippings. Then the "Scoot Luna-P between the walking Luna and Artemis without touching them" game is fun once you learn the control scheme and how to deal with slopes, but it is annoying how it's just an instant loss if you bump into either cat. Oh well, it's only a set number of bonus points anyway. Then all four mini-games are available from the main menu in both Sailor Moon and Sailor Chibi-Moon styles, but once again it's confusing for those who don't know Japanese as they're not presented in the same order as the main quest. But I like how the same eight Sailor Senshi/Tuxedo Mask are represented there by giving directions as full-screen portraits with lip flaps.

Then there's what I guess is some kind of fortune-telling game, where you enter two dates and a blood type, then you get a screen with two rows of stars, one of them next to something starting with "LOVE", then a number, then a colored heart. I have no idea, but it's funny to me how it doesn't let me change the hundreds or thousands digits of the years, meaning this game is non-Y2K-compliant with only five years left in its century!

That's... a very detailed analysis. That should go on a game faq or something, as it reads as pretty valuable information on an obscure game. Sounds like a technically impressive title for the Game Gear if it can manage all that.

Ah, no, it's really very simplistic beyond those little nuggets I managed to find, and I wouldn't want to submit a review or guide for something I only tried on an emulator. However, on more than one emulator I've found some common object palette bugs, where a certain amount of scrolling will suddenly add some bright orange to a moving platform or the bottom of a rose, or Tiren's face and tire colors might get swapped in some way.

It's a little funny how the levels are introduced by a frame around a random background from that very level as your character walks through, stopping to pose in the middle for a second. I'd usually hit a button to make it fade to the level right away, but then I noticed that I could hit the button a bit later to change the amount of time the character stands posing in the middle before moving on—it seems the final time-out fade-out is the same trigger as the Sailor's resuming walking, and if you press the button just before she would stop, then she won't stop at all!

In-level, I noticed that there's no inertia to the walking animation, so if you mash forward repeatedly, then the animation stops and restarts over and over, and Sailor Moon appears to be twisting her feet and pounding the air beside her to move forward. I got a similar "twisting" effect on the wires, where she never reaches forward to get ahead. Then I learned that unlike the way dying in a pit after collecting a Talisman didn't count, dying so that you land on a big heart afterward is of no help to you; you still die.

So yeah, I just posted a bunch of thoughts while the thread was still quiet for a while... And then I realized that my attempt to mention the break from bottomless pits got turned into a bad link to a page for Spikes Of Doom that's under the "namespace" of Bottomless Pits when I meant to add an "either or" slash, so you don't see the bottomless pits reference at all, but really they were the main thing in the game, whereas spikes were just in that first level, but I don't feel like fixing it now.

Say, darkabomination, did you ever finish watching Sailor Moon R? I just saw that the second half of the English dub expires from Hulu in 2 days.

I like Sailor Moon to an extent. I've only read the first two volumes of the manga, I've seen the 90s anime and I like it but not too much, I've seen 9 episodes of Crystal and dropped it due to other obligations (but plan on getting back to it after I graduate from school), etc. My absolute favorite adaptation is the live-action series. Even though it has flaws that are pretty glaring, it rectifies so many issues I had with the anime and even the manga. I'll rewatch it as many times as I want to, though haven't gotten the chance (plus, Luna is a MUCH better character in the live-action series than in any other adaptation).

Nah, though I really should have gotten to it. Ah well, I think I can find episodes from a group that does Hulu rips. They were painfully slow on the 1-23 set, but have picked up the pace since then.

I've mostly had Steven Universe on the brain distracting me for a while, so I really need to get back to it.

More Sailor Moon Crystal incoming: http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2015-09-28/sailor-moon-crystal-gets-3rd-season-on-death-busters/.93487

Oh hell YES! Wait, it's not another hoax is it? It probably is. Has to be. :(

The Saturn arc is finally here can this be true?

Nope, this is official this time — it's on the Japanese site and was announced as soon as its TV run in Japan ended.

edited 28th Sep '15 10:07:22 AM by PikaHikariKT

I hope they do Hotaru justice. Who do you think they'll have to voice her?

Well Madoka is voicing her in the dub version so idk

Going with the clear Precure theme; I'll guess Romi Park for Haruka, Masumi Asano for Michiru, and Rumi Ookubo for Hotaru.