Sailor Moon

Guess all those that were wining about the first anime not being aithful to the obviously superior original manga finally got what they wanted, with all the inherent compressed pacing that implies. Still, it's nice to have the original animated, and I repeat my hope that this thing gets finished.

The first anime had its problems, the manga had its problems. Make a hybrid of them and you could have one solid series.

Yeah that's why I'm still working on my "interspersed" viewing order. How did it go again? 16 and 17 after 71, 18 after 72, 19 and 20 after 82, 21 after 83?

(And not to worry, they are indeed posting eight new dubbed episodes on Friday.)

edited 6th May '15 6:26:01 PM by BagofMagicFood

On the one hand, yay, a time to finally here Chibi get some range! On the other, dinosaurs.

Even if it's not faithful exactly, I hope the trend of inserting little gags continues and they get to do a little riffing on that one.

Dinosaurs? You have something against dinosaurs?

Dinosaurs are cool, but really out of place in this show's genre.

Dinosaur World, Luigi.

So yeah, I am now with the consensus that this series hype is because of Nostalgia.

Watching Crystal, i think it's a prime candidate for Seinfeld Is Unfunny (which itself is strange, as i find Seinfeld quite funny still). In the time that followed, the Magical Girl Warrior genre grew more elaborate and the standards for plots and villain writing also grew. Sailor Moon feels very basic and a lot of what i came to expect from the characters was stuff i had absorbed from decades of Fanon, leaving the original feeling rather tawdry.

Granted, having characters as physically (or in Chibi-usa's case, at least emotionally) young as they are helps excuse a lot of the very stupid shit they do.

It's not just that.

The manga had extremely fast pacing. Crystal is an extremely faithful adaptation of the manga, but it's pacing is very slow. The manga flows better, I guess you could say.

edited 10th May '15 3:21:04 PM by universalperson

Oh snap, Calaveras now has the voice of Kyubey!

Amazing dub cast.

Hmm? What y'all taking about?

Yeah, see, I recently watched Madoka Magica, where Homura Akemi has the same voice as Sailor Mars in English. I also noticed Cindy Robinson's using her Amy Rose voice for Berthier, but I think I'm still more used to Lisa Ortiz's Amy.

Both are equally good imho.

Ale and An were good too. Doesn't make up for the filler arc and contrived situations even by this show's standards, but I definitely liked them more since I saw it in the 90s.

This past week I've been watching Bleatingheart play Sailor Moon video games, including a visual novel for PC Engine CD that takes place between these early arcs of Sailor Moon R. It's a little disappointing that I haven't seen anyone interested in translating it or fixing that one lock-up bug in the emulator.

Any non-Mamoru paths available?

Haha, actually, Mamoru is barely in the game if you don't play as Usagi, and even then, playing as Usagi mainly adds a little more to the Naru & Umino plot. You tend to see the same group scenes as they get the Another Side, Another Story treatment, but then each of the other Senshi gets her own Dark Kingdom boss to fight, terrible mini-game to suffer through, and annoying hanger-on to impress, and most of those new friends have stupid pink hairdos as if to tease the idea of Chibi-Usa.

From what we saw of the pictures, the story is that the Dark Kingdom leaders are going around wearing masks for some reason, but Nephrite is on the run from them, as the opening scene is Nephrite getting attacked by the DD Girls in an Absurdly Spacious Sewer. Then in the end, apparently the new bad guy is some Cyclops plant lady whose name may be either "Past Wiseman" or "Bloody Pile Opal". Well, I'm pretty sure they named-dropped "Wiseman" and "Death Phantom" a couple of times, anyway, and in one scene everyone's using their post-Star Power attacks without having Star Power, so maybe you ought to have seen the rest of Sailor Moon R before playing that just to be safe. Uh, and I see you can learn a little bit more on this page.

The other PC-Engine game is just a collection of mini-games where playing some of them unlocks cutscenes based on how you did, just random vignettes from the main characters' lives, but from the stream it appears that The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard.

edited 13th May '15 1:24:34 PM by BagofMagicFood

I can see why the only game people talk about with acclaim is Sailor Moon: Another Story.

edited 13th May '15 7:49:32 PM by darkabomination

I haven't seen why yet, but... Hey! I just realized, in this PC-Engine game, most of the Sailors get a unique melody for the transformation scene, but Mercury's is just Moon's and Venus's played back-to-back! Must have taken longer to slide-show all her moves...

I think the dub made some of these episode previews even funnier, like Mamoru saying "That'll just wipe out all of my passion... That is I mean, for curry" for 66, or Usagi affecting an Ami tone of voice on the line "There's even a tiny toy dinosaur" for 67 and then freaking out. ...But wait, it's not a dinosaur, it's a PLESIOSAUR! My spell-checker wants to correct "plesiosaur" to "applesauce" though

Plesiosaurs were reincarnated in the modern age to battle the Dino Kingdom

Unsurprising, as humor's one of the big things that doesn't translate well, especially the literal translations for a lot of subs. Subbing for all of it's ease to produce and encode, still has just as many translation hazards as a dub does.

Also there's the fact that hearing something in a native language has a much more instinctual reaction to your brain through association, which is why jokes tend to be funnier said out loud and or localized a bit.

Did you notice they put up the first 23 dubbed episodes again by simply re-enabling the original Hulu pages to serve videos again? Their URL numbers are back in the six hundred thousands, the same Facebook comments are there, episode 21's song is still missing its vocals... And if it's only for "a limited time" again, I'm guessing they may not let it overlap with the next time they put up 24-46, so I won't get to go directly from 23 to 24 the way I like, and I might have to just go and get the darn discs already

There's other methods...

I can see why the only game people talk about with acclaim is Sailor Moon: Another Story.

The arcade fighting game and the Super Famicom and Sega Mega Drive side scrolling beat'em ups also seem to get a fair bit of praise.

I think the Game Boy games might be more enjoyable with a good translation for the adventure sections, because otherwise you're just running back and forth mashing buttons on everyone until you stumble over the next event trigger. I'll have to try the Game Gear game when I approach the end of Sailor Moon S. Then you've got the fighting games, the puzzle games, the edutainment collections, the American image activities, the Nakayoshi crossovers... Say, did you know that somebody subtitled the Telebikko episode/game into English? There was some confusion about what that was for a while because the first Playdia game was also quiz-based, and half its FMV footage was repurposed from Kotaete Moon Call, only the story takes a different turn when instead of leading everyone into a book world, Quiz resurrects five old monsters to quiz each of the Sailors to death. And of course Sailor Mercury's monster is Garoben, it had to be Garoben, the quiz shtick was hers first, and she was Mercury's to fight in the PC-Engine story too, only as some kind of Super Garoben, while Jupiter fought Baulm EX—you know she was EXtra powerful because she had the letters EX on her forehead.

Oh and I think Wiseman's voice effect might be improving in episode 68 of the new dub... I'm still not really feeling Rubeus's English voice, though. It just sounds like the same snobby snake voice they gave to Jadeite and Aile. I thought the Japanese voices gave Rubeus a bit more of a "boastful bully" tone.