Computer Game Summary XLIV (Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon)


It's a big old arcade beat-em-up with your favourite sailor Scouts. Well except for Pluto. She's not here.
Maybe they knew in the future that Pluto wouldn't be classed as a planet anymore and decided to kick her out of the bunch.

So this is about as straightforward as game as you could possibly play.
You put in your quarter, pick your Sailor Scout and get thrown immediately into a fight with a bunch of kind of reoccurring Sailor Moon villains.
And the goal is simple, fight the villains, continuously move right, make it to the end of the stage, beat one of the ridiculously over-the-top hard bosses and then move on to the next level.

Gameplay: It's a simplified Final-fight. You have a series of Combos and grab attacks you can use to defeat your enemies and most of them won't do you any good against the Final Bosses. Who were designed in such a way as to suck every quarter out of your pocket.
The hit detection is a bit finicky and your character can feel a little slow as there's no running animation.
For the most part it's okay, you can defeat most enemies by simply keeping them on one side or jumping back and forth between them whatever here and there you'll get stuck between two groups of people and get absolutely wailed on*.
And then of course there's your Final Bosses who have an incredibly ridiculous range of attacks and you're able to hit you with relative ease.
Each hit takes about a quarter to a half of your entire Health away. And I found it incredibly difficult to get through a single stage about having to use a quarter at least once. I think of a lot of practice you could theoretically get through 90% of this game without dying but some of the very last bosses especially the end boss or borderline impossible.

The graphics are easily the best part of the entire game. Incredibly bright fluent colours with wonderfully put together backdrops. Everything looks ideally like it came right out of the Sailor Moon cartoon and the animated styles of all the different sailor Scouts are fantastic.

The music is adequate. Everything has a nice little jaunty tune to it, with slightly more intense moments when encountering greater enemies or Final Bosses.
But it's nothing that'll stick in your head.

Overall it's a fun enough experience. Not sure how far I'd want to go if I had to pay up several dollars in quarters, but it's still a decent enough game to play. Especially if you have someone else to play with.
The only part of it that really grinds my gear is the final boss and one of the other demons that pops up 2/3 into the game. Those two characters alone are the most annoying elements of the entire game and I said before they're just there to suck up your money.

But really it's just fun to have an excuse to play Sailor Moon game. There's surprisingly only a few Sailor Moon games out there and most of them seem to have popped up in the 90s.
With a fair bit being Mortal Kombat clones where you fight other sailor Scouts. I don't want to beat up the Sailor Scouts, I want to team up with them and fight against the forces of evil.

It would have been nice if there was a proper ending to the game. You get by defeating Queen Beryl and then the game just ends with credits. At least give us a congratulations or something.

*I forgot that sometimes characters will get thrown off a screen and stay there for a time. It's really quite annoying as you're not sure if you've defeated all the enemies or not and you try to move on only to be stuck in the same area.
Or sometimes you wanted the side of the screen and you get punched by an unseen enemy. I wouldn't mind it so much but it happens an awful lot in this game.
It wouldn't be that big of a bother but you have a time limit

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