Wait wait wait, what?!

There's no ending?!

SURPRISE! The game wasn't finished!

According to the super-sleuths at this Sailor Moon forum (listen I do my research thoroughly, OK, don't judge) there's a lot of content hidden in the game code that never ends up being used. There's plenty of it- in fact, we're going to have a look at the rest of the missing content in a moment- but critically, there appears to be some kind of ending sequence that, for one reason or another, simply wasn't used. Entries for this ending- eight of them, in fact- appear in the game's Animation Test menu, but don't do anything when selected. So, if it feels that at points the game isn't quite finished, it's because it bloody well isn't!

So, once you beat Queen Beril, the game ends, and you just got dumped to the credits. Not cool. Not cool. Even Hard Head 2 had an ending, and that's a much, much worse game than Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon. Every time I try to like this game for what it is- a fairly competent, and, at times (dare I say it) fun scrolling brawler- it finds some way to kick me in the nuts and punish me. I can't forgive them for this! So, I'm writing my own ending. Or, rather, stealing the ending from Chimera Beast. Take it away, italicised text!

Sailor Jupiter has finally defeated
Queen Beril, the last bastion of
evil in this world.

Now, she will roam the
world in search of more
victims, repeating her pattern of
death and anarchy in every town
she finds.

Eventually, she'll
undoubtedly reach your home town.

And you'll have to live with
the knowledge that what led
her there was... you.



BAD ENDING

... Although there is one interesting thing in the credits. Lumped in the 'Graphics' department is a person called Junya Inoue. That's a fairly inoccuous name, and you might wonder why I'm pointing it out. This man is our link to Toaplan- remember, a bunch of staff members moved over to Gazelle after the company went bust- and this isn't his first scrolling brawler- he was the lead designer of one of Toaplan's few excursions outside the shoot-em-up, the frankly insane Kunckle Bash, one of the few games I can think of that allow you to play as an Elvis impersonator and an American football player. Wikipedia says that he was the lead designer for this game, but that's not what he's listed for in the credits... It's an interesting tid-bit nonetheless.



Rather amusingly, after you've finished the game, you're treated to a 'Character Contest' screen- the game keeps track of how often each character is played as, and ranks them in order from most played to least played. Additionally, the character in first place taunts the person in fifth place in Japanese. Since I never got a Game Over any other way (is it because I'm totally hardcore, or because I cheated like a bitch? Who knows?) I can only assume that this also shows up whenever you quit and have to put your name up... I wish this showed up in other beat-em-ups, though (although in fairness, if it was on Final Fight, it'd be useless. Mike Haggar would have 100% of the vote).

Anyway, as ever, we end with the fan-favourite, HIGH SCORE TABLE TIME!!!






4 hours, 39 minutes and 21 seconds later... It's over. It's finally over.

So there you have it. Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon's finally done and dusted. This, essentially, is what's left of poor Gazelle. After their Sailor Moon quiz game was released, they quietly disappeared, and as far as I can tell, there's no real explanation for it. Their entire legacy is one mediocre vertical shoot-em-up, an untranslated quiz game and, well, this. I guess the fact that they didn't really make much ought to explain why they weren't as successful as Cave or Eighting/Raizing (I mean, they released three games in the span of two years, and none of them were great, that's pretty lax!) but it's quite fascinating to see one company's entire output in one fell swoop...

Now, I've been pretty savage to this game over these past 9 pages. Hell, I've gone above and beyond the call of duty of giving this game a good kicking, but there's a bit of a problem. It's really not easy for me to say this, but...

Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon is actually a pretty good game.



Astonishing and embarrassing, but true! If you look, most of the savagery is aimed at how stupid some of the stuff in this game is, like the marionettes and the tennis players, and it's only during Rounds 4 and 6 that I really gripe and groan about the game itself. Aside from that, it's got a nice, solid engine around it, and some areas really are quite fun to play through, especially when a couple dozen enemies pile in and everything gets a little heavy. It's a good game, a nice little time-waster, but there's one major flaw that really prevents it from reaching its potential, that I've pointed out many times in the course of this review, but it bears repeating.

This fault is the life bar. Not your life bar, but that of the enemy. Basically, they're too long, and even Jupiter, who seems to be the strongest of all the characters, can't take them down in a hurry, because none of your attacks seem to make even a remote dent in them. This is only mildly frustrating during the main game, but it really falls apart during the boss battles; they take. Too. Bloody. Long. If you imagine a boss encounter in any typical scrolling brawler, multiply the amount of time it takes you to beat them by 3, and that's how long each boss is. It doesn't help that a lot of them float around, and it certainly doesn't help that some of them are repeated.

On nearly every stage, I wanted to like this game. Sure, it's an affront to my butch masculinity, but damnit, it's fun. Beating up people mercilessly always is, and if I'm forced to play as a Japanese schoolgirl while I'm at it, fair play. But because of these robust enemy life bars, the game drags on for far too long. It's actually best to play Rounds 1 and 2, and then quit before it gets monotonous. It's truly a shame- even more so than Atari Batman game- because if this was sorted out, I'd be tempted to put this one near (but certainly not above) the kings of the genre, like Undercover Cops and Cadillacs & Dinosaurs.

As it stands, Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon is a valiant attempt that's close to being very good, thwarted by a few bothersome issues (the repeated enemies, dearth of items) and one glaring flaw (the life bar situation). It's a good game with flaws, when it could've been excellent. Essentially, it's a game only for enthusiasts of the scrolling brawler (which I am) who's seen it all before and wants something a little different, or for completely insane Sailor Moon fans (which, after this playing this game, I'm certainly not). If you're not a fan of the series, though, play it with a friend along for the ride to take the piss, because I nearly died laughing during my first play-through.


And now, it's that time, folks!
EXTENDED PLAY!


Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon - Unofficial Soundtrack

The first bit of bonus material (the first for the entire site!) is some music; all of the music from this game. Why is this here? Well, the whole idea for doing this article in the first place (aside from the fact that I hate myself) is because the music from the first stage popped into my head a few weeks before, and it was driving me nuts where I'd heard it from. It's one of those annoyingly infectious pieces that gets lodged in your brain with no intention of leaving... I eventually remembered it came from this game, and as daft as it sounds, it was this that made me decide to suffer write this article.

However, I quickly found out that finding any music from this game on the internet is impossible. It simply does not exist, and this is the same internet where I found the complete Twinkle Tale soundtrack. My search was in vain, so I decided to be an awfully nice chap and rip it myself. No extra sound effects, no annoying voices, no gristle; just the music, just for you. Originally, I said that I wasn't going to rip the entire soundtrack, as the music falls apart after the first round- my exact words were 'it sounds like a cat being thrown around a music shop', I believe. However, my self-hatred has grown since then, so here it is in all its glory. It's even in a single ZIP file, ooooh! But beware- this thing is absolutely gigantic (clocking in at over 40MB) so be prepared to wait.




Since I've still got plenty of space left to fill up, and I had these to hand, might as well milk it for all it's worth. These are the instruction stickers that would've come with the game board when it was released in Japan, intended to be slapped onto the arcade machine so people know what the hell they're doing. Since I don't read Japanese (aside from a few useful words here and there, like 'waterballoon' and 'hot-blooded') they're almost entirely useless, but the art is alright, I guess. Click on 'em for a bigger picture.

Normally, I wouldn't bother with this sort of thing, buuuut I got them for free! Well, technically. These come from sailorvgame.org which I stumbled upon during my, uh, 'research', and the very nice web-person said I could use 'em, so here they are. Actually, it's quite an impressive archive of every single Sailor Moon game ever made. I never knew there were so many.

...Don't look at me like that. My research is important stuff; just making sure what I'm babbling about isn't totally redundant. And it's not, in this case, as not many people talk about Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon... The arcade game, that is. According to that website, the SNES games are far more popular, or something. For some reason, the first SNES game was also released in France... Back then, this was actually pretty common, a few games based on Dragonball were also translated into French. Why? Who knows?


Now, the good stuff! What about that unfinished content, eh?

Thanks to a cheat you can add to MAME's cheat files from The Cutting Room Floor, you can access a very handy Debug Mode (best done just as the game's booting up). As you can see, this is mostly good for checking the graphics and sounds, so we're going to dive right into the graphics. Now, if you looked at that Sailor Moon forum link earlier, you'll know most of what's coming up, and they even had sprite sheets, but I figured you'd want to hear my own commentary on these things [No-one wants that. That's the last thing anyone wants. - Ed] Well, tough. We'll also be providing the codes for these things so you can see them yourself. Skipping past the BG Character Tests (they're individual tiles), the Object Test has a lot of missing stuff...

Code: 394 - 397
Selection markers for Player 3 and Player 4! The final game only allows for 2 players at maximum.

Code: 675 - 677
Sprites for Sailor Moon in her Princess Serenity form. Presumably intended for an ending cutscene.

Code: 697 - 699
i dunno some prince-ass motherfucker

Code: 1283 - 1369
A set of overlay sprites for Sailor Venus to change her into Sailor V. Apparently intended for a boss fight against a fake version of her.

Code: 1381 - 1395
It's that cat, Luna. Code: 1396 - 1398
It's that cat, Artemis. Considering some parts of her sprite were cut out, perhaos she was part of a cutscene at some point. Code: 2666 - 3132
Various attack effect frames that seem unused, were almost certainly intended for the sprite-based magical attacks. Animation Test Code: 1189 - 1211 All that remains of the ending animation. Some of the characters are using the wrong palette and you can't pay what reamins as animations. THINGS TO MENTION Four-Player Mode Dialogue windows and portraits Sailor V Sprite anims for super attacks Ending scraps
And that's your lot. Phew, I'm amazed we got through it at all! See you next time, loyal viewers! Let's never speak of this again.

Those who still live are instructed to go to the main page...

In the end, after all the mess...

The terrible saga of Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon has come to an end.





























... Or has it?!?




Ha ha ha! She who laughs last, laughs loudest! You'll never escape the curse of Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon!