Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon

Sometimes when you make something good you keep making it that way. That reasoning is why many games are made on the Unreal Engine and back in the nineties there were a number of games that emulated the style of Capcom’s Final Fight and Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon was one of them.

Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon was an arcade beat em up game developed by Gazelle in 1995. The game was based off the anime character from Sailor Moon. The game itself played almost like Final Fight from the way the level design was created to how the life bar of the character and enemies were displayed.

You can pick one of the five main characters from the game or you can play two players together. While each character has her own special moves and attacks, most of the basic moves are the same. Just like Final Fight, there is a lot of button smashing and tons of bad guys after you also from the Sailor Moon series.

The game itself is pretty straightforward. You guide your character through multiple levels taking on random bad guys who are really only a threat to you if they surround you. Like in Final Fight if you learn to keep all the enemies in front of you and throw the bad guys into each other the game can be a piece of cake. Speaking of cake, unlike Final Fight where you smash oil drums and phone booths for food, in Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon candy drops randomly from bad guys that replenish some of your health.

Your standard attacks are a series of punches and kicks. You can also do a little charge attack and you can jump kick your enemies. The best method for killing bad guys is to hold them and punch them a few times before throwing them into their friends. In addition, a little trick from Final Fight that is useful in this game is to count a second in between your attacks, this will allow you to keep them stunned but not knock them down until they are out of health. This works best in one on one situations.

Each character has a special attack. You start out with the ability to use it once and can collect crystals from enemies to not only do them more often, but make them more powerful. When you hit the special attack button you get a little animation of the character saying something and then all enemies on the screen take damage.

When you reach the end of a level, you face a boss, which most of the time is not much harder than a normal bad guy but their attacks are much stronger. Sometimes Tuxedo Rose shows up and tosses a rose that causes damage and then leaves, quite the hero.

In a nutshell that is all to the game. You fight your way to the final boss and that is it. Unlike Final Fight, there are no weapons and nothing really to break. The music to me is quiet annoying and does not match the game, but perhaps it is a Sailor Moon tune, I really do not know. The sound effects are pretty standard and if you like the sound of Japanese women being hit then you might really like this game. As for me, it was a subpar rip-off of Final Fight with little girls in school uniforms.

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