I love playing video games. It’s one of the first nerdy things I’ve ever done – play games on my Atari when I was 5 years old. I especially love retro video games – the older, the better. After a friend of mine posted about the Sailor Moon games that came out for the Super Nintendo/Super Famicom back in the height of Sailor Moon’s popularity, I figured I might as well see if I could find some of my old favorites to play with. And I wasn’t disappointed!
Here we’ve got the Sailor Moon S puzzle game! I have no idea what the actual official name of it is, as I can’t read Japanese much more than identifying the kanji that stand for Sailor Moon, but this is my favorite of all the puzzle games that were released for the Super Nintendo.
Most Sailor Moon fans of a certain age on the internet will definitely recognize these sprites – they were on Lycentia’s Sailor Moon Graphics Site! She’d lovingly pulled all the sprites from all the Sailor Moon Super Nintendo games, and animated some of them too. This is the character select screen – you can play as pretty much any character in the series up to the S season. I picked Jupiter, as she’s one of my long time favorites.
And we battle! I have no idea what she’s saying. Again. It’s okay, though.
A shot of the gameplay. The point is to clear clusters of two or more colored hearts to help bring the talismans down to the bottom of the screen. Whoever gets all three talismans to the bottom first wins. It’s pretty simple, and mostly you rely on luck and quick hand-eye coordination to get your talismans down before your opponents do. The music’s pretty repetitive – after playing for a little while, I ended up muting my computer’s sound. It’s not like the music actually comes from the series or anything – it sounds like pretty generic cutesy video game music that will likely get stuck in your head for days. I do love how the characters’ expressions change as you go through the game – poor Sailor Jupiter’s all exasperated that Sailor Moon just snagged a talisman.
Aaaand unfortunately, Sailor Moon snagged two more talismans, and I lost. Dangit! While I have made it past the first level in the past, I don’t think I’ve ever made it all the way to the end of the game. It’s pretty repetitive, though, all the levels are pretty much the same – just with increasing difficulty.
I think next time I might pull out one of the fighting games, or maybe dip into a longer game! This was kinda fun. 🙂