Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon: Another Story

"Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon..."

Being a fan of Sailormoon (Bishoujo Senshi Seeraa Muun), and before playing it I was very excited to play it. The game takes place before the third season and after the second season. (I think I got that right lol).

You get all of the senshi that are playable, but you can't play Tuxedo Kamen. Which isn't that bad because I mean come on, he throws roses...that would be a lame special attack for the whole duration of the game. Anyway he really isn't that a big of a role in the game.

The whole game is pretty much linear (with a few exceptions) but you get to time travel, which is nice because the graphics of the game are quite good. The caves/dungeons however are all the same twisty/turny just with a different colour and setting. >.<
Other than that, the sprites and spell effects are fairly nice, not outstanding but still worth looking at. The senshi also have some ''voice-acting'', basically yelling out the names of some of their attacks like in the show which is cool.

The gameplay IS unique one way, where you can combine (link) senshi and there are different attacks because of that. But otherwise it's plain RPGing basically, so if you're a RPGer the gameplay should be no play, and if not it's not hard to learn at all, like most RPGs. The qualm I have with it is that the senshi don't learn any new attacks by themselves, I know it's keeping in tradition with the show/manga series but that'd been a little better in my opinion.

The audio isn't too special...there's a few tunes here or there that is from the show (or a variation) and are nice but the rest is plain, the quality expected of SNES, but not above it.

The storyline itself really isn't that special, but there's a few things to do in it other than beating the bad guys, like a lot of subplots so that's worth something.

The difficulty of this game is the most in the beginning, in a way you have to strategize how to place your senshi and which link attacks to use. Plus levelling up is a factor in some areas of the game, so this game is really difficult if you don't know how to arrange things, but after that it's pretty easy, oh and if you have Sailorsaturn with her equipped stuff the whole game is pretty much a breeze unless you purposely want it to be hard.

Replay value isn't very high, because there's not much to do after you beat the game. However you might want to level everyone up to 99, which seems like a popular thing to do nowadays.

All in all if you're not a Sailormoon fan you probably won't want to play this game, but I suggest you at least try it. It's rather addictive, after a while but truthfully it's worth more renting (uh if you can ha) if you absolutely don't want anything to do with it, because it is worth playing on some level, and buying it is only worth it after you've tried it and you think you want to play it.
(Or if you love Sailormoon to death)

Gameplay: 8/10
Graphics: 8/10
Audio: 6/10
Storyline: 8/10
Replay: 4/10
Overall: 8/10

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 04/19/03, Updated 04/19/03