The 3D Adventures of Sailor Moon

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The 3D Adventures of Sailor Moon
What can you expect from the crappy DiC dub license of the show that inspired every Magical Girl anime ever? One of the biggest disasters in personal computer gaming history!
Protagonist(s): Usagi Tsukino (or Serena)
Genre(s): Various
Platform(s): Microsoft Windows
Release Date: 1997
Developer(s): 3VR.inc
Publisher(s): 3VR.inc
Country: United States
Series: Sailor Moon


"Overall The 3D Adventures of Sailor Moon sucks, a lot! It shouldn't be a suprise either to call this a game would be like seeing soda brand licorices are great or toads a deadly parasite or the black screens an actual game, it's simply not true."

— VGamers


The 3D Adventures of Sailor Moon is an activity-center game compilation developed and published by 3VR.inc in 1997 under the DIC dub license only in the United States. This is also one of the two only games that were released in the United States of America and under the Sailor Moon license, the second game is Sailor Moon and Her Sailor Scouts Computer Fun Set.

Plot

Queen Beryl has stolen the sailor scouts' transformation pens and dropped them to the 5 play areas, Fashion Salon, Galactic Moon Library, Magical Puzzle Room, Crystal Fighting Arena, and Moon Castle TV Show.

Gameplay

The game consists of six mini-games, each of which has the transformational item of Sailor Scouts.

The gameplay is mainly about clicking in different places, but there are also elements of a logical arcade game.

Why In The Name of the Moon, We'll Punish This Game

  1. Let's start with the main problem with which this game is struggling, although the game is based on the DIC dub license, apart from the changed names of the characters, this game has absolutely nothing to do with this dub.
    • Speaking of licensing, even if the game had a lot of dub-related elements, the idea itself is weak on paper considering the reception of dub itself.
  2. Poor Presentation:
    • The game's logo looks pretty lazy because it's mostly white text surrounded by a green frame, the only meaningful decoration is the anime logo, which of course has been borrowed.
    • The front cover doesn't show much effort either, it's just the anime's main character copied from one of the screenshots from one of the episodes of this series pointing her finger at the game screenshots against a starry background, and that's it.
  3. False Advertising: On the back cover is a purported "review" claiming to give the game the highest possible rating, even though nothing is known about it and there is no evidence that it exists.
    • It is possible that the developers came up with this review to encourage the customer to buy their game.
  4. The intro looks very cheaply made because what was supposed to be a dance is more like swinging your legs and arms around and spinning. The models aren't too pretty either even for the later 90's standards.
  5. The menu is very poor as apart from the 6 minigames there is absolutely nothing to choose from. There is indeed an option to exit, restart the actor, and listen to the plots thoroughly, but these occur throughout the game, so it doesn't count.
  6. The plot is very silly and nonsensical as Queen Beryl steals pens from all the Sailor Scouts and scatters them around the rooms. The problem is that none of the rooms have absolutely no obstacles, so they could easily take them from there, which makes no sense at all that the game has to constantly run from one place to another to retrieve them all.
    • Plot holes:
      • In the Fashion Salon, Sailor Scouts can be seen wearing the clothes they usually wear after their transformation, which makes it clear that not only are they lazy and don't want to go there, but they also lied about these alleged "thefts".
      • The Crystal Fighting arena is even more criminal because you have to fight using Sailor Moon's pen, which is real and irrefutable proof that this fairy tale that some Queen Beryl stole the pens is one big lie.
  7. Most of the voice acting sounds like it was done by literally one female person with a frequently changing tone of voice where only from time to time we hear a completely different voice coming from a man and to top it all none of the actors come from dub as mentioned above.
    • They also talk for almost the entire game, which becomes irritating very quickly, and even worse there's no way to shut up them.
  8. Moon Castle TV Show is nothing more than a few collections of random anime clips designed to showcase one of the characters, and the entire minigame can be completed in a matter of seconds, switching from one collection to another all the time by clicking on the plus button.
  9. Fashion Salon is nothing more than a poor rip off of Barbie-based games with very limited features where the gameplay is just clicking on a 3d character model and taking 3 pictures of them where dressing up is only optional once switching to another character the minigame itself can also be completed very quickly as mentioned above by taking 3 pictures naked Sailor Scout with the option to skip Tuxedo Musk.
  10. Galactic Moon Library is nothing more than going from one place to another and then browsing through a gallery of random anime screenshots of a given character. The minigame can be completed as quickly as the two mentioned above by continuously scrolling through the pictures and skipping Rini.
  11. The Magical Puzzle Room is a puzzle based on 3 levels of difficulty, of which the 2 easier ones are no challenge because the easiest one has only 9 elements, the medium one has 16 elements, only the hard one has 25 elements and can be a challenge, but not too much great. The minigame can be completed in 2 or 3 minutes.
  12. And finally, The Crystal Fighting Arena:
    • The controls are very stiff as the player can't go backwards only forwards and the player can only use the mouse to control which is even more frustrating especially when turning because he has to hold down the mouse button and swing the mouse to turn. The left button is for turning and walking and the right to shoot.
    • The platform is incredibly small and incredibly lazy because it is a rectangle, the inside of which is extremely tight, so the player will rather roll on the walls due to the controls facing forward, which will prevent him from shooting most of the pumpkins and somewhere with one or two.
    • Speaking of pumpkins, they change their place very quickly and they move very far from the place, which for the two reasons given above will make it very difficult to shoot down any of the pumpkins, and sometimes they jump so high that you can't even reach them.
    • There's also no possibility to change the weapon although it was released in 1998 when also came out games such as Unreal or Half-Life, even Extreme Paintbrawl had that possibility.
    • On hardware higher than the Pentium II, the mini-game is unplayable, as the game runs at an incredibly high speed, so the pumpkins move very quickly and the player is barely able to hit them. In addition, pumpkins have an incredibly small hitbox, giving the impression that hit detection is working as intended.
  13. Sing a Long is a textbook example of trying to clog a CD because it's an intro and nothing else, also when you collect all the pens this is where the end of the game takes place.
    • Speaking of the ending, it's insulting to the player because the new menu is based on the same engine as the unplayable Crystal Fighting Arena and the boring one-second journey after Galactic Moon Library, which can make it difficult for the player to pick a mini-game from now on.
    • And of course, you can't forget about the length of the game, which is very short, because it can be completed in just 10 minutes, of which the first 3 minigames mentioned above are in less than a minute.
  14. The graphics, despite the rather high resolution of 640x480 for those times, barely match that of the 3DO, which for a PC whose power at that time was comparable to the Dreamcast is absolute ugliness and one big misunderstanding ranging from terribly made models to very lame animations and dull color palette. Here is the description of the graphic:
    • Starting with Fashion Salon which is where poverty is most visible:
      • 3D models consist of very few polygons in a very badly arranged way, giving the impression that the character looks like an angular doll, and the textures are very low resolution, which also makes them look scary. The animations of their moving aren't better because they are very stiff.
      • 2D models are also not pretty, some of them look like they were made in Paint and none of them are attractive.
    • The next stage is Crystal Fighting Arena:
      • The textures of almost all 3D models are incredibly low resolution to the point that they literally look like bloody vomit, and many of the models are lazily crafted and often the small elevations resemble deep cardboard boxes.
      • The pen also doesn't look the prettiest because it's not 3D and it's pixelated so that the weapons in Duke Nukem 3D look nicer than in this game.
      • Sometimes in the background where the textures in front of the background are supposed to resemble the background a bit and divide the already heavily divided border with invisible walls you can see that they intersect each other if you look closely.
    • And now the Galactic Moon Library:
      • There are few models here because apart from a few levitating models, all the rest is part of the texture which is also low resolution so everything is pixelated.
    • In the menu, the animations consist of only a few animation frames, which is a real example of the laziness of the creators.
    • Using 8-bit color depth the graphics look even worse than using 16-bit color depth which could easily work on 8-bit color, what can you imagine how terrible the graphics look in 8-bit.
    • In the Companion Menu after completing the game, many models have no textures and show clear pixels on the borders, and the colors also clash strongly with each other, which creates an unpleasant mixture.
  15. The music goes from mediocre not memorable to a real nightmare for the ears. Examples are listed below:
    • There are two tracks in Fashion Salon, one of them is bland and a bit repetitive, and the other sounds like f-a-r-t-i-n-g.
    • There are also two tracks in the Galactic Moon Library, both of which are generic. There isn't much to say about them.
    • The music in the Magical Puzzle Room is a MIDI loop that can get annoying after a while.
    • The music from The Crystal Fighting Arena is probably the worst offender of all, as it's a very tedious MIDI loop lasting literally a few seconds that gets annoying very quickly, especially during frustrating gameplay.
  16. The way the game is programmed is quite poor considering that the game likes to crash very often or not run at all on systems newer than Windows 98, basically on Windows XP or newer no matter how far the player reaches, the game will crash after some time.
  17. To make matters worse, the purchase of the game costs as much as $35, which for something that can be called a game only because it was released under the name of a computer game is an incredibly high price.

Redeeming Qualities

  1. Because of how bad it is, you can find this game hilariously bad, especially the voice acting, and the graphics.
  2. The cover art is still nice to look at and is accurate to the anime and manga.
  3. If you want to ignore everything bad about the game, then the game can be enjoyable.

Trivia

  • It was originally planned to add Sailor Neptune to the game but this was later canceled for unknown reasons.
  • Rini was originally intended to also wear clothes as can be seen in the game files, but this was also abandoned for an unknown reason, most likely due to the bare breasts seen in the image.

Videos

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