Artist Spotlights - Natalia Trepenok

 

The 3D Adventures Of Sailor Moon (PC) (Game Review)

Sailor Moon is one those franchises that is an exception to my general revulsion to anime nowadays, because it holds nostalgic value and it’s female-centric cast was a comforting form of escapism for me when I was a closeted baby-gay back in the late 90s/early 2000s. (A friend once drew me as Sailor Venus in middle school - as a joke - and I ended up loving the idea of it! ). It also helps that the characters aren’t floppy water balloon-boob monsters who are constantly trying to show their panties to the camera (in general, I find the visuals of older anime shows much more pleasant to look at).  Looking back on it as an adult, I’m bothered by the anti-queer censorship the show faced in America, and as adorable as all the Sailor Scout uniforms are, it’s a little off-putting that these gals in tiny miniskirts are all supposed to be 14. But I can appreciate the show’s colorful visuals and it’s intended message of spreading love, being good to your friends, and standing up to up evil jerks.



That leads me to the discovery of this obscure little computer game. It’s more of one of those old “activity center” pieces of software than game, but it does also contain puzzles, action elements and and end goal!

(I wanted to be like Sailor Venus when I was a teenager. She was so cool and    has awesome hair, too!)

It’s all pretty simple as it was likely designed with very young fans in mind, but it was fun to look around at everything. It starts with an 3D animation of the Sailor Scouts dancing on the game’s main map screen. I’ve seen a lot of people make fun of the character models, and they do have silly looking vacant smiles on their faces, but I’m sure they were trying their best with what technology was available at the time. The weirdest part of it for me was how strangely jittery the camera gets at one point!

Once you get to the main map screen, You learn that the game’s winning condition is based upon finding an item in each activity center. Unfortunately it’s not well-explained *how* you find these items, and I eventually gave up trying to find the two that I couldn’t get to show up. Every time I “found” one, I only knew that it had happened because a sparkly sound played and I heard some lady tell me that I found it! (even though nothing showed up on-screen…?).

          (And whenever I’d get excited, my mouth would get REALLY BIG!!)

As for the activity center thingies themself, there are 6 in all. The first one I checked out was a video player, which was pretty charming as it showed  a lot of little randomly chosen art images paired with little AMV videos you could watch, that had very cool music, and I actually like that the videos were clearly pulled from an old VHS tape because it gave them that “retro wave”/“Vapor-wave” feel that I’ve come to enjoy.

The next activity I tried was the puzzle game. This one does have actual game-play, and probably the best of all the activities in this regard. You can pick from 3 sets of increasingly challenging tile puzzles where you move the parts around to complete an image.

Next, I tried the “Crystal Fighting Arena”. Oof. This was probably the least fun of the activity centers. It has a first person perspective and your job is to shoot a bunch of little objects that are floating around. The old-school 3D visuals are certainly charming, but the controls are awful and made me wish they were mapped out more like in Doom or Wolfenstein.

Next, is the “Galactic Moon Library”. This starts you off with those same awful 3D controls from the last activity, but thankfully all you need to manage is to walk around a cute little UFO-looking room and activate a computer console. Here, you can read bios about the show’s main cast, and see a bunch of screenshots form the shows too. Sailor Mars apparently loves vegetarian pizza, which makes me wonder if she actually is vegetarian? That would be neat. :) Also, when you look through Rini’s image gallery, you get some nice artwork of the  characters Artemis and Luna as well. Hooray for cute cats! Seeing Rini nowadays, I can’t help but imagine her sounding like Sweetie Bell from My Little Pony. I think it’s the floofy hair.

Lastly, was the “Moon fashion Salon”.  If you’ve ever played with paper dolls or tried out any of those dress-up flash games that were pretty common in the early 2000s, this is like one of those. You can actually have these kids wear some pants! …But it sucks that Darien doesn’t get the option wear any pretty dresses (laaaame!). It was fun to get through all the different clothing styles- I’m a sucker for any game that lets you customize your characters outfits. A lot of the garments had comically gaudy patterns on them, but some were kinda cute looking. It’s kind of  shame that the outfits you pick out for the characters don’t actaully show up on the 3D models of them in the main screen. It also felt annoying limited that whenever you changed clothing sets, you’d lose your current outfit, making it harder to mix and match things.  Also, why is it called a “Salon”? You can’t change anyone’s hairstyles!

(Thanks to youtuber jamcal for posting footage of the 3D City so I could get this screenshot!)

Now, lastly, i you unlock all 6 mcguffin items, you unlock the final area! 3D City! This one I decided to just look up on YouTube, as sadly, when I went to try the game again later to see if I could finish it, I found out that it didn’t save my progress…I won’t count this as a point against the game itself because it probably has more to do with the fact that I was running it from a Windows 95 emulator that I’ve never used before, and I probably just did something wrong upon shutting it off. All that said, the 3D City was ultimately disappointing to me. All it is a 3D version of the game’s main map hub, complete with an awkward floaty camera. Personally, the regular hub world map seems like it’s a lot easier to navigate.

So, do I recommend this? Well, maybe as a novelty if you have a fondness for Sailor Moon and/or old-school Windows 95 aesthetics. There’s very little game-play,but it could be a cool collectible for a Sailor Moon fan, and the puzzle mini-game was actually pretty fun and challenging on the higher difficulties! If you’re wanting a  physical copy, the game’s pricing on ebay runs from about 20-90 bucks depending on the seller.  However, if you’re just casually curious and want to try it out first, there’s a nice copy of the game configured for modern computers here:  https://collectionchamber.blogspot.com/p/the-3d-adventures-of-sailor-moon.html This cool person is working hard to get old computer games running properly on modern machines, and I love to see folks preserving art like that! Kudos to you,  Collection Chamber. The original development team for this game, 3VR Inc., shut down in 1998 so if you’re the type to feel badly for not paying, you can be rest assured knowing that there is no longer any way to buy the game directly from the creators anymore, anyway.