An English translation for Sailor Moon S for Sega Game Gear is now available

Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon S for Sega Game Gear

Great news for Sailor Moon fans who also appreciate classic video games! The 1995 Sailor Moon S video game for the Sega Game Gear has been translated into English! This seems like a somewhat odd choice of a game to translate as it’s not an RPG or something with a bunch of text, but a fairly simple side scroller. Still the translation is a useful one as it adds English to the title screen, multiple menus and even subtitles to some spoken cut scenes. This is not an official translation of a 24 year old game but rather a fan translation.

Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon S for Sega Game Gear - Title screen - English

Does this mean you’ll need to dust off your Sega Game Gear to play this? Not likely. The translation file supplied is in the form of a patch, an ips, which can be applied to a rom dump of the original game in order to make the English version. Fans would likely play this on some sort of video game emulator. Which you would want to use depends on what platform you like to play it on. Details and a download link are included on the Romhacking.net web site. This file alone will not allow you to play the game. You will need the original rom, the patch and software to patch it as well as an emulator. For legal purposes the original rom file, which is copyright, is not hosted on the site. The file name mentioned is “Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon S (Japan).gg”. I had an old file named “Sailor Moon S(jp).gg” and was able to patch it. I’ve also seen it called “Sailor Moon S (J).gg” on a site which hosted the rom. You’ll need software to patch the file. It’s not terribly complicated, but depending on your operating system it might require a bit of work. Since I use a Mac I needed to dig a little to find platform independent software to patch the game. I ultimately used a Pearl application ips.pl which can run in a Unix terminal but there are probably easier ways to do this on Windows.

Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon S for Sega Game Gear - Sailor Moon

I personally enjoy video game emulation on my Raspberry Pi equipped with RetroPie as well as a hacked 3DS I use for portable classic gaming. I tried out this game on my Raspberry Pi. It seemed to play well although I had trouble with the Rei’s Fortune Teller mini game. It just booted back to the menu instead of giving me my fortune. Speaking of that mini game! The game suffers from the Y2K bug as it is unable to take a date beyond 1999 for today’s date. This game is so old that it doesn’t even work right if played almost 20 years ago!

Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon S for Sega Game Gear - Rei's Fortune Teller - English

I originally played this game years ago as I bought the Game Gear game and a second hand Game Gear for the express purpose of playing it. The Game Gear has no restriction on playing international games. Since there’s very little Japanese text outside of the menus it was easy enough to play. As Sailor Moon games go this isn’t really the best. It’s a side scrolling sort of platformer sort of beat ‘em up game but there are much better Sailor Moon games of this type on the Super Famicom (Super Nintendo in North America). Most fans would probably tell you that the Sailor Moon Another Story RPG is the most worthwhile of the many Sailor Moon video games released on a number of systems throughout the 1990s. I certainly have enjoyed many hours with the game, though I find it has a very inconsistent difficulty curve. That game is also available in English along with the Sailor Moon R Super Famicom game. The Sailor Moon S and SuperS fighting games are also pretty fun and easy games to pick up.

Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon Another Story - Title screen

Have you played any classic Sailor Moon games? Which is your favourite?

Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon R - Title screen

Source: Silicon Era

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Sailor Moon Monopoly game review

Sailor Moon Monopoly - Board

The Sailor Moon Monopoly game is now out in stores and online. I got my copy from an EB Games store in Ottawa (the Canadian equivalent to GameStop) a while back and it seems like many fans have done the same. With the game in hand we can get a good look at exactly what’s going on with the various pieces! As we’d discussed earlier this seems to be Sailor Moon S the game for reasons which I can’t really fathom. The various characters are mostly all from Sailor Moon S, mainly the villains being the Witches 5, Professor Tomoe and Mistress 9 as well as the inclusion of all Sailor Guardians including Sailor Moon S’s new additional Sailor Uranus, Neptune and Saturn. With the Viz video releases now having reached the end of Sailor Moon SuperS this seems an odd way to do it. Perhaps the game was simply in development for too long or this may have been an intentional choice as many of the Sailor Guardians introduced in this season would not appear in Sailor Moon SuperS and a Sailor Moon Sailor Stars Monopoly game would not be as recognisable to fans. For whatever the reasons, it’s Sailor Moon S Monopoly!

As with many other versions of Monopoly this really is the same old game we’ve seen time and time again with a different esthetic. This was immediately obvious to me as I’ve played countless hours of the game in my youth and I even spent quite some time programming a Monopoly computer game in Turbo Pascal when I was a child (the game mostly worked well but lacked houses, hotels, Chance and Community Chest cards). This is good for purists who want to have the same game experience as normal Monopoly. One thing which I think is fairly odd however is the completely random grouping of characters for most of the properties. Allow me to rant a bit about each one.

Sailor Moon Monopoly - Mortgaged Properties

First we have Luna and Artemis, as a single property, bundled with Mimette of the Witches 5. Wouldn’t it have been easier to just use this, one of the only two pairs of properties, as Luna and Artemis? Mimette does not fit with Luna and Artemis at all. The characters don’t ever actually interact.

Next we have Eudial, Viluy and Tellu. This actually works! They are 3 of the Witches 5 and since there are no sets of five properties (most are groups of three) this sort of works!

Then there’s Cyprene/Ptilol with Kaolinite and … Sailor Chibi Moon! Kaolinite does have a brief interaction with Chibiusa at some point and the two characters do show up together in succession in the later versions of the Sailor Moon S credits. Cyprene and Ptilol fit only with Kaolinite. It would have made more sense to have put Mimette with her fellow Witches and then put Chibiusa with either her parents or maybe with Sailor Saturn!

Next is Sailor Mercury, Mars and Jupiter. There are all Sailor Guardians so this works decently. Aside from Sailor Moon they do spend some time together before Sailor Venus joins the show so I’ll say this is one of the three less terrible one.

Sailor Moon Sailor Stars episode 167 - Professor Tomoe and Hotaru

Next is Sailor Venus, Professor Tomoe and Sailor Pluto. None of these characters have much to do with each other, except perhaps for a brief interaction between Sailor Venus and Pluto in one episode of Sailor Stars. Sailor Venus belongs with the Sailor Guardians from the first season while Sailor Pluto fits in better with Sailor Uranus and Neptune or even with Sailor Chibi Moon. I would personally have put her with King Endymion but that’s because I like trolling people. Professor Tomoe is a villain and if he’s going to be paired with anyone but his fellow villains from the season it should probably be his daughter, and not the Sailor Guardians who steals his baby from him in Sailor Stars.

Next is Sailor Uranus and Neptune with … Tuxedo Mask! Naturally Sailor Pluto would have worked better here. There’s nothing these two lesbians love more than the show’s male love interest! At least Sailor Uranus and Neptune are together where they belong.

Sailor Moon Monopoly - Board

On the last side we have Sailor Moon with Sailor Saturn and Mistress 9. This sort of works since Sailor Moon fights Mistress 9 and sort of saves Sailor Saturn but these characters would fit so much better elsewhere. Saturn should be with her father or her friend Chibiusa and Mistress 9 could easily fit with the villains! It does of course work that two versions of Hotaru be grouped together.

Finally we have the only grouping that works well, and that is Neo Queen Serenity and King Endymion. The only issue here is that they don’t really appear in Sailor Moon S so they don’t fit with the game at all.

Live Action Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon Act 9 - Makoto the cop

Other groupings make some sense! The railroads are all items, either Talismans or Sailor Saturn’s Silence Glaive. The utilities are replaced by Sailor Moon’s items, that being her broach and rod. Jail and Free Parking are unchanged. It seems like there’s an opportunity here to use something a bit more Sailor Moon themed for these. Maybe Pharaon 90 sends you to the Tau Star System or something like that. A missed opportunity which leaves art which ultimately clashes with the rest of the game.

Sailor Moon Monopoly - Tokens

When it comes to the game pieces they are nice! These are the three Talismans, Sailor Moon’s Cosmic Heart Compact and Spiral Heart Moon Rod, and the Holy Grail. They’re all things and not characters but then aside from the dog most Monopoly game pieces are just things anyway.

Sailor Moon Monopoly - Money

The money is a bit odd. The colours and values are more or less kept from real Monopoly with different characters appearing on each bill. The money is all shown with an M with a slash through it. Moon dollars or something of the sort. It’s not like Sailor Moon takes place in a universe they don’t use normal currency. We frequently see prices and money in the series being yen. Is there some rule that a themed Monopoly came have some weird non existent currency?

Sailor Moon Monopoly - Love Cards

Finally we have the Love and Friendship Cards. These seem to basically be Chance and Community Chest cards with the flavour language changed and the same dollar amounts and consequences. The descriptions of what is occurring are just random events occurring during Sailor Moon S.

Sailor Moon Monopoly - Friendship Cards

Should you buy this game? If you wanted to I imagine you already would have! It’s just one of a very, very, very long series of Monopoly games with images based on many franchises. The specific decisions made in adapting this game seem to be pretty poor as someone with a minor amount of effort would likely have been able to put together property groupings and other aspects of the game which work much better. It seems like someone with next to no knowledge of the franchise was given a list of characters, art and perhaps episode summaries of Sailor Moon S and that they threw together a version of Monopoly that superficially seemed to have made sense. For my money the Sailor Moon games by Dyskami Publishing are a much better way to play a Sailor Moon game.

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