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.

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.

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!

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.

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

Source: Silicon Era

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