Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Sailor Moon Video Games

The Sailor Moon video games, both console and arcade, were released in Japan during the height of the media franchise's popularity. By 1998, 20 games were released. The games released as of 1995 each had sales figures of about 200 000 to 300 000. They have never been released in any other country, with the single exception of the Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon game developed by Angel, which was released in France in 1994.The games are hard to find in any other country unless downloaded from the internet as ROMs.
Bandai produced a small number of Sailor Moon games, but the majority were handled by a Japanese game company called Angel. Early games were side-scrolling fighters, whereas later games were unique puzzle games, and even later titles chose to go a versus fighting game style. Another Story was the only game to stand out, being a role-playing game. Panic in Nakayoshi World was also released, an overhead Adventures of Lolo-style puzzle game featuring characters from various Nakayoshi-printed manga. Sailor Moon and Chibi Moon are playable characters.
The games mainly saw release on the Super Famicom, with the first side-scroller being ported to the Mega Drive. A separate arcade side-scrolling fighter was also released. In addition, two side-scrolling adventure games were produced for the Game Boy (Sailormoon and Sailormoon R), and a side-scrolling game was also produced for the Game Gear (Sailormoon S).
The first versus fighting game from the series was released for the 3DO. However, as the 3DO did not sell well outside of Japan, this game has gone largely unnoticed. Produced by Bandai themselves as opposed to Angel for the other two, this game is considerably different. A final versus fighting game was released for the Sega Saturn and PlayStation.
The last Sailor Moon-related game to date was released in November 2001 - Happy Chibiusa World.
A game was released in the U.S. for the PC. It was a minigame compilation titled The 3D Adventures of Sailor Moon. Aside from the theme, the games did nothing to tie in to the series.
On July 15, 2010, Bandai Namco Games Europe announced development of a new Sailor Moon video game for Nintendo DS, which should be released by the end of 2010.

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