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Sailor Moon RPG: Another Dimension |  |
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By: Devin De Leon Homepage: http://members.aol.com/dvool/ Download: 0.97 MB Reviewed by: Pepsi Ranger |
The storms rise, the innocents fall, and the nightmare begins. The dimensional shift has happened, but no one knows how. Well, somebody has to know, but finding the knowledgeable ones of the world would require a feat greater than climbing a building without a rope. Unfortunately, the knowledgeable ones aren't the ones stuck in a negative reality. We are, and we're upset.
Let's get more specific. Serena, some blonde girl in a sailor's uniform, gets sucked into a dimensional shift on her way to school. Certainly something like that should improve her day, but it doesn't. Instead she is faced with the horrible dilemma of being lost in some crazy town with a cave and a river maze in its outskirts to add to her confusion. But, Serena's a tough girl who only cries and whines when it's necessary, so she does what she can to figure out what's going on, and to find a way back home. Of course, as she gets a handle on her little problem, she discovers that some of her other Sailor Scout friends were sucked in as well. As it turns out, a witch named Jasmine thought sucking them into the Nega-Verse would help her harness their power for her own malicious deeds. Even though Jasmine's efforts seem foolish to the common hero, since she's a supervillain who is bound to lose the fight, our five girls and their cat do what they can to stop her anyway. This means going through a number of obstacles from caves, to ice caves, to rooms inside caves to end the terrible threat of…something that doesn't seem so awful yet.
Anyway, that's the basic gist of the story from what I've gathered. But, before I continue with this review, I must post a disclaimer.
The Disclaimer:
I don't watch Sailor Moon, nor do I know anything about it. A girl at work told me that Sailor Moon has a sister who is actually her daughter in another dimension (which I find very odd), but that's about it. Aside from that, I really don't feel I'm qualified to give an accurate review of this game (which is why I waited so long to check it out). Therefore, I decided to let my eight-year-old sister play the game instead and base this review on her opinions. After all, she knows something about the show.
So, to make things clear to everyone reading this, this review does not exclusively reflect my thoughts. I'm not saying everything here will be completely representative of an eight-year-old girl's thoughts, but for the most part…just read the review.
The Review:
"It was fun," according to my little sister. Okay, what does that mean exactly? It's hard to say. She had fun finding all the Sailor Scouts, saying things like, "Ooh, there's Amy," and "Ooh, there's Lita," to name a few things. I guess that's good. She also wanted to keep playing it, so that must've had some potential too. Some of the battles proved to be a bit difficult for her, but once she learned to hold down the spacebar during the attack cycle, the game got easier. She also enjoyed going into the houses and talking to people. Yeah, maybe that's a given to any RPG game, but the kid liked it, so what difference does it make? She thought the graphics were okay, even though it wasn't much of a concern to her. In truth, every time I asked her what she thought about the graphics, she would talk about something different, so the look was next to irrelevant. She also liked the cat. Other things she enjoyed included…well, just about everything. Granted, she skipped through dialogue boxes from time to time, and she managed to freeze the game at least once, but for the most part she found it to be an entertaining experience. She sang along with the theme song, even though she only knew the chorus, and she named the Sailor Scouts whenever one was found, so it was something worth playing in her opinion.
But, even eight-year-olds have things they don't like about games. In this game, she wasn't crazy about Jasmine. She said, "Jasmine looked pretty, but should've looked like a hag." I think she was also disappointed with how many times the witch would show up, but never said so specifically. She disguised her feelings of the witch's arrival by saying things like, "Oh no!" and "Here, you fight her," as she handed the keyboard over to me. Other things that seemed to bother her were the invisible walls of the ice cave, and the smiles of the characters. I guess the Sailor Scouts should look like real sailors with the grunts and everything. I'm still not quite sure what she meant by that. I never noticed anybody's smiles, but if they were there, they obviously shouldn't have been. She was also annoyed by the difficulty of the hawks that hunted for prey in the second town. These things took a lot of hits to defeat, and the player couldn't run from them. Basically, encountering hawks equaled getting screwed (my words, not hers). The last thing that bothered her was the fact that there weren't more cats. Frankly, I think that's trivial, but cats still add to the excitement of an RPG game, so yeah, there should've been more cats.
Now, my disclaimer may limit the opinions of this review to my sister's thoughts, but I did watch at least half of this game (and played the other half when I was getting sick of waiting for it to end), so I managed to form a few opinions of my own anyway. I will start by saying that this game bored me to tears. I literally found myself putting my fingers up to my head like a pistol every time a new plot twist occurred. Not to say I didn't appreciate the plot twists or anything, but each new shift in the story told me that the game wasn't ready to end yet and that was just painful to me. I'm not saying that this game was horrible because in all things considered it was designed pretty well. The problem was that it was not meant to be played by people who don't know a thing about Sailor Moon. I don't feel it teaches enough about Sailor Moon to help a newcomer grasp the story line, and the story doesn't slow down long enough for someone like me to at least try and figure it out. Basically, I didn't like it. I'd get more detailed, but I'm really tired of thinking about this game. If anything, the design was interesting, and I imagine the story is strong enough to grip true fans. And that's what this game is good for--it's fans. But, the poor souls who enter Sailor Moon's alternative world without background knowledge will more than likely feel about as trapped as the game's characters reveal themselves to be.
Before I post the scores of this game, I want to make sure everyone knows that the numbers are a compilation of my thoughts and my sister's thoughts. Since she is ready to give out nines and tens for all categories, I should say that any true fan might agree with her. However, for those who are like me and don't have a clue about the stories this game is taken from, my considerably lower scores may suit to a greater justification. With that said, let's end this.
Scores:
| Graphics: Even though my sister didn't take much notice to the graphics and would just assume give them a ten anyway, I still took notice of them and felt that they had strong maptiles, but blocky walkabouts. Of course, that sort of forces it to cancel itself out, bringing the score to a little above average. But, when taking in consideration the nasty looking backgrounds, but the nicely translated anime cutscenes, the score evens itself out again. Therefore, if I were to take my score of six and average it with her score of ten, we come up with the final score of... | |
| Music: Since everything else in this game is ripped, I imagine the music is too. It still sounds pretty good regardless, and my sister sang along with the theme song, so I have nothing to complain about. My personal score for music would have to be a 7.5 or so, which I believe is substantial for this piece. Since she thinks the music is "very good," I'll take that to mean a 9.5 on her behalf. Therefore, our two scores averaged would mean a music rating of... | |
| Storyline: I should get something straight here. The story is not bad. I was bored with it because I can't relate to the characters, but if this were an original RPG game, I would say the story has a definite appeal to it. The twists keep it interesting, and enough stuff happens to keep things thick. However, the story still moved just a bit too fast, and as a non-Sailor Moon fan, I really didn't care about it. My sister on the other hand thought the story was good. I'm assuming that "good" means not quite excellent, therefore her score for the storyline would have to be an eight. I could be wrong, but the review is in my hands now, so we're gonna call it an eight. Since I think the story still goes somewhere, regardless of whether or not I liked it, I think it deserves at least a seven. When morphing our scores into one, we can safely say that the storyline deserves a... | |
| Gameplay: Ah, the gameplay. Is there really anything to say about the gameplay? Since I didn't play it very much, I can't really comment on the gameplay. However, my sister thought it "wasn't very easy, but was kind of easy." I guess that means a six roughly. I will agree that there were a few things (like the hawks) that made the game feel unbalanced, but it wasn't the most horrible thing I've known. At least the tough paths were subtly revealed, so the player never had to be lost at any given moment. But, in all things considered, there were plenty of dull times, so I'm limiting my score to a six as well. Since two sixes average to a six, that must mean the overall score for gameplay is a... | |
| Overall (Not an average score): Okay, now for the big one. What can one really expect from a Sailor Moon game? If a fan picks this game up and gives it a serious chance, he or she may be pleasantly surprised. However, if a non-fan picks this game up and gives it a try...it would be wise to lock all doors and board up all windows, and hope he doesn't come looking for a way to break tension. So, to sum up the scores for the game's overall appeal, eight-year-old girls would gladly give it a ten, but guys like me would say four at the absolute best. The kid loved it, but I cheered when it was over. Anyway, here's the combined score... |
Operation: OHR is owned and maintained by Kevin W. (Aethereal)