The 3D Adventures of Sailor Moon

"Overall The 3D Adventures of Sailor Moon sucks, a lot! It shouldn't be a suprise either to call this a game would be like seeing soda brand licorices are great or toads a deadly parasite or the black screens an actual game, it's simply not true."

- VGamers The 3D Adventures of Sailor Moon is a computer game compilation developed and published by Californian company 3VR Inc.(that's their only game before they filed for bankruptcy in late 1998) and released for mh:awesomegames:Microsoft Windows in 1997. The game is based on the 1992 anime series Sailor Moon, albeit the game is more specifically based on the DiC/Cloverway dub And it's also the only game released in the US. The game looks very similar to the well-known games from Phoenix Games and was falsely advertised by 3VR as a technological achievement in the gaming industry, but the game did not gain much popularity anyway.

Advertising on the Back of the Box
The Best 3D Interactive CD-ROM Game Based on The Hit TV Series “Sailor Moon”!!!

Enter the magical and mystical world of the Sailor Scouts and explore new places and play challenging games all in the latest 3D technology. The Sailor Scouts are ordinary high school girls who transform into glamorous powerful super heroes who stand for justice and fight against the evil forces of the Nevaverse.

Magical Puzzle Room - 3 levels of play ranging from the basic 9 sided cube mysteries to the difficult 25 sided challenges, with over 50 different 3-D puzzles. Solve each puzzle to see a Sailor Scout Image and listen to the important message each puzzle reveals.

Crystal Fighting Arena - Test your sharp-shooting accuracy against flying crystals and moving targets. Increase your score by beating the clock and hitting as many targets as you can.

3D Fashion Salon & Fitting Room - Admire the super fantastic costumes and custom design what each Sailor Scout will wear. Pick and chose from beach gear, fighting gear, formal dress wear and lots of cool fashion accessories.

Moon Castle TV Show - Here you can see the Sailor Scouts in action or MoonTV. View over 10 different videos created from the best-loved episodes - accompany by cool music.

Plot
Queen Beryl has stolen the Sailor Scout's transformation pens so that they can't transform and scattered them all so that the Sailor Scouts could not find them, and she scattered them in the following areas;

The Galactic Moon Library - Sailor Jupiter's pen.

The Magical Puzzle Room - Sailor Mercury's pen.

Moon Castle TV Show - Sailor Mars's pen.

Sing A Long.

Crystal Fighting Arena - Sailor Moon's pen.

Fashion Salon - Sailor Venus's pen.

The player's task is to find all transformation items in all five areas, bounce them form hands of Queen Beryl and return Sailor Scouts.

Gameplay
The game consists of six mini-games, each of which has the transformational item of Sailor Scouts.

The gameplay is mainly about clicking in different places, but there are also elements of a logical and arcade game.

Why It (Intentionally?) Should be Punished in the Name of the Moon
NOTE: Due to the quality of the game, it's possible that the game was intentionally ill-designed to show DiC and Videogame Advisor the middle finger for something they didn't even do, and as a scam.
 * 1) The very idea of ​​creating a dub-based game just to make money from this dubbing is very stupid considering that it has received a negative reception.
 * 2) * Even worse, the game apart from the theme music and the names of the protagonists has almost nothing to do with this dub, which is out of the question.
 * 3) The box is quite lazily-made, because it consists of the Sailor Moon that is stuck on, 8 official screenshots, background made of stars and nothing else.
 * 4) * False advertising:
 * 5) ** There are eight official screenshots on the cover, one of which (actually the one presenting the Fashion Salon) has a model that looks better than in the real game, which is an attempt to hide the quality.
 * 6) ** It says on the back cover that she's playing uses the latest 3D technology when the graphics are extremely awful(see WI(I?)SbPitNotM#5).
 * 7) ** The dub's theme song is considered a key feature on the cover, which considering it's a licensed game, should've already been taken for granted at this point, especially since CD audio was now possible at this time.
 * 8) ** On the cover there is a review from Videogame Advisor about which it is not known if it happened at all. It is possible that the developers came up with a fake review in order to encourage the customer to buy.
 * 9) The logo of the game is very lazily-made. A part of the logo, "The 3D Adventures of", is just a simple white text surrounded by a green frame and "Sailor Moon" is simply a anime logo.
 * 10) The game, although it was released a year later and on much more powerful hardware, is even worse than the game on Playstation and Sega Saturn in every way possible.
 * 11) Unimaginably terrible intro, which is even worse than in Sailor Moon Super S: Shin Shuyaku Sōdatsusen. The Sailor Guardians, no joke, spin like Sky Dancers and wave their arms and legs in all possible directions, and the cats animation looks like it was made in Paint 3D, and the models of all characters look like plastic dolls. The quality of the intro of this game is on par with the quality of the music from Crazybus.
 * 12) Extremely terrible graphics that makes the graphics of both Superman 64, Bubsy 3D and Sailor Moon Super S: Shin Shuyaku Sōdatsusen look like a 9th generation games, and it must be added that the game was released on a much more powerful platform than Playstation, Sega Saturn and mh:awesomegames:Nintendo 64, so it deserves no justification.
 * 13) * Fashion Salon is the most infamous example.
 * 14) ** The 3D models in Fashion Salon consist of a small amount of angles and unsightly textures and evoke associations with 3DO or even worse, Super FX, rather than with the equipment from 1997. They are also a symbol of the game's graphical backwardness.
 * 15) ** The 2D models, clothes and symbols in Fashion Salon are extremely bland and pixelated and look as if they were made in Microsoft Paint and additionally blurred.
 * 16) * The graphics in Crystal Fighting Arena are a simple recipe for vomiting.
 * 17) ** The texture of the substrate is stretched to such an extent that it literally looks like bloody vomit.
 * 18) ** The models in the center of the map that were supposed to resemble volcanoes are even worse than the texture of the floor, because they look like little cardboard hills that are additionally crushed.
 * 19) ** The walls and the background also look very cheap and lazy, the walls are just a copy and paste the same texture, if you look closely, you will see that the walls are crossing each other, and the background is pixelated and does not even resemble what is on arena.
 * 20) * The situation is similar in The Galactic Moon Library.
 * 21) ** The equipment of the location is literally part of a highly stretched wall texture where pixels are literally visible. Only the hovering stars are separate models.
 * 22) ** The graphics accompanying viewing photos are so pixelated thanks to the color palette that it may cause vomiting.
 * 23) * Even the loading screen looks bland.
 * 24) ** The Sailor Moon 3D model from the loading screen looks like it was made by the same person who made the intro and looks like it was created with the copy and paste function.
 * 25) ** The 2D models from the loading screen and Sing a Long (similar to the ones from Fashion Salon) if you look closely, you will see that they also resemble models from Microsoft Paint, but with various extras.
 * 26) * Terrible color palette, 16 Bits color depth is same as 8 Bits and it's just insipid and may cause gag reflexes with 3D models from Fashion Salon.
 * 27) * If you look closely, you can see that the menu is not even three-dimensional but simply consists of pasted pictures and in fact, this is how the menu was made, you can see it in the game files.
 * 28) The animations aren't much better than graphics (basically on par with graphics).
 * 29) * The 3D model animations in Fashion Salon are very stiff (they look as if they were made in the times of the first Alone in the Dark, i.e. 5 years earlier).
 * 30) * The animations in the menu consist of 3 to 6 frames and you can see that the developers did not want to work on animations.
 * 31) * The weapon animation in Crystal Fighting Arena consists of 5 frames and repeats 3 times (similar to the menu).
 * 32) * Sailor Moon's animation from the loading screen is extremely lame and is on par with the intro.
 * 33) Very long loading time, by the standards of 1997. The loading time of the game, although the mini-games are small, takes up 5 seconds. Even mh:awesomegames:Quake II with much better graphics and huge maps loads faster.
 * 34) Atrocious voice acting from the narrators as well as what is supposed to be Queen Beryl (though it's off-screen) in the Galactic Moon Library.
 * 35) * Even worse, none of the dub's voice actors reprise their roles, not even for Queen Beryl, who is the only actual character from the show to get any sort of dialogue, and this is a licensed game.
 * 36) * Unlike Bubsy 3D, you can't even mute them, so you have to put up with that voice all the time because it speaks half the game.
 * 37) A poorly and lazily made menu that consists of six mini-games, an exit button, a retelling the plot button and a button to repeat what the actor said in his horrible voice to the player what to do. At most, you can forget about options, credits, the ability to save and load, or the high score list.
 * 38) * The buttons for telling the story and resuming the actor's voice are completely useless, because firstly, the plot is told immediately after the intro, and secondly, what is displayed on the screen immediately tells the player what to do, so they didn't have to add those buttons at all.
 * 39) * It is also in vain to look for options outside the game, and the only window that appears when starting the game has only 2 options, either starting the game or not.
 * 40) ** The window also looks very lazy as the artwork literally looks like it was made in Paint. If you don't believe, you can see here
 * 41) Stupid And Nonsensical Plot: Queen Beryl steals the transformation pens. In all six locations, there are absolutely no obstacles that would prevent them from retrieving items, so they could easily enter to any location and take it for themselves, so why couldn't at least one of them actually try to get them back? Were they so lazy that you yourself have to get them while the Sailor Guardians do nothing more than being couch potatoes?
 * 42) * Plot holes:
 * 43) ** In the Fashion Salon, the Sailor Guardians can be seen in the very suits that they transform into. This could imply that not only are the Sailor Guardians lazy couch potatoes that have already been flanderized by the dub, but they lied about the transformation pens being stolen as a stupid excuse for being lazy.
 * 44) ** In Crystal Fighting Arena you fight with Sailor Moon's weapon, which you retrieve just in this area, which is the ultimate proof that they lied about the theft of pens.
 * 45) The game crashes a lot. It doesn't matter how far you get, or how much time you've spent on it, it will crash during your experience at some point.
 * 46) Unbalanced FPS speed: on newer hardware the game works too fast, which is especially felt in The Crystal Fighting Arena.
 * 47) The Fashion Salon is simply you dressing up the Sailor Guardian in whatever random clothes you decide to choose and taking them a photos.
 * 48) Moon Castle TV Show is just a bunch of random clips from the show with the audio replaced with whatever music the developers got from some stock techno mix CDs they had lying around in their archives.
 * 49) Galactic Moon Library is nothing more than march from one place to another and looking at personal profiles of the Sailor Guardians themselves and reading information about them.
 * 50) Magical Puzzle Room is a bunch of picture puzzles with no real challenge to them, very similar to that of some games from Phoenix Games, except every time you complete one of them, one of the awful voice actors shoehorns in some bland moral that's unskippable (with the exception of the last one which lets you know that you unlocked Sailor Mercury's transformational pen), which makes them worse than the ones from Phoenix Games.
 * 51) The Crystal Fighting Arena has horrible mouse controls, as you move way too fast & slipper as well as barely being able to shoot the targets you're supposed to shoot. You will most likely just be wandering around in the really bland looking, & flat 3D space in the shape of a rectangle or square and rolling over invisible walls. Even worse, the hit detection only works when it wants to and most often it does not. There's no way to actually know when your weapon is going to register, or not. This minigame makes the game almost unbeatable.
 * 52) * The idea of ​​making a FPS game for little girls is one of the stupidest gameplay ideas a human can come up with. The only FPS games for kids so far have been Super 3D Noah's Ark and mh:awesomegames:Chex Quest, and the protagonist of these types of games is usually a man, not a woman.
 * 53) The Sing A Long segment is literally just the theme song to the DiC dub, & nothing else.
 * 54) A game for completing a mini-game and retrieving an item offers nothing in return, on the contrary, it blocks the player's access to the mini-game until the rest of the game is completed.
 * 55) The game is very short, it can be completed in less than 10 minutes and even worse, the Galactic Moon Library, Moon Castle TV Show and Fashion Salon can be completed in just seconds.
 * 56) * As for the length of minigames, you can complete the Moon Castle TV Show in 3 seconds, skipping all movies, Fashion Salon in 10 seconds by taking photos of heroes wearing only underwear, and the Galactic Moon Library in 15 seconds by clicking the photos quickly, and you can even skip Chibiusa.
 * 57) Awful Ending: The reward for completing the game is a menu that is based on the same engine as Crystal Fighting Arena and the Galactic Moon Library, which makes it difficult to choose the area you want to go to. You get nothing else.
 * 58) Back then, when the soundtrack in Sailor Moon Super S: Shin Shuyaku Sōdatsusen was good, here it is awful.
 * 59) * The music from the menu is a awful 2-second MIDI loop consisting of 2 instruments. Only from time to time another instrument will appear for 2 repetitions.
 * 60) * The music from Crystal Fighting Arena is nothing more than a awful 10-second MIDI loop and this can add to the frustration of a desperate attempt to shoot any of the pumpkins.
 * 61) * The music from the Magical Puzzle Room, like from Crystal Fighting Arena, is a awful MIDI loop, only it lasts 20 seconds and usually does not allow you to focus on solving the puzzle.
 * 62) * Music from Fashion Salon consists of 2 awful MIDI music tracks lasting 20 seconds each. One of them literally sounds like farting.
 * 63) * The music from The Galactic Moon Library, although it is not as horrible as the ones mentioned above, it is boring and puts the player bored with other mini-games to sleep.
 * 64) * With the Sound Blaster 16, the soundtrack is even worse, because not only is it made up of horrible 10 to 20-second MIDI loops, it is also massacred.
 * 65) Boring and bland sound effects, they lack the charm that those from Quake 2 or Turok had, and if that was not enough, they do not sound like their own authorship, but rather like torn from other titles.
 * 66) In the game files, you can find a half-naked Chibiusa who does not have a bra at all, although this picture is not in the game at all.
 * 67) The game cost US$35, which is an exorbitantly high price for what cannot even be called a game.
 * 68) The badly made official website of the game that is full of pride. The authors consider themselves masters in creating graphics when they did not actually make any experience (considering that the graphics of the game looked terrible even at that time).
 * 69) * Even worse, the site is also not without lies, the authors admit to the authorship of non-existent titles.

After release
The game, although falsely advertised as a technological leap, sold very poorly and received an overwhelmingly negative reception from players, even from dub fans. As a result of extremely poor sales, 3VR announced bankruptcy in late 1998. The game itself fell into oblivion very quickly and is sometimes even compared to Bubsy 3D.

YouTubers
The game, while not reviewed by any of the critics, it was reviewed by a few little-known YouTubers who criticized the lame intro, poor graphics, non-existent gameplay and pointless plot. One of them even stated that it was not even a game and recommended that all Japanese exclusives should be played instead.

Average of players' ratings
The average rating of players on GameFAQs out of 11 is 2.17 / 5, or 2 stars out of five, for the 12 ratings, only 3 people gave a positive rating, but most likely they're sarcastic ratings.

Trivia

 * It was the second game based on this anime to be released outside of Japan after Sailor Moon Arcade, Previously, the games were created by the Japanese company Angiel, which dealt exclusively with the local market.
 * It is also the first game based on this anime to be released on the PC.
 * The game was originally supposed to be called "Sailor Moon - The 3D Virtual Adventures" but was for unknown reasons eventually renamed "The 3D Adventures of Sailor Moon".

Gameplay
vAQ2ewaVh98&t

Intro
VjiJkt0m9pE

AuroraPeachy's Gameplay
pdZeYda9ppY&t p0DT0THGS_s gKojj_Gof8A

Reviews
0ivWj-RohQ4 xD_x2xFA6ws&t N58wodblYCY

The 3D Adventures of Sailor Moon
https://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/3d-adventures-of-sailor-moon/screenshots

3VR.inc
https://www.mobygames.com/company/3vr-inc

3VR's Website
https://web.archive.org/web/19980129010654/www.3vr.com/history.html