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Someone Awful! posted:a not-uncommon anime trope is playing old man perversity for laughs Rei's grandfather says hello.
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Jun 24, 2016 19:04
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| # ? Jun 2, 2024 04:20 |
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Leveling up Mercury is probably the last painful of the lot. Girlfriend can take a speeding train to the face and not even need to fix her hair.
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Jun 24, 2016 19:12
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END ME SCOOB posted:He will totally die. But he's a strong man, unlike that poor defenceless woman? 
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Jun 24, 2016 20:43
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sheep-dodger posted:But he's a strong man, unlike that poor defenceless woman? Exactly! He's strong, so he will die. You must grow strong before you become truly weak. 
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Jun 24, 2016 21:11
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and Happarosai in Ranma 1/2, creepy old perverts was extremely common in 90s/early 00s anime - I'm glad at least for all the faults that the creepy old perverts aren't treated as light comedy anymore.
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Jun 24, 2016 23:22
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Hi thread! I'm a little late because I wanted to read the whole thing before posting. I tried playing this game many years ago but got completely stonewalled by the solo Mercury chapter. I rage quit after my attempts to grind always ended in death and misery, so I'm really glad to see how the game progresses without having to endure the horrors for myself. I vote Go help mom . Robindaybird posted:and Happarosai in Ranma 1/2, creepy old perverts was extremely common in 90s/early 00s anime - I'm glad at least for all the faults that the creepy old perverts aren't treated as light comedy anymore. I agree with you, I hate Happousai and his various clones. Ugh. I don't ever find that funny.
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Jun 25, 2016 17:11
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Cheese Pain posted:Hi thread! I'm a little late because I wanted to read the whole thing before posting. I tried playing this game many years ago but got completely stonewalled by the solo Mercury chapter. I rage quit after my attempts to grind always ended in death and misery, so I'm really glad to see how the game progresses without having to endure the horrors for myself. Mercury's chapter becomes somewhat less painful when you realise one thing about her (spoilered in case END ME SCOOB was gonna mention this later): Her Shabon Spray debuffs enemy attack power. Hit an enemy once or twice with it and they become pretty much unable to hurt you.
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Jun 25, 2016 23:18
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I actually did not know that because while I've found myself going "how do only the enemies get status attacks" it's not like anything makes this transparent within the game.
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Jun 25, 2016 23:57
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a cartoon duck posted:Mercury's chapter becomes somewhat less painful when you realise one thing about her (spoilered in case END ME SCOOB was gonna mention this later): Her Shabon Spray debuffs enemy attack power. Hit an enemy once or twice with it and they become pretty much unable to hurt you. I was a teenager who didn't know much about RPGs at the time, so this would have definitely helped me to know! I'm kind of wondering if I'll give it another try sometime because the thread makes it look fun, but the grinding, ugh.
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Jun 26, 2016 04:30
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 Survey said... 2 votes do our job, 10 votes save the lady. For the record: if y'all were sadistic, you'd have said "get in the hole", because it immediately begins the boss battle, no chance to back out, with additional dialogue where Mercury finally goes "Oh my god Hans get the gently caress out of here you are out of your depth". However, to balance this out, we would also be sexually harassed by Dr. Schwartz to end the chapter.  Instead, Dr. Schwartz will be surprised we're actually alive, imply that the consequences had we waited would be dire for the patient (they wouldn't, she still lives), and Hans takes credit for returning the moss.  No, really.  However, having an actual job to get to, Mercury just slips out tbe back while Hans whispers sweet nothings to his mother.  Hans' mother is healed, everyone is happy, and to top it all off...  We are now barred from ever seeing Hans again. If we try to reenter the house, Mercury shakes her head and just says "No, I can't do it, it's pointless". Technically, the "happy" ending here is if we bum rush the crystal, because the two part ways amicably as she leaves! On with the events!  So this is the cave entrance we found the good doctor in, as well as where we did most of our grinding, but do you notice that the path continues on and up to the right? We want to go that-a-way to find the earthquaked stone.  It gets pretty linear from here. The cavern winds on and on, the same random encounters show up as in the first one, and eventually there is a save point.  AND THEN THIS BROAD ARRIVES IN A ZWEE OF TELEPORTATION  So, Sailor Mercury, you finally arrive. Who are you? Seeing as how you'll be dead shortly, I have no formal need to introduce myself. Die, Sailor Mercury! So this is Nabu. Nabu is (currently) not a problem at all. I entered this fight at a mere level 13 and all Nabu does in this encounter is smack us around. Mercury's a friggin' tank though, so even once I run out of EP and just damage-race her, it's pretty easy.  Indeed... Anshar warned me of this. So is this Anshar your leader? (stunned) (Damnit! What do I do... do I respond to that, or...?) ...For the good of the cause, I shall kill you! Is that necessary? I don't know what "your cause" even is. What's your goal? Our goal? Our goal is...(The battlefield dissolves into flashback.)  So it's hard to convey since most of this is transcription, but Nabu is basically ranting to herself right now, and Ishtar is just shrugging or occasionally making a puzzled face. Especially after a certain point. Are you okay with that? (shrug) (walking away) Isn't the Silver Crystal's power amazing? Scientists haven't been able to figure out how or why it works! But how could a power that science can't comprehend... how can that protect the world?(The mall gets darker around the two of them.)  Troubled people... (looking around) Where did that voice come from?(Ishtar is just staring at her friend baffled at this point, especially as she follows the voice around.) You question the power of the Silver Crystal...? W-well, yes... It does have such wondrous power. But such a power could never last forever... Alas, nobody knows when that well will run dry.(At this point, Ishtar is just waving a hand in front of Nabu's face in vain.) Yes! I've been thinking the exact same thing! That miracle can't last forever! I'm gathering together people like you and I... Nabu, join us. We'll figure out how the Silver Crystal works, you and I... and what will become of its power. Absolutely! I'm on board! (A black beam begins sucking Nabu up into the sky. Ishtar is still absolutely baffled. Flashback ends...) Our goal? It's to get the Silver Crystal from you! (manic) I'LL KEEP GOING UNTIL THE END!!And this is where poo poo goes south.  At this point, Nabu hulks the gently caress out. She suddenly gains the Tempest ability, which slams us for a middling-to-decent amount of damage, but the real kicker is that her defense has skyrocketed and she will now cast poison on us as much as possible. It's got a low hit rate, but if it lands, you need to fix that poo poo immediately, because it's going to do something like 25-35 damage per round and chew you up. Combine this with the fact that we currently have no items that heal status AND HP, and this fight becomes a losing battle of attrition, since she has unlimited EP* and we do not. "Fine," I thought at this point, "I'll capture the game over screen for the thread, they'll want to see that sometime."  "Oh. It just instantly reloads the last save when you die. That's anticlimactic." So at this point, I rubber-banded my controller and set Mercury to running around in here to level up a bit. We went in at level 17 and I figured, sure, why not. That also did not work. A series of lucky crits and her hitting with poison every turn I cured it wiped me out. So I decided I was going to make god drat sure I didn't have to do this a third time. I went to watch a bunch of TV and left the game running. How much did I powerlevel in that time period?  Well, puzzle pieces don't drop from every random encounter, but as you can see, that poo poo is way more filled in than when we got to Switzerland. We're level 22.  This was also the point where I went "I get a miniscule damage drop if I use Shabon Spray versus the cost of the others, let's spam that longer". According to one person in the thread, Shabon Spray actually debuffs an enemy, which is mentioned nowhere in the game and signaled by nothing, but this too probably didn't hurt if true. (Is there some source of these secret bonus effects to Sailor skills I should be looking up? God, I'd love that knowledge for future chapters.) Anyway, long story short, we finally fed Nabu her berserker teeth on round three.  I'm so exhausted... fighting for these stones in a cramped place like this. (She shrugs.) Letting you have this stone won't stop us. Nergal will stop your friends, and Tuxedo Mask will remain out of the picture. (Nabu begins floating.) Sailor Mercury... this battle will continue. W-wait!(Nabu does not wait, vanishing in midair.)  Realizing her foe is gone, Mercury just lets out a cheer and picks up the stone. At this point, I feel it's time to point out what an inferior foil for Mercury Nabu is: if you could teleport... why did you not just take the drat stone with you and solve your problems that way?! So at this point I'm just going to gush for the first time about how incredibly cool the live-action Sailor Moon series was. Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon (as it tends to be referred to to distinguish it from the other versions of the series) was a TV drama that was basically a stealth sentai** series with monsters of the week, sub-villains, etc. all adapting and heavily remixing the first story arc of the series. That's right: a solid year of nothing but Queen Beryl and the Four Kings. Oh, and Dark Mercury.  See, at some point, the villains went "You know, the others are kind of idiots. If we just handle the blue haired one, we're probably safe." So Kunzite sent out some fodder, kidnapped Ami in the fight, and brainwashed her. She proceeded to spend just under 10 episodes turning her knowledge against the Scouts, taking no poo poo from her alleged bosses on the villain team, and running around with an icicle she froze a hilt onto and made into a sword. This plan was so unexpected she shattered Sailor Moon's stick with it. (It got better.) This series did some real weird things with the basic premise, and you had better believe I'm coming back to it later when we refight Queen Beryl, who it gave the best motivation of all. (Also, I guess we'll look in on how the other Scouts changed in that show while we're doing these sub-chapters...)  I really do swear it seems like they mixed up the two endings to this chapter, because, again, we did very much just heal Hans' mother first, but Mercury spends her outro on this chapter lingering outside his house and telling him "farewell forever" without even knocking on the door. But that doesn't matter, because I'm never coming back here! Woo! Who do we have next?  Aww crap.  (looking around her suddenly) What was that? I felt a burst of evil energy...Sailor Mars then begins running around this village hunting for whatever it was, including this actually-comical moment:  Not from this person either...  But that's for next time. * One guide I've seen says that Nabu can run out of EP. I do not know how long this person dragged this fight out, because I left it on auto-battle at one point while way too weak in this first attempt, and around ten minutes in she was still slinging Tempests without fail. ** The stuff Power Rangers was based off of.
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Jun 26, 2016 09:11
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I actually managed to have Nabu run out of EP when I played this game! Don't ask me how I did it, it was a lot of years ago, but I remember I did.
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Jun 26, 2016 09:34
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Wow, I'm shocked at how bullshit this game is. I don't remember that AT. ALL. It's amazing what I'd put up with in an RPG back then, despite having Chrono Trigger and FF6 to compare it to.
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Jun 26, 2016 10:43
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It gets worse. This is the part where you realize that levelling curve I mentioned at the start of Mercury's segment happens 5 times in a row.
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Jun 26, 2016 10:52
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The poison is the really obnoxious part of the Nabu fight. Both she and Mercury have way more defense than attack power, so if you haven't got both of Mercury's accessories and put her in an aggressive position in formation, it's pretty easy to end up in a situation where the poison does way more damage than either side's actual attacks and the fight turns into a test of your patience and how many recovery items you brought along. (I mean, it's going to be that anyway, but it can be even worse.)
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Jun 26, 2016 11:00
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END ME SCOOB posted:This was also the point where I went "I get a miniscule damage drop if I use Shabon Spray versus the cost of the others, let's spam that longer". According to one person in the thread, Shabon Spray actually debuffs an enemy, which is mentioned nowhere in the game and signaled by nothing, but this too probably didn't hurt if true. (Is there some source of these secret bonus effects to Sailor skills I should be looking up? God, I'd love that knowledge for future chapters.) I got it from this gamefaqs guide and it proved effective enough for me to make the front-row glass cannons not die in one hit all the time. After scouring some other guides though it seems that either Shabon Spray is either the only attack with a secret debuff effect or nobody cared to find out if there are any others.
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Jun 26, 2016 13:20
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Given how spergy GameFAQ writers can be, a ROM format means someone can rip it open to look at the code, and the general low-effort feel of the game, I wouldn't be surprised if that's the only attack that has a debuff effect.
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Jun 26, 2016 17:47
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There's really no other reason to not spam your strongest attacks in this game. Other than if you're fighting multiple enemies or just one
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Jun 26, 2016 17:50
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shabon spray definitely does debuff enemies and it and a buff combo thats available later (and manicures? im not sure they stack) relieve a lot of the grinding. i think they intended you to figure that out, but i usually skipped over that attack in my first playthrough and had the same problem
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Jun 26, 2016 21:28
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This thread is lovely and I never realized this game was so spectacularly weird. Since none are coming to my mind at the moment, are there other RPGs, snes or not, that are this bizarrely balanced and designed? Especially licensed ones? There's something really special about the sheer cryptic obnoxiousness of these mechanics.
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Jun 26, 2016 21:51
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Robindaybird posted:Given how spergy GameFAQ writers can be, a ROM format means someone can rip it open to look at the code, and the general low-effort feel of the game, I wouldn't be surprised if that's the only attack that has a debuff effect. That writer is very clearly a kid from the mid-00s. He didn't debug poo poo. I'll keep an eye out for more "effects" but I'm still not sure this isn't a placebo effect...
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Jun 26, 2016 22:01
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Not licensed, but Drakkhen II: Dragonview always comes to mind. Because of the way damage is calculated, you'll go from taking 40 hits to kill an enemy to single-digit hits within the span of a few levels, and then the number won't change for the rest of the game no matter how many levels you gain. Granted, the enemies are mostly scaled so that when you encounter them, you're in the right level range to deal with them, but one boss in particular is easy to reach at too low a level and thus require an astonishing 200 hits to defeat. Gain one level, or find a weapon upgrade you might otherwise miss, and the number of hits drops to a manageable amount. Another level, and it's a cinch, and grind enough to get one more and it might as well be just a tough regular enemy. There's also a region not far off the beaten path you might accidentally wander into long before you're meant to go there, and if you meet an enemy before backing out, you die in one hit and have little hope of killing it. If you happen to have one of the supermoves that deals a guaranteed 1/4 of its health at the cost of some of your HP and manage to pull it off enough times, you can survive the fight and gain all the experience you'll need for the first half of the game or so. It's a fun game that I still love, but the balancing is pretty strange.
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Jun 26, 2016 22:07
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I remember playing one of the Ys games where I got to a boss at too low level, and all my attacks did 0 damage. That was a fun one.
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Jun 26, 2016 22:55
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Yeah, the unmovable object is a pretty standard consequence of weird stat scaling, but when it comes to "we just didn't want to tell you what this move does"... honestly, the only games I can think of are the masochistic CRPG fare. Stuff like Wizardry and roguelikes.
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Jun 26, 2016 23:58
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the whole game system is pretty arcane, honestly. how much does link building affect its attack? who really knows! what effects does a link have and does it have any buffs or debuffs? who cares! I wouldn't consider this game "hard" - there's really not much strategy other than using your best links and expensive attacks and maybe applying a debuff or a buff and then hoping your stats are sufficient and your item pool holds out (and it probably will because as mentioned in the previous posts - most of the best equipment is stuff you find really early on so you aren't going to be spending money on anything but consumables.) It's weird, because it seems like the game is definitely balanced to be kind of rocket taggy where you can get through most random encounters in one shot or have a decent chance of getting one shot yourself. I feel like maybe they were trying to make it so that grinding was easy and fast and if you were stuck on a boss you could one shot random goons until you were ready. it's hard to know if they did that because they were lazy or because the target audience was supposed to be young girls who they figured probably couldn't handle anything more complex. (j/k they were probably just lazy)
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Jun 27, 2016 01:55
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I remember there being a Tenchi Muyo RPG for the SNES. It had a tactics element to it, but overall it was a pretty shallow game. I think the level cap for any given character was 8. The special attacks were all pretty cool though. I don't remember it being the least bit difficult, honestly can't remember whether the translation was any good or not either, though I think it was.
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Jun 27, 2016 03:28
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There was another Sailor Moon game for SNES that was fantranslated, it was basically a sidescrolling beat-em-up titled Sailor Moon R after the second season. Its notable bit of fun is having Jupiter suplex everybody. 
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Jun 27, 2016 03:45
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END ME SCOOB posted:That writer is very clearly a kid from the mid-00s. He didn't debug poo poo. I'll keep an eye out for more "effects" but I'm still not sure this isn't a placebo effect...
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Jun 27, 2016 04:25
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One thing you didn't mention in the LP, but which made me intensely mad when I played the game, is that at the beginning of Mercury's section she says "I'm standing on Mont Blanc in Switzerland, the highest point in Europe." No. Mont Blanc is not in Switzerland, it's shared between Italy and France. Mercury's supposed to be the smart one 
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Jun 27, 2016 04:49
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the_steve posted:I remember there being a Tenchi Muyo RPG for the SNES. It had a tactics element to it, but overall it was a pretty shallow game. I think the level cap for any given character was 8. The special attacks were all pretty cool though. I don't remember it being the least bit difficult, honestly can't remember whether the translation was any good or not either, though I think it was. Not only was the level cap 8, the experience system was dead simple: to level up, you needed to defeat a number of enemies equal to your current level. So you could grind a repeatable battle near the start of the game and get everyone you had available at that point to maximum level if you wanted. (This was pretty much the only way to get some characters to level 8 at all, particularly Ryoko since she was unavailable for most of the midgame.)
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Jun 27, 2016 04:50
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Mikl posted:One thing you didn't mention in the LP, but which made me intensely mad when I played the game, is that at the beginning of Mercury's section she says "I'm standing on Mont Blanc in Switzerland, the highest point in Europe." Eh, boundary lines were different in the 90s.
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Jun 27, 2016 04:56
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Mikl posted:One thing you didn't mention in the LP, but which made me intensely mad when I played the game, is that at the beginning of Mercury's section she says "I'm standing on Mont Blanc in Switzerland, the highest point in Europe." Maybe she got her translations confused and was really saying "I'm the highest person in Europe and this mountain is white."
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Jun 27, 2016 05:13
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Well, hooray for treasure at least? That looks like it helped.
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Jun 27, 2016 06:27
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I still can't believe going back to help the mother is the 'wrong' choice. I guess the moral here is always jump down mysterious holes as quickly as possible.
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Jun 27, 2016 06:30
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:I still can't believe going back to help the mother is the 'wrong' choice. I maintain that not having another creepy doctor scene far outweighs Mercury having further interaction with whatsisface. In fact, I maintain that further interaction with whatsisface is a loss.
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Jun 27, 2016 06:50
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serves you right for putting the fate of one human above the
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Jun 27, 2016 10:56
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kefkafloyd posted:There was another Sailor Moon game for SNES that was fantranslated, it was basically a sidescrolling beat-em-up titled Sailor Moon R after the second season. Its notable bit of fun is having Jupiter suplex everybody. I was not making GBS threads you when I made the comment that almost every Sailor Moon title is a beat-em-up or fighting game in the OP. Seriously, I did some research to see if this was the only story-based title it had ever had, and what I found was:
So yeah. * If you want to count LCD handhelds this number goes up by a few but it does not change the genre ratios much.
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Jun 27, 2016 11:26
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END ME SCOOB posted:
!!! It is now my life mission to track down this game and write a review of it for the thread.
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Jun 27, 2016 11:56
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Sailor Moon: La Luna Splende. Please enjoy. Apparently the game has a bunch of empty "/en/ /es/ /fr/" etc. folders in its code so at some point it was going to be multinational, but eventually just came out in Italy alone. The game is about Molly/Naru/Nina being in a coma. No joke.
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Jun 27, 2016 12:05
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END ME SCOOB posted:Sailor Moon: La Luna Splende. Please enjoy. Apparently the game has a bunch of empty "/en/ /es/ /fr/" etc. folders in its code so at some point it was going to be multinational, but eventually just came out in Italy alone. so a standard weekday in the Jubon district
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Jun 27, 2016 12:24
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| # ? Jun 2, 2024 04:20 |
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There was a Let's Play 20 years of Sailor Moon thread here (at least I think it was on SA, by bleatingheart) where they explore the more obscure titles. The PC-Engine games were just standard visual novels IIRC and the mini-game collections looked absurd but fun and serviceable.
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Jun 27, 2016 12:57
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