When I first started using the internet independently as a kid, I was really into Sailor Moon. Sailor Moon R had just finished airing up to the usual part where the dub cut off mid story arc and it started from episode one again. Desperate for any other information I could find out about the series, I spent countless afternoons on different GeoCities Sailor Moon shrines. Finding out the Japanese names of the characters, discovering there were even more Sailor Senshi than just the inner five – it was like a whole new world of this series opened up to me. Don’t get me started on the soundtracks, because I was all over that. In midi form, of course…though I somehow amassed a rather large collections of .ogg files as well. I eventually came to terms with the fact that I wouldn’t be able to download all the newer episodes on my pathetic dial up connection, and gradually became engrossed in other anime instead.

As a teen who completely missed the 16 bit generation, emulators were crucial to filling the gaps when I was broke in high school with no easy way to track down classic consoles. I forget how I initially stumbled upon them, but it was amazing to finally play all of these games I had read about online. The majority of them being Japanese RPGs. Games like Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy V, and Terranigma. Of course the most awful thing about using emulators was the throw-away nature of the ROMs. If something didn’t keep my attention past the first three hours, I usually dropped it pretty quickly and moved onto the next game.

This new found treasure trove of games appeared almost simultaneously with my reignited love for Sailor Moon. The live action series had just finished airing, so there was a huge saturation of Sailor Moon media everywhere. I finally went back and watched the subbed seasons, I read the manga and then realised I’d been missing out on a surprising amount of licensed games. Even more shocking is that some of them were legitimately good.

I sunk god knows how many hours into the puzzle games and tried my hand at the Street Fighter knock-offs. But then I found a fan-translated version of Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon Another Story. By this stage I was fairly confident with SNES JRPGS, so I jumped right in. I was hooked.

Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon Another Story is a relatively simple JRPG – you have customisable attack formations, defend prompts and group attacks called Link Techs. Considering this was a game primarily aimed at primary school girls, the battle system is accessible enough for a younger gamer to have fun but has just enough depth if you went into the formations and Link Techs. The game is set between Sailor Moon S and Sailor Moon SuperS, with an amazing fanfiction-esque story that throws in all the villains from the anime and then throws in a new group of antagonists known as the Opposito Senshi. Each chapter takes place in a different part of the world, and each town that the Senshi travel to resembles the stock-standard JRPG locale design. You have areas like a Scandinavian ice cave town, ancient ruins, a forest – while they weren’t all that imaginative, there was something very comforting about the familiarity.

The story ended up quite convoluted, and it mainly seemed like an excuse to chuck in all the monsters of the week from the anime for random encounters in place of making original content. The basic premise is that a woman named Apsu has changed the destiny of all the Sailor Senshi in the future and they have to travel back and forth through time to re-write their futures to defeat her and the Opposito Senshi. So naturally you’d have to fight all the previous antagonists, such as Beryl, Esmeraude and Professor Tomoe to name a few. At one stage the plot starts to take its pick of the manga canon and Sailor Venus suddenly becomes important and gets a magical ark that stands in for the generic JRPG airship that lets you back track to wherever you please. When you were in the ark, you could glide along the world map with majestic SNES Mode 7 graphics. I was pretty impressed, considering the game was already ten years old by the time I finally got to play it.

Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon Another Story was a great way to combine two things I had been absolutely fanatic about in late high school. While I’m a little disappointed that I’ll never be able to play a legitimate copy, I’d still argue that the experience I had playing it on an emulator hunched over in my desk chair for hours on end would very similar if I had played it on an actual SNES. So while I may have grown out of emulation after I started to have disposable income, the thought of those couple of years where I’d try anything once still strikes a chord with me. So if you’re after a cute, 15-20 hour JRPG that still has better animation than Sailor Moon Crystal, I suggest you give this a bash.