[GoldenXtreme]

I gave Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon a watch, along with a friend who had watched the anime version in the past (though it was a long time ago for him). It was a solid experience overall, one that managed to satisfy both as an alternate take on the original Sailor Moon story arc for my friend and as a interesting mashup of magical girl and tokusatsu elements for me. Oh and before I get started just let me say: don't use the Miss Dream subs for this show. I did and it was a truly astonishing mess of lacking grammar, typos, and flat out mistranslations. I don't know how the Sea of Serenity subs are, but this is a low bar to clear so they are probably superior.

Since I'm not really familiar with Sailor Moon beyond second hand knowledge, I tried to approach the show on its own merits. It's low budget, but as it goes along you can tell the show gets more comfortable with balancing practical action with CGI. It's not mind blowing, but it does show that its actually possible to put the glamour of magical girls in the tokusatsu quarry. The story throws together some truly absurd romance with a plot that shares a lot of structure with the near contemporaneous Kamen Rider Ryuki (also by Kobayashi). Seriously though, the ending in particular really invoked Ryuki, with a bloody swathe being cut through both the hero and villain casts, the protagonist dying, and everyone eventually being revived in a new world. While not directly Ryuki related, I also found it kind of flabbergasting to see a magical girl treated like a tokusatsu berserk form, with Princess Serenity usually being treated as an object of abject terror who is also completely FABULOUS.

I think what might be a sticking point for a lot of viewers with this show though is that there is a lack of communication in this show that would genuinely put Toshiki Inoue to shame, with the various heroes often running off and doing their own things and not telling anyone. Like, I get that after a certain point everyone basically had to treat Usagi as a bomb that could go off if she ever got upset, but it was an element long before that too. I did particularly like Rei though, whose actor also really got to show off some incredible talent for a newbie during some of the more dramatic scenes, even if she might be the most prone to running off and trying to progress the plot on her own. I'm also not really keen on romantic elements, which is something I've occasionally brought up before. I was pretty okay with it here, where at its highest level of angsty teenage pining it actually crossed the line into being flat out funny and sometimes I ever found it sweet, like the Makoto coming to slowly accept her crush on Motoki.

There are some elements to the story that are never fully resolved though. Nephrite's storyline just stops after a certain point, it's never really made clear what exactly Queen Metallia is, stuff like that. There were also some parts that just dragged or were supposed to be serious were amusing to me for the wrong reasons. Still, even if I'm not sure I was really the kind of person this show was supposed to appeal to, it was unique and interesting. It'll be fun to compare it to some of the other magical girl toku that exist and I'd even like to check out some of the Sailor Moon manga and anime at some point so I can compare them.