Well, this is the first proper episode of the Black Moon Clan arc and W.O.W.  It’s great.  I mean, in true Sailor Moon Crystal fashion, it completely failed to live up to its true potential, but for the most part it did things right.

First of all, let’s just get right down to the disappointment: no new intro.  But that’s okay.  It was kind of expected.  Predictably, the Dark Kingdom enemies was swapped out for the Black Moon enemies.

Slightly less predictable was having bonus cuts of Chibiusa and Sailor Pluto.

So uh… yeah.  I looked at some concept art, and Pluto’s earrings are larger than I thought… but they were about the size of her ears.  These are easily TWICE the size of her ears.

The first hanging question when it comes to this arc was how well the Black Moon Clan and the Spectre Sisters would be done.  Like I said: they look FANTASTIC.

Prince Demande has a great voice, but Rubeus… I don’t know what to think about him.  He seems way calmer than i expected.  I guess it’ll eventually grow on me.

The biggest surprise of the episode probably came right around when Chibiusa arrived at the Tsukino home.  For starters, it was unexpectedly cute the way Mamoru awkwardly attempted to introduce himself to Usagi’s mom.  In the manga, Usagi introduced him, and Mama was totally chill about it.  I find it weird that of all things to change, it was this.  Not complaining at all, though.

What followed right after was mindblowing.

Honestly, you just don’t come to expect much comedy out of Sailor Moon Crystal.  The manga gets pretty heavy pretty fast, so gotta savor it when you can.

I’m really happy they introduced Asanuma.  He really helps flesh Mamoru out as a character.  For all intents and purposes, he wasn’t in the anime, likely due to the conscious effort to keep Mamoru away from the story as much as they could get away with it.

Another interesting change from the manga:

So, Rei has a vision of the arrival of Koan and a man being burned alive.  In the manga it was an adorable little girl that couldn’t be older than 8.  It’s a shame that after all this time, SMC just can’t be at least EXACTLY as edgy as the manga.

No reason; just thought that image of Luna was cute.

This episode takes the opportunity to give us the series’ first-ever all-five-senshi henshin sequence, and I have to say… good choice.  A LOT of this episode just FELT like the 90s anime, and an all-five sequence was a neat throwback.  Besides, there’s pretty much no opportunity to do that for the rest of the arc.

This episode also introduced two of the senshi’s new attacks: Rei’s Burning Mandala and Ami’s Shine Aqua Illusion.  It’s unfortunate that even though they look like stock animation, the animators didn’t bother to add in a background.  It’s just all black.

For comparison, even though the 90s anime version also had a dark background, it at least had stars.




Also, it’s unfortunate that both Burning Mandala and Shine Aqua Illusion debuted just to job to Koan’s fire.  It makes the senshi look weak, but that’s a fault of the source material.  I like to think that the Spectre Sisters’ powers being far stronger than the senshi’s newly-powered-up powers only makes sense since they’re from a freaking millennium into the future.  It shows that the enemy a whole level stronger than the enemies of the previous arc.  I just wish there was time to fight off lesser enemies to show off how powerful the senshi really got before they’re unceremoniously taken out of the picture.  But like I said, that’s a flaw with the source material.  SMC is just being faithful.  I’m just saying… they could’ve done SOMETHING to really give the impression that the new attacks are stronger.

I did appreciate that the question of whether or not the Spectre Sisters would die or survive was answered right away when Koan died to Moon Princess Halation.  I was expecting it, but I did dread the possibility of their survival.

Overall, wonderful start to the arc.  It sucks that the next three episodes are going to be like this.  I don’t mind spoiling things for everyone, but if things follow the manga, Mercury gets kidnapped, Jupiter gets kidnapped, and Venus does NOT get kidnapped, which makes her the Rowen/Touma of the group.  And I can say that because Yoroiden Samurai Troopers predates this arc by at least four years.

A lot happens in the kidnapping sub-arc, so it’s not like I wish we were done with it already, but things don’t really get going until we get to Crystal Tokyo.  So yeah, I’m a little impatient to get to the good stuff.