Sailor Moon SuperS Plus: Ami's First Love

Ami's First Love is one of the other specials of Sailor Moon SuperS, with this one playing right before the Sailor Moon SuperS Movie. This one has a sweet premise: focusing on Ami and trying to build off her personality to be more than that of a simple bookworm by introducing....a love interest, in case the title didn't give that away. Personally, I think this is good; barring a few episodes related to swimming or chess (and I do mean LITERALLY "a few"), Ami's entire character has more or less been: studying, asking the girls to study with her, or studying during an episode's events,so it was a really great idea to have her branch out, especially since Ami has been the least involved with love of all the Senshi, by a long shot. Unfortunately, they can't stray too far from Ami's roots, so they give her a study rival interest who has a lot of mystery built around him, as well as a creature called Bonnon which seems to prey on Ami's "selfish desires" of love. The execution of this is both good and bad for all involved: on Ami's part, it comes off really well because it gives her some much-needed depth while also relating to one of the core aspects of her character, even though it in practice doesn't change much about her at all, despite their best efforts. Mercurius (her rival) had potential to be extremely well-written; while I like the aspect of keeping a character's true motives and identity itself hidden or ambiguous (and Sailor Moon pulls this off exceptionally well 90% of the time), this just isn't the place to do that in a special like this. There's not nearly enough time in a 15 minute episode to flesh out a character like this meaningfully (even Umino took several episodes to come into his own), even if he isn't that interesting of a character, because the special is BUILT around him and why Ami is attracted to him. So it's important to know more about him, keeping in mind the special is 15 minutes. Meaning, he gets less screentime than a standard victim of the day in a generic filler episode. Also, Bonnon, the secondary antagonist, suffers from some one-dimensionality as well; she's barely on-screen for more than three minutes of meaningful screentime at absolute best (she is also silhouetted and not revealed immediately), which makes her nice as cannon fodder and for Ami to unleash a new attack, but gives her practically no development in doing so. Still, it's really nice to see that Ami got an episode to herself and that this turned out fairly well, given the time constraints. It's definitely worth a watch if you can handle its few shortcomings, as other than the criticisms listed, it's quite enjoyable; the humor is as clever as always, and they deliver on the action and tension that is present. 7/10.