Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon Crystal Season III

I told myself I was giving up on Crystal after the conclusion of the first arc. But after seeing the new art, the previews and the revisited character designs for the Infinity Arc, I decided to give it one more chance, and have been catching up with it every few weeks. We'll start with the good: The art has improved pretty drastically. The animators had the good sense to ditch those awful CG henshin sequences and make some nicer hand drawn ones. Fight scenes are punchier and the artwork is overall more expressive. The portrayal of the Outer Senshi is about the best you could askfor from a direct manga adaptation. In fact, most everyone's characterization has improved, including Usagi; they have personalities and actual lines now that aren't just repeating what someone else has said or collaborating on a single sentence together. Some of the humor is back, at least at the beginning, and I feel like even the music has improved by a few notches. Also, all the gay is dialed up to eleven, and that warms my little bi heart. Here are my complaints: Someone on the animation team really needs to Google "what do cats look like?" The writing is still pretty lazy; I always thought a straight adaptation of the manga was a bad idea, and I stand firm on that. It makes for bad pacing and stifles character development. There's still some Art Weird. Episode 35 in particular looks like nobody cared much about it, and there's an ongoing problem with Usagi and Chibiusa's heads being drawn with giant, misshapen craniums in every profile view. Late in the season as we move into the final conflict, I'm definitely noticing that we're falling back into that pit where it's constant drama with almost no emotional resonance, which I think is a consequence of the rushed pace. In conclusion, the Infinity Arc of Crystal is... okay, in that it is easy on the eyes and not a catastrophic destruction of everything that made Sailor Moon good [insert pointed look at seasons 1 and 2 here]. There are some parts that are worth watching for, but it can't at all rival the 90's anime for soul and charm. It's definitely still not the Sailor Moon we deserved from the 2010s. It's not really doing anything particularly new or exciting with the IP. I would call it ornamental, for the most part. It's a nice, pretty thing to look at for a while if you like Sailor Moon, and if you're particularly attached to the manga you'll probably enjoy it a lot more than me.

**Warning: English is not my first language** Sailor Moon S3 shows itself as an improvement from its previous seasons (Both art and music were certainly something to work with, CGI was ruining everything this thing stands for) and a remake of its classic 90s counterpart. Working with such a classic as Sailor Moon will get high expectations from everybody, and it did keep us hype about possibilities. So, it's quite disappointing to find that Crystal S3 couldnt handle that hype properly. Instead, S3 seems a lot rushed (It's only 13 episodes, so of course pace will be faster), even though it had a really nice arc towork with that could be delivered in a better way, by properly developing characterization and wrapping up all the previous events from S1 and S2. Instead, we are faced to just getting little pieces from everyone and forced to like it in order to find any emotional sense. And plot holes, big stupid plot holes that basically ruined S2. It also fell into turning each and every Sailor senshi into, basically, cannon fodder. Something quite repetitive in S1 and S2; and it was a fresh feeling that they finally served a purpose for themselves, rather than doing it for plot advancing. But then it happened, and it's like they thought the Sailor Senshis were just there to make some filler. Characterization was a high point in the classic 90s series, and I understand that you can't get that done in 13 episodes per arc. It actually forces you to make the best writting ever so you can get to exploit the best of this. It's quite obvious they didnt do it. While animation got improved, there is still room for improvement: Minako's transformation sequence and animation after episode 35 is pretty much a good example. Even though, it still shows us better animation than S1 and S2. Music is something I cannot complain, specially the last 2 episodes; but it was quite irrelevant and there is still a lot of room for improvement. Overall, Sailor Moon S3 feels like a clickbait article, that you find useful initially; but the more you keep reading, the more you notice it's voided of any good content. While it's good that they try to be faithful to manga (A change from that cartoonish and lightheart tone from the 90s), it's quite sad that they couldn't exploit the vast and rich characters this franchise offers. I hope any other sequel, remake or reboot will notice how important are these characters in order to get something worth of watching.

I wasn't a fan of the reboot of Sailor Moon. Crystal felt like a chore to go through and given that it was broadcast once every other week I dropped it halfway through, then picked it up later and finished it off long after it originally aired. Just about everything was wrong with it. Season 3 pretty much reverses everything I thought about the reboot. It was actually a treat to watch the show. The first improvement was replacing the opening with something better. I didn't like the opening of Season 1, Moon Pride, because it had silly lyrics like, "we don't need no men tosolve our problems." I don't think those are completely accurate but I think it's close and dumb. While the openings will never be as good as the original series Moonlight Legend, or Makenai, I don't think there's any way those songs could be topped in the first place, so why even bother trying to compete. The music is also really good. The music is actually really good. The first thing I noticed is that the animation quality is quite a bit better. While not everything has to be fluid, especially scenes where someone is talking a lot. It does help with action scenes, and that was something that was sorely lacking in season 1. This show feels like watching a legend being written, and that's because the direction is much better and more coherent. The stakes become really high as Sailor Moon and her coterie try to prevent Master Pharaoh 90 and his devious plots from succeeding. They also have to prevent the awakening of Sailor Saturn, the guardian of destruction, from showing up and bodybagging everybody on both sides. The only real problem I found with this show is the subcast of the Witches 5. I found their dialogue of talking about levels, like it was an RPG, and the general fact that they were just fodder for Sailor Moon to brutally murder with her love and affection, to be annoying. They were the least developed of any of the villains and I feel just wasted a lot of time.