This is pretty mid as beat-em-ups go but it has really stellar presentation and gamefeel where it counts - arguably the more important strength for licensed games. There's a lot of effort put into the visuals and the authenticity to the original show's style. And more than anything, I think it's just Very Cool (tm) that they didn't play coward and adapt Sailor Moon into something overly-basic because they think lowly of their audience: It's just a right-as-rain brawler with good hits and solid jams. How many franchises marketed towards girls in the west would have done the same? (actually after doing that female protag list, there were hardly any games based on western franchises for girls, period. >:/ )

Also uh, no 2P in the Genesis version is a fucking travesty, I don't know how they did a 4MB cart and didn't include that. There's not even a lot of objects on screen at once, so it doesn't come across as a processing issue. Sprites are BIG and I imagine they could tax a bit against the ram, but not THAT much. Maybe it's color palette related, like they couldn't make a good 16-color batch that worked for every sailor, and they couldn't dedicate 2 whole palettes to players without heavily compromising everything else. Idk. Just weird how well-budgeted the package feels for it to be missing that from the SNES version.

(Fun piece of trivia: Aki Hata, this version's composer, also worked on Dynamite Headdy and Yu Yu Hakusho: Sunset Fighters. It slaps too!)