Bandai Namco is on broad for producing a Sailor Moon game as long as there is enough fan interest.
[dropcap size=small]T[/dropcap]his past weekend at a press event the senior manager of IP strategy for Namco Tak Miyazoe made an exciting announcement. He proposed that a Sailor Moon game based on the Sailor Moon Crystal series could become a reality depending on several factors. Mr. Miyazoe said,
“We’re always exploring ideas, the potential is always there. It’s more about, are there fans out there who want it? Can we hear enough voices? From a business perspective, would [a Sailor Moon game] make sense, and more importantly, what do the fans want?”
Back in 1995 in the United States, Sailor Moon was introduced with a strong amount of success. The anime ran consistently for five years before ending in 2000. The anime was extremely popular and was praised for having a strong female dominated cast. Sailor Moon was rebooted in 2014 by Toei Animation with a new title, called Sailor Moon Crystal in commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the mangas series.
Toei Animation has been producing Sailor Moon Crystal as a reboot of Sailor Moon and intends for it to be a closer adaptation of Naoko Takeuchi’s original manga. So far the anime has been doing very well and Viz Media, the distributor of the anime and manga in North America, reported plenty of success thus far. So much success that merchandise has been ordered to be made.
With that being said, many fans of the anime are hoping that a game could be made that fits well with the show.
A total of thirty-five Sailor Moon games have been released. Most of them were made specifically for gaming consoles and hand-held devices. Of the thirty-five games released, thirty-four were released in Japan.
The latest game that was released, Sailor Moon: La Luna Splende for the Nintendo DS was released in 2011. However, the game was never released outside of Italy. To that end, Mr. Miyazoe said,
“It really comes down to us being able to develop a compelling game that treats the Sailor Moon franchise the right way and we’d want to know that fans would support the game. There are other factors that go into us deciding what we can and can’t make, but these two items would be some of the bigger questions we ask ourselves before diving into a project.”
At this time the fate of a Sailor Moon game lies in the hands of its fans and only time will tell what becomes of it.
