I started to watch the Crystal series when it came out in 2014 and I remembered being super hyped about it. I watched 14 episodes before I dropped it out of boredom. Years later I decided to pick it up again and watch the rest since I was fairly surprised to find out it had two more seasons.
I tried my very best to overlook my nostalgia and compare it the original 90's series since it's bound to be different. I knew the art was different, the music was new and the plot had been slightly altered from the earlier series. I accepted that. But the art in the manga is so extremly detailed and carefully done it's practically impossible to copy it to a weekly series with a fairly low budget.
The art is different in a bad way. It's poorly done and I can't tell if it's because of lack of money, tight schedule or just because they couldn't care less about the final product. Nonetheless, it was really bad.
And what happened to the old clumsy, food loving Usagi? What happened to the hot tempered Rei and the stupidly love struck Makoto? I hate to say it but most of the characters were so OOC it didn't even make sense anymore. The only change in character I liked was Chibi-Usa's change of attitude. I couldn't help but really hate her original bratty attitude and found her really annoying in the original series. Even though I found the Crystal series overall very rushed and especially the established relationships I did find relief in that Chibi-Usa behaved decent.
The music was fairly good though. I've been a fan of Yasuharu Takahashi for a long time and he never cease to surprise me with his music.
So my ratings overall:
Story - 3 (It was too rushed and everything happened without any foundation to it. You need to have seen the 90's version or read the the manga to understand the basics)
Art - 4 (It was a nice try to try and copy such carefully layed out art but in the end it failed miserably)
Sound - 6 (The music scores replayed a fair amount of times throughout the series which leads me to think that not many scores were written for this series)
Character - 5 (No basics whatsoever and very OOC most of the time)
Enjoyment - 4 (I am a sucker for Sailor Moon but it was a huge dissapointment)
Overall - 5
But as I do love Sailor Moon, I will probably try and watch the second season as well even though I really disliked this season.
