How to be OP in the 90s Sailor Moon anime-verse. The 90s Sailor Moon anime was the first verse I ever scaled so I wanted to go back to it for this blog and make a strategy guide for it.
City-Scale Threat:
Toei series in generally tend to have rather screwy internal scaling and power levels, and the original Toei Sailor Moon was all over the place in terms of scaling, I'll give my scaling and why as I go.
This tier encompasses most of the characters in Classic, Season 1. In terms of power, the relatively early youma Kigaan could maintain a dimension stretching the horizon, usually standardized as requiring energy in the range of kilotons to megatons of energy. This is consistent with Jadeite of the Dark Kingdom stating that if the Senshi do not come out to face him, he will immolate and destroy the city, though the timeframe is unknown. This puts the general range of power as between town and city level.
In terms of speed, Sailor Moon was able to avoid the flash of light from a camera at close range, moving a greater distance in the same time as the flash itself, moving empirically faster than light, defeating said enemy by tricking them in capturing their own photo using mirrors. Even fodder have highly impressive feats such as Luna and Artemis running via underground tunnels the distance from Tokyo to the North Pole twice in a single night, the second time while avoiding attacks from Kunzite or when the brainwashed people from Earth invaded Earth, demonstrably on-screen from their own power, fast enough that it surprised the people of the Moon Kingdom.
The primary opponents of this tier are the Youma, monster inflitrators of human society, either native denizens of the Dark Kingdom or expressions of humanity's most negative emotions. Among their number some are relative powerhouses, scaling statwise above the other youma including Thetis serving Queen Beryl directly, the three Plant Sisters sent to eliminate Nephrite, the 7 Great Youma that led them in the time of the Moon Kingdom, and the 5 DD Girls sent by Beryl to fend off the Sailor Senshi's invasion of the Dark Kingdom. At the top of the the tier are 3 of the 4 heavenly kings; Jadeite, Nephrite, and Zoisite.
To allow for their inflitration of human society and stealing of energy, the majority of youma possess shapeshifting ability allowing them to disguise themselves as humans and the distinctive power of the Dark Kingdom possessed by nearly all its members: energy-draining. Many youma also possess some form of binding or other incapitating attack ranging from goo to vines to webbing to trapping people in giant tennis balls, it's common enough to be a memetic form of attack. This method of attack is generally used to incapitate an enemy as the youma drains them of their energy. Numerous youma have shown the ability as well to control crowds of people they have drained the energy from. Nephrite's youma in particular have demonstrated the ability to turn people obsessive, hostile, even violent by exploiting their dark desires and the youma Iguara controls a species called the Chanela that turn humans obsessive of them through their sheer cuteness.
Individual youma generally have their own theme and abilities. In terms of incapacitation there are various forms of gas attacks from Murid's hallucinatory mist, to Mitsuami's knock-out gas, to the flower Youma Flau's extreme drowsiness-inducing flowers and the Vampire Kyurene's sleep induction. The Twin Youma Castor and Pollux were able to replicate Sailor Mercury and Sailor Mars' magical techniques Shabon Spray and Fire Soul suggesting water manipulation, fire manipulation, and possibly power-copying. The youma Blizzar could similarly control ice and snow. The nature Youma Petasos could control animals and has anti technology powers that caused technology to stop working from the touch of her beasts. The butterfly Youma Papillion showed the ability to summon magical butterflies to bind the Senshi and could form a barrier with them capable of blocking their attacks. Similarly the camera youma Kyameran could form a barrier with her photokinesis and more dangerously seal people in photos by taking their picture.
Several of the youma can teleport including Kyurene, Murid, and Yasha. Likewise the youma Kigaan and Ramua have their own dimensions which they can control and create portals too, large enough to encompasses buses. The Youma Balm and Tesuni have demonstrated telekinetic abilities, Tesuni even throwing Sailor Moon around, and Mitsuami demonstrated a microscopic vision as she posed as a worker at a hair salon, analyzing individual strands of hair for matches of Sailor Moon's DNA, searching for her true identity.
Stronger than the average youma, some youma have distinguished them for their power. First of this was the water Youma Thetis, she who tragically pined for the Heavenly King Jadeite. Thetis had the usual powers of a youma; she could disguise herself as a human and could steal energy, in particular trying to steal the "love energy" of couples. Thetis was notably more powerful then normal, able to briefly survive being hit by Sailor Moon, Sailor Mercury, AND Sailor Mars' attacks. She could teleport in a flurry of water, and levitate as well as manipulate water to the extent of creating a ship-sized whirlpool or shoot blasts of water capable of threatening Sailor Moon. She could use water manipulation to create her own humanoid minions of water with low-mid regen, able to recover from being horizontally bisected. Thetis was a powerful illusionist, able to create the illusion of a luxury cruise ship, including all the internal details and the taste of the food within.
The first of three powerful groups of youma was the plant sisters; Housenka, Grape, and Suzuran. They are a trio of youma assassins sent to eliminate Nephrite with plant manipulation strong to overrun a small building with vines rapidly, that they use to create piercing thorns, and somehow create fireballs and sonic bursts. The three of them can levitate and are powerful enough to threaten Nephrite with their attacks, and required Sailor Moon and Sailor Mars to combine their attacks to defeat, probably on the same level as Thetis.
The second of these groups was the Seven Great Youma, the seven youma that led the Dark Kingdom in the assault on the Moon Kingdom. Each held a shard of the Silver Crystal in them, divided into the 7 rainbow crystals, likely explaining their great power that not even the Sailor Senshi could defeat with their attacks and Sailor Moon had to purify them with her purifying technique. For the most part, the Seven Great Youma are only impressive for their sheer power rather then their techniques though Rikoukeidar of the Blue Rainbow Crystal can absorb and reflect attacks and summon "primal protozoa" that clings to those with energy and immobilize them, and Binah the angel Youma of the Green Rainbow Crystal can fly and use magical quills to draw the outlines of things which becomes those things. This is a really potent ability potentially, but also kind of a no-limit fallacy. The Seven Great Youma are noted to be able to combine into a far stronger monster, probably of a higher tier.
Finally there is the legendary DD Girls who, though it cost them their lives, managed to actually kill the Guardian Senshi. The DD Girls have fairly conventional abilities for youma; disguise power, flight, binding vine arms, fireball creation, possibly ice manipulation though their leader also has potent illusion abilities which like Thetis before her, the Senshi had no defense towards until Sailor Mercury smashed the gem on her forehead granting it.
Beyond all these characters are the Heavenly Kings, 3 of the 4 being Jadeite, Nephrite, and Zoisite. Even if one of the stronger youma could match them in power, they are versatile and skilled enough that all 3 Plant Sisters had to capture Naru as a hostage, and Nephrite still cleanly beat them only getting a small injury. The Heavenly Kings are all magically versatile and highly skilled warriors who lead the youma. All three of them can teleport and can create illusions comparable to the best illusions of Thetis or the DD Girls, with Jadeite creating an illusion of a giant ethereal copy of him floating above the city seen across the entire city and a giant fireball immolating the city to threaten the Senshi, Nephrite creating an illusion of one of the city streets warping spatially as well as an illusion of many duplicates of himself, and Zoisite creating an illusion disgusing himself as Sailor Moon that even decieved Tuxedo Kamen as Tuxedo Kamen was in physical contact with Zoisite. All three of them have also shown the ability to create matter from nothing and both Jadeite and Nephrite have shown the ability to sense auras.
Going into them individually starting with the first one Jadeite displays numerous abilities including creating a black sphere of energy he claims can kill Sailor Moon, Sailor Mercury, and Sailor Mars all at once in one-shot. He also demonstrates numerous forms of teleportation including creating black portals that suck things into them which he can use to BFR people through dimensions. Like a youma he can disguise himself and drain energy, even able to instantly drain all the energy of several people knocking them unconcious before they could react as well as nullify the energy of attacks being used against him which he did to the Moon Tiara. He can also control those he's energy-drained. Jadeite was also able to create living creatures out of clay and had telekinesis strong enough to control a plane.
Nephrite the second is a fiery reckless heavenly king strong enough and skilled enough to defeat the three plant sisters clearly by himself. Nephrite can levitate, create energy-draining lighting and shoot energy beams, teleport in a variety of ways, and create portals similar to Jadeite's, though it's unknown if he can suck people into them like Jadeite did. Nephrite has an insane ability to create matter, creating the youma Regulus from the constellation Leo, which I presume is some power-inapplicable hax as opposed to Nephrite being...star level, and Nephrite also created the Dark Crystal from his will, a crystal that can search out the Silver Crystal. He can enchant objects by infusing the spirit of a youma within it, even someone's clothing, so that the person touching it is possessed by the youma, and can send out his shadow as a seperate possessing entity that can energy-drain (including a whole ballroom.) Nephrite has an enhanced sense of hearing Naru's cry across the city, and has a form of divination based on the position of the stars, though this may require prep time and is not useable in battle.
Zoisite is the third of the heavenly kings and is the weakest physically but the most cunning usually using deception and quickly adapting his plans on the fly. Physically he's still strong enough that his attacks can threaten to kill Tuxedo Kamen who initially was treated as stronger than Sailor Moon. Zoisite can teleport and can conjure a red orb that can teleport other entities as he did to Sailor Moon and Tuxedo Kamen which can't be resisted by physical strength like Jadeite's portal suction. Zoisite can also levitate and is an agile fighter that noticably dodges often attacks from his equals. Zoisite has several forms of energy manipulation, usually using rock or ice manipulation but can also conjure fire or just bursts of concussive force. Zoisite has also demonstrated mild telekinesis and gained control over rats. Zoisite also at one point seems to follow a character as a shadow, though I think it's just supposed to be showing he's following stealthily.
Hypothetically the real difficulty of countering this tier should be defeating those three...but there's one youma that's even more pressing, one with no special signifigance in-universe. Episode 9 of Sailor Moon Classic introduces the youma Ramua, the time youma. Ramua resides in her dimension which is a warp in time. Within she has complete control of time able to freeze people in time, keeping them from moving, or rapidly age-ing or de-ageing them until they disappear. She can make portals to her dimension as she chooses and can enchant clocks which alter people's perception of time dramatically causing a schoolday to end at 8:00 AM as the people there thought it was past lunchtime, cars and buses crashing as their drivers misunderstand how much time they have to go, and most notably caused one guy to think he could somehow run from Tokyo to Paris, suggesting some were affected to have their sense of time distorted thousands of times over. Ramua has no special signifigance in the verse, but she's unironically the biggest threat of the tier just because as soon as one enters her time warp, where one's sense of spacetime becomes distorted requiring Sailor Mercury's computer to find direction, she can freeze one in time. Her only weakness is a single normal-looking clock outside her dimension which, if broken, destroys her timewarp.
So how to counter this tier?
One of the most helpful abilities to have that's immediately apparent is some form of extrasensory perception. Most of characters on this tier use a stealthly ambush style of attack and being able to tell when a person is a youma in disguise or being able to sense through the illusions of the DD Girls or the Heavenly Kings would nullify one of the most common tactics and allow for a counter ambush. I think it would be especially good to have magic sensing or energy sensing that way one would be able to sense the magic clock of Ramua's, and be able to hit her weak point.
I also think it's pretty noticable that the characters on this tier don't tend to kill very quickly. The Youma pretty much all use a tactic of binding an opponent and then draining their energy because their entire goal is to gather energy for the Dark Kingdom. Even the Heavenly Kings tended to use attacks with notable charge up periods in combat like Jadeite's black energy sphere or Zoisite's fire summon and even Ramua after she froze someone in time wouldn't instantly kill someone but leave them there aware as she moves to stab them with a spear. What that means is that a character who is comparable in speed and can still act while bound, such as using a thought based power, will always be able to get at least a shot off. Likewise if a character has sufficient energy manpulation resistance or a high enough stamina, it might take a bit for most of the characters to kill them using standard tactics, outside of say the elite youma.
A power that might be helpful in this tier, and indeed several tiers of this verse, is purification. Most of Nephrite's, Zoisite's, and Kunzite's youma are humans who are possessed and corrupted. Being able to purify them would defeat most of the youma. This is what made Sailor Moon's second attack "Moon Healing Escalation" so useful. The major problem is this doesn't defeat most of the biggest threats. Jadeite, Nephrite, and Zoisite aren't brainwashed in the 90s anime, Ramua is Jadeite's youma, and Thetis and the DD Girls are Queen Beryl's. It would only really helpful against most of the normal youma and against the Seven Great Youma.
A more generally efficient ability is an ability that involve mobility or manipulation of the space between objects. Anime Sailor Moon built up a reputation for constantly clumsily dodging things to increase the drama. This is because none of the abilities on this tier are direct, they're all some form of projectile or beam or melee attack. Likewise the ability to teleport is a power given to the high tier characters of this tier and used as an example of their power. Abilities that can negate this advantage include once again thought based powers that don't transmit spatially to be dodged, and the ability to move efficiently through space with things like your own teleportation to avoid attacks.
Another interesting point about this tier is while every other tier includes some advanced technology or other forms of power, on this tier is entirely made up of magical abilities, or the biological abilities of magical entities. A character who uses non-magical abilities would be somewhat of an outside context for the tier, which brings me to my first counter
Continent-Scale Threat:
This is the tier that contains the high tiers from Classic, and most of the characters in R, the second season.
Characters in this tier scale primarily from Wiseman's attack which Tuxedo Kamen declared would quickly wipe the Earth of life, which is generally regarded as being roughly in this tier. The Sailor Senshi withstood this very attack as Mamoru was describing it, along with Mamoru himself. In the 90s anime Mamoru recieved no particular power-up during R, so the last time he gained power was when he awoke to his identity as Prince Endymion in Classic, and from this scales to the strongest characters or Classic and the characters in the Makaiju Arc. You could argue it scales back to the beginning of the series as Chibiusa before transforming for the first time was able to withstand this same attack, but there's a clear tier difference between someone like Beryl and Zoisite, whom she can one-shot with a single attack, most likely this is just Chibiusa's potential as a Sailor Senshi.
This tier is still the same speed as the prior tier, there's no higher speed feats for this tier and the two tiers in their interactions are consistently shown to be similar speeds, with Classic-era Sailor Mercury managing to with brief distraction blitz Dark Prince Endymion. So Low FTL Continental.
This tier includes the 12 Cardians, monsters summoned by Ali and En from their cards, 16 Droids, humanoid robots sent back from the future to the present day to fill key points in Tokyo with dark energy to weaken the city's defenses in the future for the Black Moon Clan's invasion, and an army of hundreds of Flower Youma, the flower monsters created by Fiore. It also includes the strongest members of the Dark Kingdom, Kunzite and Queen Beryl, the Makaiju Siblings the plant-elf aliens Ali and En, and the 9 members of the Black Moon Clan, the rebellious contingent of humans in the future who saught to overthrow Neo-Queen Serenity.
As befitting their purposes, all the Cardians and the Flower Youma can absorb energy as they do to gather energy for the Makaiju or Fiore. Likewise the Droids have a form of corruption able to turn places into darker versions for the purposes of infiltration with their dark energy.
The Cardians and Droids are generally themed and have related powers. Of their most notable members includes Siren, the mermaid cardian, whose song induces sleep in those who hear it, the sun cardian Amaderasu who attacks with scorching rays of heat and can seal people inside bubbles, and strongest of them the cardian Reci, the tree ghost cardian who moves intangibly through objects like a ghost, uses large area of effect plant attacks, can physically seal people, and open portal to other dimensions. Reci was a strong enough cardian that it required Sailor Moon to recieve a powerup from Queen Serenity to defeat her, though Sailor Moon's powers were unstable earlier.
However far more dangerous are the Droids, the most hax group of monsters of the week in the Sailor Moon anime. To the point that their most hax three members would be relevant threats even in the final season. Starting out more humbly, the droid Dumbell is a master martial artist and the droid Jamenen is made of a logia gel-like substance. Fruit droid Avocadora can use knock out gas, Makeup Droid uses powerful acid attacks, and the storm and the ice droids Furaiki and Nipas respectively can create a raging thunderstorm or the freezing winter winds. The animal droid Dogbar can control animals, the biological droid Pharmakon can create disease, and the two droids Chiral and Achiral can phase through objects. More versatile then any of these, the flying mischeivous sprite droid Giwaaku uses mind manipulation and illusions to decieve people into thinking their friends have turned against them, and can create many illusory duplicates of herself.
This tier contains the strongest members of the Dark Kingdom, excluding Metaria herself. Kunzite is the strongest of the Heavenly Kings clearly. Kunzite can fly and teleport, even teleport others remotely. He has similar powers to the other Heavenly Kings, able to create illusory duplicates of himself and without even moving, drain a city of its energy. He shows technopathy capable of activating machines with his will, darkness manipulation which he used to obscure a battlefield in darkness, and wind manipulation/freezing able to create winds as cold as absolute zero. Kunzite was able to create a forcefield which absorbed and reflected the Senshi's attacks and was able to turn it into some kind of shrinking dome around them, trapping them. He also has spacetime manipulation. He can BFR someone through time or dimensions sending them as far as to the Moon or to the Dinosaur era. He can also warp the space within a Dark Tower, making it seemingly much bigger on the inside than the outside and making the inside warped so the Senshi could not find the exit when trying to escape even with Mercury's computer.
Stronger than any of the Heavenly Kings is their Queen Beryl, who with just her passive anger threatens her courtroom. She doesn't fight much in the original Sailor Moon anime, but it's shown that with her Crystal Ball she can see anywhere she wishes, she can teleport anyone she wishes to her courtroom, she can shoot a beam from her eyes to send people into Eternal Sleep, sealing them in crystal, and she can manifest illusionary images of herself in Tokyo from D Point at the North Pole.
At the start of R, the Senshi would face the Alien couple, Ali and En, plant-themed space aliens. They have all the usual Sailor Moon villain abilities; energy-draining, illusions, flight, teleportation, and disguisng themselves. The two also have their own unique abilities. Ali can create a localized storm of dark energy that dulled the Senshi's senses, kept Sailor Moon and Mercury from attacking and Sailor Jupiter from transforming. En in contrast has a form of precognition and can divine the future. Ali claims it is "the best in the universe", though as he was trying to charm his lover at the time, it's possibly hyperbole. The Alien pair, do have the weakness that they are constantly at risk of running out of energy and have massive stamina problems.
After the battle with the Alien couple, the Senshi would have to face the Black Moon Clan. Overseeing the Droids are the Ayakashi Sisters, a team of four bickering sister agents sent to inflitrate the present day society. They have all the general Sailor Moon villain powers, and also possess negative energy manipulation which they can use to corrupt areas like the droids do or form negative energy construct like grappling hooks. Koan is the pyrokinetic of the Ayakashi sisters, and was given by Rubeus a space-time bomb, a bomb that would rip a hole in the spacetime continuum. Berthier is the hydrokinetic of the Ayakashi sisters, and created a bubble around the Senshi that reflects attacks. She's also a superhuman intellect that rivals Sailor Mercury, a Type 1 intellect. Petz is the Electrokinetic of the Ayakashi Sisters, given by Rubeus the Dark Wand, a wand with "infinite energy", which multiplies Petz's negative energy and can implode into a miniture black hole. Petz also created wish-granting gems giving limited reality-warping. Finally Calaveras has a whip which she infuses with dark energy into a dangerous weapon that matches Sailor Venus' whip.
Stronger then them are their overseeing agents, Rubeus, Esmeraude and Saphir. They have the same common abilities. Esmeraude has green energy-draining lighting and after being given a cursed crown by Wiseman can turn into a dragon that is probably the most physically powerful threat on this tier, who easily withstood the late R Senshi's attacks and threatened them with singular physical strikes, scaling well above the baseline for the tier. Rubeus is the one who granted the space-time bomb and dark wand and presumbably can procure more, and also has his massive spaceship that scans areas of spacetime for targets and teleport there as well as gravity manipulation and the time travel central to the Black Moon Clan's plan. Saphir is the smartest of the Black Moon Clan, untricked by Wiseman's machinations likely scaling him above Berthier in intelligence.
At the top of the Black Moon Clan hierarchy are their leader Prince Demande and his treacherous advisor the Wiseman. The two have the general Sailor Moon villain powerset, and the two fought a teleporting energy-blasting battle to a stalemate. Demande has superior teleportation abilities able to teleport past the Crystal Tokyo barrier that kept the rest of the Black Moon Clan out, and has his infamous Evil Eye which grants telekinesis and hypnosis to those who look into the eye strong enough to work even on the Sailor Senshi which resist mind manipulation that effects crowds regularly. The Wiseman is a strange vessel entity serving the abomination Death Phantom. He's a master manipulator, tricking the Black Moon Clan regularly, and able to sense things across a city-wide scale, sensing the moment Chibiusa took the Silver Crystal. Wiseman is a skilled illusionist, has the power to freeze people in place, or corrupt them into evil versions of themselves as he did to turn Chibiusa into Black Lady and alter her memories. Wiseman also has a low-high regen, regenerating from Demande reducing him to a puddle and possesses the evil Dark Crystal which can shoot beams of dark energy able to one-shot Sailor Senshi level entities, cover the whole Earth in darkness, and nullify powers, shutting down the Senshi's powers.
However probably the biggest threats at this tier are the most hax droids. Luax is the time droid and is basically Ramua 2.0. She exists in a cosmic time warp, a void in time. She can disguise herself, and can reverse time to return all attacks back to the sender, with her only weakness being that in the moment after Luax attacked the flow of time returns to normal. The ethereal droid Akumuuda can fly, turn her body into smoke and drain energy. More notably she can hypnotize people, put them into sleep and enter their dreams where she can drain them of their energy until they died. In Sleeping Beauty-like sense, only love's kiss can awaken one put to sleep by Akumuuda. However the most dangerous is the Shinigami droid Jakoku. Jakoku is a droid of nightmares who enters one's dreams and keeps one asleep as it threatens one in their dreams, warping their dreams into a nightmare world. Only by believing that someone can surpass death itself, is an invincible hero as Chibiusa believed of Sailor Moon, can allow them to defeat Jakoku.
So the biggest threats on this tier are dark energy's corruption and power nullification, lots of spacetime manipulation, and some dream/sleep manipulation. How to counter this?
One power that seems really OP in this tier is attack reflection. Luax is dangerous almost entirely from her attack reflection via time manipulation, Kunzite was eventually killed by Sailor Moon parrying his own spacetime BFR-ing dark blades back at him, and just in general the tier is full of OP attacks but not that much defense outside Wiseman's regeneration and some phasing.
Countering Luax, Akumuuda, and Jakoku requires an odd set of abilities. First off just the ability to enter a timeless place to fight Luax, and then to overwhelm her time reflection. Then either resistance to sleep manipulation or the ability to kill Akuumuda in her smoke-y form before she puts one to sleep then resistance to fear manipulation or nightmare manipulation to beat Jakoku. You could use a robot for the latter problem, if it wasn't for Kunzite's technopathy. Given the droids are all robots, one could think to try a technopathic character to control them, and while that would be a generally useful power I don't think it would work on Jakoku who exists within dreams and renders one generally powerless when warping one's dream into a nightmare. It would only work if the character could already fight normally in dreams.
Using the Black Moon Clan's plan and using an acausal time travel to mess with the tier in their past before they come to be would probably work but is pretty rare on this tier. While the Black Moon Clan's ability to time travel might suggest that a counter might require acausality, they don't really use it offensively in combat particularly so it's probably not that big a deal. With that said time travel or other four-dimensional combat might still be helpful against temporal BFR or just to reach Luax.
There's one final power that would be extremely op in the verse in general, that being antimagic. Almost all characters use magical abilities and a character that can nullify magical abilities would only have a relatively few types of threats to deal with, which brings me to my first counter
Planetary Scale Threat:
This tier consists of most of the strongest characters from Classic and R, as well as most characters from Sailor Moon S, the third season.
Characters in this tier scale to a number of casual planetary and violent planetary destruction feats putting them somewhere in the planet to large planet level range. The great tree the Makaiju can destroy planets, even a portion of its energy used in the war of Ali and En's people was able to destroy the homeworld. The Xenian Blossom can grant its user energy potent enough to destroy the planet, and can tank the resultant violent planetary explosion. Queen Metaria even in her partially freed state was able to cause massive sunspots that covered the Sun gradually and disasters across the planet, and merged with Queen Beryl to form Super-Beryl. All three of these powers were overcome by the power of the Silver Crystal stated itself to be able to destroy planets, with even a passive energy burst killing the Xenian Blossom. The Daimon in S would be presented as a new tier of power with literally the first daimon overpowering the Silver Crystal tanking the energy burst type that destroyed the Xenian Blossom and forcibly detransforming Sailor Moon. You can try and scale this lower based on things like Luna, Artemis and Tuxedo Kamen sometimes seem somewhat relevant to this tier, or how Beryl and Endymion are presented as stronger than Princess Serenity who herself withstood an attack from Super-Beryl but it creates way more internal inconsistency to suggest Beryl is somehow near Super-Beryl's strength. When Mamoru and Usagi's love strengthens her and allows her to create the Spiral Heart Moon Rod near the start of S my presumption is Mamoru got stronger there as well which removes a signifigant inconsistency.
In terms of speed this tier scales off the feats of Fiore and the Makaiju. Fiore is stated to have searched the galaxy for a flower to give to Mamoru, in the timespan of explictly ten years (Shingo is ten at the time, and was born the day Fiore left the Earth.) The Milky Way Galaxy is about 100,000 lightyears across meaning to even cross it's diameter once in that timeframe would require speeds of 10,000c but far higher is impressive as he was searching its planets for a flower. Even more impressively in a vague but similar timeframe the Makaiju "wandered the universe." Even the nearest galactic cluster is 11,000,000 away lightyears meaning to wander such is 10 years would require a speed just over 1 million times the speed of light. To travel a larger subsection of the universe would require a speed greater in the millions to even the billions of times the speed of light. This is consistent how when Metaria grants Beryl the energy of darkness, it is said Beryl will spread hate and greed to all living things across the universe, again suggesting the speeds required to traverse the greater scope of the universe requiring speeds millions to billions of times the speed of light.
The threats of this tier include many daimon, some named and with themed powers, but many unnamed in a giant of army of unformed true form daimon, an army of snow dancers the minions of the villain of the S movie, Super-Beryl the final villain of Classic, the Makaiju the final villain of the Makaiju Arc in R, Fiore and the Xenian Blossom the villain of the R Movie, and the Death Busters the villain group of S.
The monsters of the week of S are the Daimon, at least hundreds. The Daimons in their true state were gel-like logia monsters infused into objects to create monsters. Most of them have the ability to steal "Pure Heart Crystals", which seem to be a part of the soul. Those without their Heart Crystals are rendered into an instinctive unconcious state, mindlessly acting on their last thoughts with their Heart Crystal repetitively.
The Daimon are not as hax in general as prior monsters of the week but some have some pretty strong abilities. The running Daimon Hurdle is a relative speedster, fast even for her tier. The swimming pool Daimon Doburin has hydrokinesis and can trap people in floating water orbs. The Tea Daimon Chagama used attacks of acidic tea. The sadistic cat Daimon Nekoneru has an extreme degree of malleability and regeneration, made up of many tiny pieces that can break apart and reconnect at will. Both U-Choten and Choukokkaa have gravity manipulation and the later can also summon minions made of sand. The wheel Daimon Taiyan has the power to duplicate herself into two, and of course this tier also has the greatest character ever, the door Daimon Doorknobder. Doorknober has the ultimate power of Thyrakinesis, the power to open and close any door. Unstoppable.
Obviously nowhere near as strong as Doorknobder, but still notably stronger then most Daimon was the Glass Knight Cenicienta. Cenicienta could transform her arm into a glass blade or regenerate it, breath out shards of glass to incase an enemy in glass or trap people inside glass as a form of sealing.
Even stronger and one of the biggest threats of the tier is the lab experiment that nearly destroyed the Death Busters along with the world U-Ikasaman, the dimension Daimon. Ikasaman controls a dimensional rift, a fracture in the spacetime continuum connecting a seemingly endless number of dimensions and environments she manipulated to her aim to play games with the senshi. She could move or change the dimension segments within at will. She can't resist games and gambling, though blatantly cheats if she would ever lose. She can also seal people inside playing cards.
Outside the Daimon, the S movie also has a different type of foddder, dozens of Snow Dancers, ethereal monsters that float around freezing with their breath whole buildings and city blocks. They can also create dozens of illusory copies of themselves each.
More versatile then the fodder are the Witches 5, a series of 5 witches that served under the Death Buster leaders. These include Eudial and Viluy, two supergenius type intellects who created technology to remove the heart crystal from someone's body and other advanced technology. Eudial is a fire-themed witch who usually used a flamethrower that was a massive threat to the S-era Senshi. The second was the immature Witch Mimete who can shoot star projectiles and after her transformation became a being of pure electrical energy existing inside technology. The third of the witches 5 was the plant witch Tellu who created plants called Telluns that dangerously drained the water from the atmosphere and stole heart crystals. The fourth was Viluy who created nanobot swarms that can disintegrate peoples bodies. The most dangerous of the Witches 5, and the strongest in raw power was Cyprine-Ptilol, a double-sided witch who could split into the two witches Cyprine and Ptilol, with the ability to steal heart crystals, absorb and reflect attacks, dimensional bfr, and mind/sleep manipulation controlling sleeping students of Mugen Academy and commanding them to come to the school for heart crystal extraction across the city.
The overseers of the Witches 5 were the Daimon Kaorinite and Germatoid. Kaorinite was a highly versatile fighter most notable for her potent barriers the Senshis' attacks couldn't break, her fighting skill comparable to Mamoru's, and her ability to phase through objects. She also possesses many of the common SM villain abilities such as flight and teleportation, as the ability to bind enemies with her hair. Her superior is the mad genius Doctor Tomoe controlled by the Plant Daimon Germatoid. Germatoid in terms of raw power was strong enough to contend against Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune until they gained their talismans, and could possess inanimate humanoid objects with pieces of its biological matter to possess them. Doctor Tomoe also scales in intelligence above even the Witches 5 being the smartest of them and probably the smartest character in the entire series, and while Germatoid was possessing him, could use the same intelligence.
Not as strong in raw power but as massive or more massive a threat are some of the strongest characters from the earlier seasons.
Super-Beyl is a fusion of Metaria and Beryl as Metaria granted Beryl her "energy of darkness" to try and live on after it became apparent Sailor Moon was about to stop Metaria's re-awakening. Super-Beryl was a 50 meter montrosity, whose appearence upon the Earth covered sky in dark clouds, and the whole world was being drained of energy. Metaria proclaimed that Beryl with the energy of darkness would "instil hatred and greed into all living beings" suggesting possibily emotional manipulation, though it's possibly a figure of speech. Super-Beryl otherwise would possess Beryl's abilities.
The Makaiju is a cosmic tree with lifeforce manipulation which created life on its home planet and gave its energy to them but which they selfishly used in warfare against each other, destroying the planet, the Makaiju wandering the universe with the last two survivors. The Makaiju can drain lifeforce, even a single branch of it, though it required the energy of love specifically to subsist off.
Fiore with the Xenian Blossom is a versatile fighter with many of the most potent abilities seen already including lifeforce manipulation, giving Usagi's life back at the end of the film, telekinesis strong enough to move a multi-city block sized asteroid towards the Earth, brainwashing, potentially planetary energy-draining, possibly low-godly regen, summoning continent level plant monsters, and a resistance to illusions strong enough to see through the Sailor Senshi's disguise which no other enemy in the anime was able to do.
However likely the biggest threat of this tier is the Daimon sealed inside Hotaru Tomoe's body, their secret leader and lord of the daimon, Mistress 9. Mistress is likely the strongest character in the tier in terms of raw stats, being wholly unconcerned at attacks from Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune at the same time. Mistress 9, even when dormant within Hotaru could with a single touch drain all the life from a daimon rendering it a withered husk, teleport Hotaru to safety, or project psychic hands that can steal pure heart crystals so strong that it can overpower the four guardian senshi pulling against it. Mistress 9 can casually psychically project a forcefield around a building that the Senshi couldn't break, create portals, telepathically sense things, travel between dimensions and nebulae and disguise herself as Hotaru.
So going over the biggest threats for the tier, it's primarily a lot of emotion/soul hax, some lifeforce hax, a large amount of dimensional/spatial hax, and powerful forcefields, along with a bit of basically everything else.
One of the things that helps in trying to counter it is that in the anime the haxes of the tier aren't that potent. Most pure heart manipulators only ever do one at a time, with the exception of Cyprine, and that's actually somewhat of a plot point as the Death Busters had to search through everyone in Tokyo to find the person with the Talisman inside them and couldn't just mass steal from people. Likewise while the lifeforce drain is dangerous, Mistress 9 has the best lifeforce draining and it's just massively draining from one being at a time. Having even normal resistance to soul and lifehax would go a long way.
The dimension hax and bfr with characters like Super-Beryl, Cyprine, and Mistress 9 are annoying but they don't actually have any forms of sealing outside physical sealing like Cenicienta's glass sealing and the snow Dancer's freezing meaning a character who has their own spatial hax can counter. Plus it would get around Cyprine-Ptilol's attack reflection which is only in one direction by allowing an attack from behind and would allow one to get past forcefields. Even with Mistress 9, she pre-emptively grabbed and pulled Sailor Moon through a dimensional portal so the Sailor Senshi couldn't Sailor Teleport into her forcefield.
A rather oddly common thing on this tier is characters who are two fused together; Beryl and Metaria, Fiore and the Xenian Blossom, Cyprine and Ptilol, Professor Tomoe and Germatoid and Hotaru and Mistress 9. Of those 5, 3 of them don't even really want to be together and have the good half within them. Therefore a particularly effective strategy might be a manipulator type character with knowledge on them who can manipulate them into fighting themselves. Even Ikasaman was defeated partially by Chibiusa outwitting her with a very obvious card gambit where she drew a card and made an obvious horrified face when she actually got a good card. Similarly on this tier in particular unlike all the other tiers, none of the characters save Kaorinite are particularly proficient at fighting. All of them rely on one-shotting opponents with heart-crystal stealing or overwhelming them with raw power. Outside Kaorinite, only Fiore displays any fighting proficiency and it's not particularly strong. A character who is an extremely proficient fighter would have a much easier time dodging attacks and hitting back accurately. Stealth might be helpful and against most opponents it probably would be though Mistress 9's telepathic sensing and Fiore's ability to see through illusions means it's only a really helpful ability rather then tier-breaking.
The last notable counter point is that pretty much everything on this tier is biological whereas most tiers have undead, ethereal, elemental, or mechnical beings. The only non biological entities on this tier are the Snow Dancers and MAYBE Cenicienta. As such things that manipulate biological forces like body control, animal manipulation, plant manipulation, lifeforce draining (which is already seen as a god tier ability for the tier), or radiation emanation would all be effective on basically every character.
So who would be a good counter? Well you could use
Stellar Scale Threat:
This tier consists of pretty much all the characters from SuperS, the fourth season, and most of the characters from Sailor StarS, the final season of the 90s anime.
Characters in this tier scale off the Golden Crystal, a crystal state to have the power to destroy stars in a statement very similar to one made of the Silver Crystal in the first arc of the manga. Queen Nehelenia takes a direct hit from it and only her illusion is destroyed. This hit causes a massive explosion which knocks out but does not kill the Super Sailor Senshi and the Amazoness Quartet suggesting they would be lower in the stellar range but still scale, especially during StarS when Super Sailor Jupiter and Super Sailor Uranus individually take a maintained assault by Nehelenia. This is also possibly supported by the SuperS film in which Queen Badiyanu uses something called "The Black Dream Hole" and planned to consume the Earth with it. However the Black Dream Hole doesn't really act like a Black Hole in most ways, and even if it did Badiyanu is clearly way stronger then anyone else in that film so it might not even scale. Near the end of the film Badiyanu merges with some kind of molten core to the black hole which potentially is a star, and hits Super Sailor Moon with several attacks which harm her but she survives, then Super Sailor Moon and Super Sailor Chibi-Moon get amped by the powers of the other Sailor Senshi and they destroy merged Badiyanu with one attack. It's also possibly consistent with the Shadow Galactica being able to use black holes that can consume planets as weapons. The Sailor Starlights in their fight against Galaxia also create many explosions across the galaxy visually bigger then star systems, though as they might be amped at the point it probably doesn't scale. You could scale this all the way to the beginning as a civilian, Miharu, manages to push a SuperS villain, Tiger's Eye in combat forcing him to cheat, and also there's Nephrite's weird feat of making a constellation a youma which if it was accepted would be an even stronger feat any of the feats mentioned above, however you get into massive inconsistencies there are clearly numerous tiers of characters that can stomp each other and Tiger's Eye vs Miharu is moreso really meant to be a demonstration of their skill levels rather then raw power.
In terms of speed, this tier scales off Base Sailor Saturn and Super Sailor Moon traveling explictly to the center of Pharaoh 90, a universe onto itself encompassing the Sailor Moon universe in a timeframe of at most minutes. Sailor Saturn would return in StarS and even be upgraded to Super Sailor Saturn, and while she's dramatically more powerful then the other Sailor Senshi, she doesn't seem to be noticably faster. This would require speeds of quadrillions of times the speed of light. This tier would then have to be likely quadrillions of times the speed. This is again possibly consistent with the Starlights fighting Galaxia across the galaxy in seconds, requiring speeds trillions of times the speed of light, though once again the Starlights were likely amped during this event.
This tier probably doesn't have as potent hax relative to its power level compared to the second tier, but it makes up for that with sheer versatility and diversity of threats and abilities. This includes no less then 4 groups of monsters. These include the mirror parodies, duplicates of Nehelenia created from tiny bits of the mirror of hatred, the manifestation of Nehelenia's hatred. Mirror Parodies are glass-monsters that look like Nehelenia, can disguise themselves as her, on occassion demonstrate some of her abilities, can teleport, and should the shard fall into the eye of someone, will brainwash them and make them comatose. These exist in the hundreds. The SuperS movie introduced dozens, likely hundreds of little candy-baby looking monsters called BonBon babies which had no noticable abilities or intelligence, they were just really tough to the point the Senshi struggled to harm them and would distract and annoy the Senshi by tackling them. The monsters of the week of most of StarS consistent of the 19 phages, monsterous parodies of a person's nature created when a non-Sailor Senshi has her their star seed removed. But the most notable, even if they are likely the weakest in raw power are the Lemure.
The Lemure are the circus performers and summoned monsters of the Dead Moon Circus. There are 34 named Lemure. They are completely intelligent entities, to the point that three ballon lemure were actually family members that tried to avenge each other after their various defeats. The horrific truth of the Lemure is revealed after the Dead Moon Circus' defeat, that with the corruption of the young Princess Nehelenia she consumed the dream mirrors of her royal court, killing them. The Lemure are their warped ghosts endlessly trying to entertain and please their dark queen from beyond the grave.
The Lemure are a pretty dangerous group overall. They are, as ghosts, naturally immortal and can make themselves invisible at will. They are most infamous for their signature ability, dream manipulation. They extract the dream mirror, the embodiment of a person's dreams, rendering them hopeless and eventually killing them outright. The Lemure are the kingdom of nightmares and prepare for combat every day, giving them likely a high level of combat skill. In their invasion of Elysian they drained the world of its life, causing the kingdom of dreams to become lifeless, dark and cold, and trapping the kingdom of dreams to become covered in entrapping webs at the orders of Queen Nehelenia. However their most potent ability by far is that the Kingdom of Nightmares exists parasitically on the Kingdom of Dreams. According to Helios, as long as there are dreams to be wasted, the Dead Moon can not be brought to ruin. The nightmare beings have a form of conditional immortality conditional on the dreams of all beings, or at least all humans.
The Lemure individually usually have circus abilites, more suited to entertaining the queen then anything suited to combat but there is a few particularly dangerous members of their ranks. Shadow Lemure Hebiganabiko can enter into shadows and into peoples dream through shadows associated with them. The electric catfish lemure BiriBiri Dude can put to sleep with its voice. The performing monkey Lemure ManeMane Girl has the magical power to copy attacks, even copying the attacks of the Super Sailor Senshi. However by far the strongest Lemure was the clown Lemure Mister Magical Pierrot. Mister Magical Pierrot was a vastly powerful Lemure able to defeat the Amazon Trio in combat, absorping their attacks or transmuting their attacks, turning Fish Eye's knives into butterflies and Tiger Eye's whip into a snake.
Speaking of the Amazon Trio, they are the first generals group of the Dead Moon Circus; a tiger, a fish, and a hawk transformed into humanoid forms. The three have teleportation (which they can use on others), telepathic sensing able to sense where the others have teleported and capable of following, various mundane and elemental forms of attack, the ability to disguise themselves and the same dream mirror extraction ability the Lemure have. Tiger's Eye is the strongest in power, and is skilled enough to briefly fight the master swordsgirl Miharu through sheer skill. Given Miharu was able to overcome until he cheated despite his power you could consider this is a level of A Tier skill. Hawk Eye demonstrates creation abilities, creating a false photograph to cement his false identity, and was able to create an inter-dimensional portal to try and trick Helios. Fish Eye is the most cunning of them, can use a magical net to immobilize people or freeze them, and can hypnotize people, though is normally an absolutely terrible shot.
The other generals group of the Dead Moon Circus are the Amazoness Quartet. They use the amazon stones which can be used to create inter-dimensional portals and telescopes that can view things between dimensions, explode, trap people in web, or knock out their dream mirror and they have insane accuracy feats of pool ball-ing and hitting large of crowds of people with one ball. Their collective power is potentially enough to overwhelm Zirconia herself. CereCere is a plant manipulator that can create knockout gas. JunJun can create illusions like a giant cage with a bear inside. VesVes has the ability to seal people inside a computer which she used to trap the Super Sailor Senshi. However the most hax of them is the little child psychopath herself PallaPalla. Even without her Amazon Stone she was able to casually switch the ages of Usagi and Chibiusa, and create negative energy lashes that prevented teleportation. With her Amazon Stone she was able to voodoo doll the Senshi and turn her little toy dollhouse dentist's office into a real dentist's office. However the Quartet, and especially PallaPalla have the weakness that they extremely childish and easily bored.
The leader of the Dead Moon Circus groups under Nehelenia is the witch Zirconia. Zirconia is strong enough it would take all 4 of the Quartet to possibly match her. She is powerful enough to maintain all of Nehelenia's spells in her absense, though whether she can use them seperately is unknown. She is capable of creating many illusions of herself or others within mirrors to play mind game. She can use energy projection and has a little flying pet called Zircon she can shoot blasts out of or use to knock peoples Dream Mirrors out. She also completely no-sells the Moon Gorgeous Meditation which can seal enemies.
The 4 Animamates Galaxia sent to Earth are generally stronger, being able to fight against the Super Outer Senshi though probably not stronger to the point of being in a differnet tier. They have the shared ability to shoot homing energy blasts that steal star seeds. In the 90s anime star seeds are basically just souls and having them removed unless you're a Sailor Senshi turns you into a mindless monster version of yourself, and if you are a Sailor Senshi with a "true star seed" it just existence erases you as it did in the manga. They also travel around in teleporting phone booths like the Doctor from Doctor Who. The Animamates have slightly different abilities; Aluminum Seiren uses water projection, Lead Crow uses a whip but their common abilities are their most important abilities. Lead Crow also had showed one more thing that's not an ability, the aformentioned Shadow Galactica weapon that was basically a weaponized small black hole that would absorb the Earth. It was also called a "dimensional rift."
The enemies of Earth and the Universe were opposed by a set of 16 named heroes across its five seasons including 13 characters on this tier. The Princess Serenity has bodyguard Senshi, the four Guardian Senshi who after attaining their super forms were able to consistently if slightly overpower the Amazoness Quartet and later match the Sailor Animamates in combat. By the end of StarS, the Sailor Senshi could fight phages in melee in their civilian states. The Sailor Senshi can combine their power, which allowed the 4 Guardian Senshi to repair holes in spacetime, restore normal gravity, teleport across dimensions, create a forcefield that could keep out armies of comparably powerful entities, and fight enemies much stronger then them. Sailor Senshi were able to tank being in space, and can resist the cold of absolute zero. The Senshi can also resist knockout gas and hypnosis.
Sailor Mercury is a supergenius girl who took one look at the schematics for a flying bike contraption and easily tells the creator, a normal person, how to make it function, is implied to be smarter then Viluy who created a nanobot swarm that could disintegrate a person in moments, deduced Nephrite's real identity, determined the EXACT percentage of Seijuro being the Moonlight Knight, and generally serves to help the Senshi see through tricks. She's likely even smarter scaling to Sailor Pluto. She's a hydrokinetic that regularly uses water including creating an obscuring mist, freezing enemies or even acid like the Makaiju's, neutralize energies or knock unconscious brainwashed innocent civilians. Her Mercury Aqua Rhapsody technique also somehow got the Senshi out of the computer VesVes trapped them in and she once somehow held a collapsing dimensional portal open with her power. She's resisted Garoben's energy-draining and Viluy's disintegrating nanobot swarm. She managed to use her Shabon Spray while paralyzed and when the droid Giwaku tried to decieve her that her friends had betrayed her with her illusions, Sailor Mercury was able to see through it via her trust in her friends. Sailor Mercury also uses the Mercury Computer, a small portable computer and visor which does whatever the plot needs, including plotting a way through Ikasman's warped dimension in flux. detecting the location of objects, analyzing the composition of matter or energy to tell what they're made of, and determining the rules of a dimension.
Sailor Mars is the pyrokinetic shrine maiden of the Guardian Senshi. She can produce fire attacks which she can maintain like a flamethrower including a wall of fire, a living firebird that can act independently, mystical rings of fire, and producing a bow and arrows made of flames which she can physically use with such accuracy as to hit a Mirror Parody using Sailor Neptune as a shield without hitting Sailor Neptune in front of her. Rei as a Miko also has spiritual abilities; able to sense auras, evil presences, see the future in fire, sensed the sentience of the Makaiju, and even sense through the stealth technology of the Marzipan. Sailor Mars can also use mystical ofuda to exorcise evil presences as strong as Queen Nehelenia. These paralyze evil-doers and nullify their powers, and can nullify evil magic affecting her such as stopping her from being turned to stone. In the R Movie, Rei showed the ability to throw dozens of these ofuda at once and with great accuracy. Beyond this, Rei has also shown signifigant martial skill and super strength able to punch out Jadeite's humanoid minions made of stone without even realizing they weren't human, could hear a whistle across a city, and mild probability manipulation.
Sailor Jupiter is the super strong Guardian Senshi of protection. Her strength is regularly equal or far in excess of her attack potency and durability, to the point that before even transforming for the first time she could do notable damage to Zoisite with a punch and throw one of the seven great youma around. With her powers she can call down lightning, throw ball lightning, create a giant dragon made of lightning to eat enemies, and create omnidirectional bolts of energy. In the 90s Anime, Jupiter's power is regularly treated as the strongest of the Guardian Senshi, her attack knocking out all the Guardian Senshi when reflected in episode 105, doing notably better then the other senshi against Dragon Emeraude, destroying a wall of the Dark Tower of Kunzite shocking Sailor Mars and Sailor Venus who had no idea how they would get in, and withstanding 16 shots from Queen Nehelenia herself to protect Usagi while the other Guardians were struggling with the Mirror Parodies of Nehelenia. Other then that however Sailor Jupiter doesn't have many other powers. She can superleap, she's a skilled fighter, and has rose earrings she can use as a distraction weapon.
The unpredictable Sailor Venus is the final Guardian Senshi. She can shoot energy beams or energy danmaku, can create giant energy hearts as a projectile, and her most versatile power, creating a metal chain of hearts that can be used for offense, defense, grabbing objects or swinging around like Spider-Man. Venus is known for her agility able to leap up to a second story building in her civilian state, outrunning a car in her civilian state, and just generally dodging attacks noticably well. Sailor Venus has also semi resisted the effects of having her heart crystal and later her dream mirror removed, and has the most experience as a Sailor Senshi due to her time as Sailor V.
During R and S, three veteran Sailor Senshi are introduced, the Sailor Senshi of the Outer System who act as the Solar System's first line of defense and so have greater skill and power and have a talisman, a powerful item they can utilize as their Heart Crystal. The Outer Senshi seem to universally have sensory abilities and energy manipulation. First of these is Sailor Uranus. Sailor Uranus is the speedster of the of the Senshi able to keep up with speed-based enemies and leave the other Senshi in the dust. Her energy attack is air-themed and can reflect projectiles by creating winds so strong as to carry the attack back to the sender. Her talisman is the Space Sword, a sword which dramatically increases Uranus' offensive capabilities. Uranus and Neptune have collectively resisted Cyprine's hypnosis, and the two were able to maintain their independent wills after having their souls being taken by Sailor Galaxia, something that forced even the Golden Queen to comment on their impressiveness.
Uranus' partner is the mysterious sea Senshi Sailor Neptune. Sailor Neptune uses a water-themed energy attack and her talisman is the Deep Sea Mirror which allows her to dispel illusions, clairvoyance to view things far away, and show the true form of things. Sailor Neptune is most known for her psychic abilities, superior even to Sailor Mars, allowing her to sense through Nehelenia's illusions. She has a vague sense of the future and can sense evil presences as far away as the Moon from Earth. She also potentially has vague dream manipulation. Neptune possesses the same mind and soul hax resistance as her partner, and both have prophetic dreams foretelling the calamity of Sailor Saturn.
However one of the biggest threats of the Outer Senshi is the lonely guardian of spacetime, Sailor Pluto. Sailor Pluto exists naturally at the spacetime door outside space and time where she oversees its proceedings, She can use her talisman, the Garnet Orb to create a forcefield or bfr herself or others through space and time. She also somehow sent the Senshi into Chibiusa's dream to fight Jakoku. Not only can Sailor Pluto sense the future, she was able to sense the change in energy across the entire galaxy. She's smart enough that she was able to create Luna-P, a magical floating cat head toy that can turn into seemingly any object, as well as somehow created a holographic projection of herself from outside spacetime all the way to Earth to warn the Senshi. She also has her most famous power. It requires her to sacrifice her life, but she can freeze time giving her allies ample time to act. Though somehow she actually came back from this power without explanation and even before that her soul appeared in the living world to speak to Chibiusa. She's only somewhat balanced by her desire to not mess up spacetime more then neccesary.
During the final season, three new Sailor Senshi from another Star System are introduced, the Three Sailor Starlights, freedom fighters against the evil Shadow Galactica conquering the galaxy. Sailor Star Fighter is their leader and the strongest, managing to equal Sailor Uranus while the others are more comparable to the Guardian Senshi and has a laser attack. Sailor Star Maker is their tactician having an intelligence comparable to Ami's, and can shoot a danmaku energy attack. Sailor Star Healer seems to be the quick one of their group, able to blitz Sailor Venus on one occassion, and having a fire attack. The three also possess teleportation abilities.
However there's one more Senshi on this tier, that's potentially another one of the biggest threats in this tier; the Sailor Senshi in training Sailor Chibi-Moon. Sailor Chibi-Moon is for the most part the weakest Senshi. Her three attacks include two jokes; Pink Sugar Heart Attack which is consistently more of an annoyance then an attack (though is noticably fast, his the Daimon Rangy none of the Guardians could hit), and the ultrasonic crying which is her crying amplified into an Earthquake like attack. Her other is "Twinkle Yell" which just summons Helios to help her. She is pretty noticably durable withstanding the divine fire of the Golden Crystal directly to try to save her Helios, able to resist the effects of Dream Mirror removal, and resisting corruption because she holds Helios in her dreams. However by far her most notable trait is she is the one who inherited the Silver Crystal. The Silver Crystal is the ultimate plot device in the entire series and Chibi-Moon is only balanced by her lack of mastery of it. I'll get into the full capabilities of the Silver Crystal later but in emotional moments Chibi-Moon has drawn out some of its power capable of fighting universal entities, a power that warps spacetime sensed in the far future by Demande and Wiseman from sheer potency, and reactivating the seal Queen Serenity placed on Queen Nehelenia. An emotionally unstable Chibiusa is one of the biggest threats of the tier. Speaking of Chibi-Moon brings up the last two heroes of this tier, neither Sailor Senshi.
The first is her love Helios, or Pegasus. Helios is a shapeshifting entity who can appear either as a young boy or a pegasus and travel between physical reality and the world of dreams. He can phase, even through portals, and take others into the world of dreams as well. Helios is the noble guardian of Earth and his powers granted the Senshi their super forms, and he can restore or heal, restoring against petrification, resurrecting the Amazon Trio and giving them Dream Mirrors, and break evil enchantments. This power makes him the curse of the Dead Moon Circus and somewhat of a deus ex machina in SuperS. In his horn he holds the Golden Crystal, a Crystal supposedly stronger then even the Silver Crystal though even harder to wield, a crystal that will burn the area with divine fire and purifying light if anyone impure tries to touch it. Its power is what Queen Nehelenia strove to take for it was belioved it alone can unseal her from Serenity's seal.
This tier also includes Chibiusa's father, the lover of Sailor Moon, Tuxedo Kamen, known also as Mamoru Chiba and Endymion, King of the Earth. Tuxedo Kamen primarily uses agility, skill, and stealth to aid the Senshi. In the anime he throws roses as an attack. These roses are more powerful then normal as they are amped by Mamoru's love for Usagi. They disrupt evil magic, and can create a barrier that pains evil beings within. He's accurate enough with them to disarm the 4 Amazoness Quartet with 4 roses at once. He also carries a whole capeful of roses he can throw at once for a danmaku attack. He also uses a cane or sword which he can somehow block a gas based attack with. He's also a psychic in his own right with prophetic dreams, able to sense Nephrite and Marzipan's identities, and able to sense when Usagi is in danger. The final point is so powerful that when Mamoru had amnesia his subconcious drive to protect her manifested as its own seperate physical entity. He can survive in space, somewhat resisted Luax's time manipulation to protect Chibiusa, and one point seemed to turn invisible, though that feat was kind of ambigious. His future self also has trans-time telepathy able to send messages to his past self in the form of dreams.
However there's three more threats that are some of the biggest threats of the tier, two of which are the villains of the S and Super S films, Queen Badiyanu and Princess Snow Kaguya. Both of them required Super Sailor Moon to be amped by the energy of 7 or 8 Super Sailor Senshi to defeat, putting them above the SuperS-era Guardian Senshi, but below the End of Series Guardian Senshi who scale to a non-Silver Crystal amped Eternal Sailor Moon who at the start of StarS was Super Sailor Moon amped by the energy of all 9 other Sol System Senshi. Kaguya is a cosmic villain that flies around on a meteor/star thing who can freeze entire planets, drain them of their energy, conjure armies of Snow Dancers, and disguise its presence from even the Mercury Computer. Lady Badiyanu is a giantess in control of a giant space vortex, called the black dream hole, which can absorb the Earth and send all people in it to sleep dreaming of what they desire most. At the end of the film she fused with the molten core of the black dream hole. She also has telekinesis, manipulation of negative energy to the point of making cages, barriers and telekinetically move things with it. Her Black Dream Hole also forcibly reverted the Senshi to civilian forms and granted age manipulation, illusions, and hypnosis. Her spaceship the Marizan also has invisibility which she possibly granted, though the Mercury Computer did see through it.
However the biggest single threat on this tier is the final villain of SuperS, and of the first part of StarS, Queen Nehelenia. Nehelenia was a lonely little princess brainwashed by a cursed mirror and ate her court's dream mirrors turning them into her cursed ghost circus so she would never be alone. Nehelenia was sealed inside a mirror reality by Queen Serenity and is burned by the sunlight, however during the climax of SuperS, Nehelenia was able to escape her seal at which point she becomes the biggest threat to the tier. Queen Nehelenia has many powers, she exists within the mirror dimension where light and time are frozen yet she can move naturally suggesting a level of time stop resistance. She can convert every mirror in an entire city into one of her cursed mirrors and can use other reflective surfaces like water. These mirrors naturally brainwash people into become obsessive of their reflections and she can trap someone in the mirrors where they fall into eternal sleep similar to what Beryl did to Jadeite. She can teleport within the dimension, move her cursed mirrors around physically, and can even repair dream mirrors if she wanted. Nehelenia possesses a superhuman degree of willpower able to will attacks to disperse or reflect back at the user. She was able to forcibly grab the Golden Crystal and use it despite it trying to fend off her evil power, and was even able to with great effort almost push herself out of the mirror dimension despite the seal though the sunlight burned her and sent her back in, Nehelenia is also the queen of nightmares and spiders. She can invoke nightmares and cause spiders to create so much webs it blots out the Sun over a city. She could also create her own webs not even Super Sailor Moon or Helios could escape and either electricity it or drain energy through it. She can create many illusions including illusory fire that still burns or illusory flowers that can brainwash and she can summon entire armies of Zirconia or Mirror Parodies. She even has a level of reality-warping, turning the Amazon Trio from people to their humanoid states, closing a time portal, causing an eclipse to happen, and turning her court into circus monsters.
So to sum up this tier's biggest threats are most likely Sailor Pluto, Sailor Chibi-Moon, Kaguya, Badiyanu, and Nehelenia. The strongest abilities of the tier are conditional immortality tied to all dreams, mind/soul hax, corrupting, life-draining, purification, spacetime bfr, dream bfr/sealing, mirror sealing, immersion, surges of universal conceptual power, planetary freezing/energy-draining, astral/dream plane beings, lots of sensory abilities and attack copying/reflection.
While an intimidating list, this tier also more then any other abounds in weaknesses. Pretty much every character in this tier has a notable weakness meaning a generally versatile character is helpful as they can take advantage of a larger number of weaknesses. One of the most notable ones is that four out of five of the biggest threats lack any kind of sensory abilities. Even Nehelenia was defeated by stealth partially as after she got the Golden Crystal, the childish Amazoness Quartet, managed to swap it with a pineapple. Only Sailor Pluto, who depending on her opponent is unlikely to cause her to use her strongest abilities, can particularly sense things meaning a stealth strategy would be very helpful. Sailor Mars, Sailor Uranus, Sailor Neptune, and Tuxedo Kamen all have anti-stealth abilities but they are much more managable then the entire tier at once.
Just like the first tier, but even more so, purification would be an extremely potent strategy. The Entire Dead Moon Circus is just a corrupted little girl and her brainwashed court. A counter can get around the Dead Moon Circus' immortal ghostly nature, and defeat them all at once just with a big burst of purification. Similarly the Sailor Animamates and Phages are Sailor Senshi forced to Galaxia's will by their braclets and corrupted versions of normal people. Purification would immediatly restore them which is what Eternal Sailor Moon did. Only the Heroes and the Movie Villains would not be affected by purification.
Speaking of, another helpful trait would be being a pure entity oneself. The Golden Crystal and the Silver Crystal are immensely powerful hax objects, but won't hurt a good person and a sufficiently good person could hypothetically use them herself or himself.
Another seemingly simple stategy that would be helpful is danmaku, especially from sufficient range. While there's attack reflection and attack copying, that is only shown to work on one attack at a time and almost no one else in the entire verse has much danmaku potential. Even large area of effect would be helpful as most of the characters in the tier lack range with their abilities and so large range and area of effect grants a noticable advantage, as demonstrated by Sailor Lead Crow temporarily defeating the 4 Guardians at once by skilled use of her whip. Another way to take advantage of this, even mild spatial manipulation might be particularly strong as it would be hard for the tier to hit a counter with numerous attacks at once outside of many characters attacking at once.
So who would be a good counter for this tier? You could use
For a kid counter that CAN physically fight the tier you could use
Happy Birthday Imp! and WOW it looks like yet again you gave all of us a present for it. This was certainly one of the best Verse Strategy Guides I have ever Seen and I think it is really sweet how you came back to the first series you ever VS Analyzed to commemorate your 500th Blog, I was going to do something similar myself pretty soon. Toei Sailor Moon, is a LOT Different from the Manga in several key area's there were definitely familiar names and faces all over the place, but they often had different backstories, and levels of power compared to each other. A lot of trends I noticed was characters in Toei Sailor Moon tended to have much less impressive stats, but have like double the versatility of their manga counterparts, as Toei naturally just gave them a lot more abilities to fill out episodes, and also gave like everyone fusion forms :D. It was also really cool seeing various New characters show up like the Movie characters, or ones from filler i remembered. And BEYOND Hilarious seeing just how broken some of the one off monsters of the week could be, like how theres a Random Youma with legitimently better time powers than Sailor Pluto, which is insane. Something I think was vary unique about this blog is just how much detail you gave each section you broke down. In my VS Guides I simply focus on explaining what all the relevant threats are. I often will just list powers that apply to many characters up front and only mention characters by name when I have specific powers to cover that are exclusive to them. You really went the extra mile here giving each character a cool introduction and going through every one of their powers, weaknesses and even secondary stats like range, absolutely fantastic! Many of these Tiers of characters seemed absolutely Nightmarish to battle against! I actually think this verse was in many respects harder to counter than the actual Sailor Moon Manga if you think about it, as they simply had more powers to worry about, and limited your pool of characters to do it in more with their lacking stats. But I gotta say the amount of Epic counters you pulled out in this blog was both impressive and inspiring. I think its really cool that every single one of these characters you used for counters is from a Verse you experienced through your career as a VS Debater. But WOW did I love seeing many of these characters in action! You managed to use at least 1 character I really love as a counter in EVERY Tier and it absolutely BLEW MY MIND each time, seeing someone as cool as you Hype up one of my favorite characters and explain how they'd kick everyones ass! Some Highlights include Tak taking out The Dark Kingdom by using her technology, insane skill and intellect tiering and flipping mind control to outfox everybody! Enid's awesome soul hax to Suck up Mistress 9 and Save Hikaru! Bubbles' purification song and Duplication powers to save the day from the dead moon circus just like another Cancerian little bunny girl i know! and Satori being an absolute beast and stopping Galaxia like the literal Underworld queen she is, I loved how you described her and Usagi's interaction! But by far my favorite of these was Natsu Flipping Dragneel overcomming those despairing Black Moon clansmen with his insanely versitile Fire Magic that can mess with time and concepts themself. You KNOW i love the image of him punching Demande's face in :D, and seeing you talk about him was the most hype i have felt in a long time. All the rest of your picks for this blog were incredible too, with lots of real fitting franchises that Sailor Moon helped inspire from Wedding Peach to CLAMP, or other Sentai like Power Rangers, to even just really genuinely cool counters like the shonnen king of anti magic, Asta.
ReplyDeleteI had a fantastic Time with this Blog Imp and I can't wait to see whatever you make next, Heres to 500 more!
This was a fantastic blog. As someone who only knows the Sailor Moon manga so far, it was pretty interesting seeing all the powers that were unique to the anime, and how they relate to existing protagonists and villains in terms of scaling and abilities. I see that minions were greatly expounded upon in the anime, sometimes with a lot of unique powers of their own. I am thinking of the time manipulators primarily, such as Ramua; the fact that these minions have such potent time abilities is just silly and ridiculous. Also interesting to see how relatively common plant manipulation was in all of these. The power descriptions for each tier were incredibly thorough in general so good job with that. I was happy with a lot of the character choices you used. I think I was personally most familiar with Tak, FD Link, and Enid and it was cool to be able to recognize the feats and powers you were able to talk about with those characters. Though of course, I also have some amount of experience with Samus, Bubbles, and Ra as well. I haven’t been keeping up with Fairy Tail lately, but it was also really cool to see Natsu here and how powerful he’s gotten. The fact he has that many resistances is crazy and I love his time and concept burning fire. As for characters I don’t know, Asta’s anti magic strategy was pretty cool. It was nice of you trying to find ways of freeing Hotaru with the “Planetary Scale Threat'' characters. Also, thank you for sharing the existence of the beloved Sailor Moon character Doorknobder :P. I really like how you talked about the main difference between Usagi of the anime vs Usagi of the manga at the end there; that felt like a nice conclusion. I also like the little playful jabs at the anime you put occasionally in the blog; it just goes to show how much you like the show even if it can get silly at times (for instance: “ a small portable computer and visor which does whatever the plot needs”). So overall awesome 500th blog, and I hope you had a happy birthday Imp!
ReplyDeleteThese strategy guides are always a treat to read, it gives such a broader overview of where a series stands in fiction when you compare it to others, and introduces you to concepts that you don't normally run into when just doing a 1v1.
ReplyDeleteYou actually surprised me with your knowledge of Legend of Zelda lore, particularly the Stone Tower feat, something you don't typically see in vs arguments so that tells me you really did your homework. Although, I would suggest referring to the Link you showcased here as the Hero of Time, as it seemed a more generalized analysis of that particular incarnation of Link, and the Fierce Deity does not typically possess the Master Sword or the Triforce, but eh. I'm splitting hairs when it comes to the minor details like that, since the Feirce Deity Mask should by all means be a part of OoT/MM Link's toolset.
I also liked the Invader Zim comparison! Zim is usually the character used in debates like this but is comically incompetent, it's interesting to see what a fully fledged Irken can do when invading another fiction.
That being said happy 500th blog and happy belated birthday!
I'm late to the party, but congratulations on the big 500!!! I know I haven't read quite all of them, but I think I've read most of them over the years. Your blogs are very entertaining and informative Imp; I hope I can read 500 more! I think you couldn't have picked a better verse to cover for such a momentous occasion. I can't remember at which point I stopped watching the anime as a kid; I think it was around halfway through? So this blog had a nice mix of nostalgia and totally new information. I've read the whole manga and it was nuts seeing some of the changes, especially in the final arc! Now allow me to start giving my thoughts on the wildly diverse characters you recommend as counters to this verse.
ReplyDeleteRight outta the gate on the first tier, Tak was an unfamiliar face that seemed pretty OP. That intelligence is quite impressive! Though my favorite here was your second pick, Queen Mary. I've been a Mother fan for decades, so I was absolutely floored by seeing her included here! What a cool choice, it was great seeing you really show how powerful she is. She doesn't get much screentime in her game so I feel like people forget or underrate her. And while she may be my fave of the characters you picked for the first tier's counters, I must agree that Angel Lily is easily the best counter here. I often forget how ridiculously OP Wedding Peach Angels are vs any sort of evil beings, but your blogs always remind me!
Before I talk about the second tier, I just wanna quickly give you props for how in-depth you are with the MANY monsters of the week Sailor Moon had. Great job! The next set of counters surely made a lot of bros I know cheer. Asta? Link? Natsu? A lot of top tier favorite boys make for an interesting counter to one of the most iconic girl-focused series. I feel for you having to sift through Black Clover to figure out how strong everyone is in relation to everyone to get a proper grasp on Asta and his craziness. Link's anti-evil kit makes him a fiercer (heh) version of a Wedding Peach Angel for stomping some stronger foes, but Natsu was my fave here. I got to know how OP this fella is thanks to Thor's blogs and you did quite the elaborate rundown here on how he has all the tools needed to counter everything this tier can throw at him!
It's cool to see how weaknesses change and evolve from tier to tier; probably one of the neatest and most underrated qualities of these strategy guides imo. The biological weakness on the third tier was interesting and opened the door to a lot of potential ways to counter. Winged Dragon of Ra as an answer to Metallia is one of the best, most thematic counters I've ever seen! I also like that it can potentially save some of the good characters of this tier that got turned into monsters. So surprisingly, on a tier with freakin' Samus Aran, Ra is my fave counter featured on this tier. Enid, another character I learned about from our bro Thor, comes back to kick more ass. Really dig her shadow and soul stuff. As for the famous bounty hunter herself, I wasn't familiar with this form of Samus and didn't realize she gets this strong. Cool! Phazon was a jawdroppingly amazing counter to this tier. I know she's one of your favorite characters, so it was very nice that you could find a niche that she *perfectly* slotted into for this blog. Congrats and well done!
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DeleteThis fourth tier was huge! Very IMPressive that you tackled it all after already going through more than half of analyzing this verse; I hope you're taking it easy now. Animus is a Power Rangers character I didn't know at all, and a divine mechagod? I love it! One of the coolest mecha I've learned about recently. That projection of his is pretty OP, though his weaknesses seem concerning. So who do you find to one up this counter? An adorable little girl! I smiled seeing Bubbles here; her presence made it even more of a celebration of your long history of work. Uranus was an unexpected tough match-up, but then I remembered she's fine with killing a kid if she has to. Apparently that's one thing that didn't change from the manga! Blue Beetle was my fave counter on this tier though, and easily the strongest. I have heard this character mentioned numerous times, but had no idea what his powers were. Holy cow, this guy is busted as heck! Seriously, his tech is off the chain! He didn't even need that extra time hax at the end of your write-up for him to completely bend this verse to his will. And jeez, talk about pure of heart. In a very short amount of time, you were able to educate me thoroughly on the vast powers of Blue Beetle, thanks!
Then there's the big one, the final and most powerful tier. A surprising number of characters here; usually the top tier only has like two of 'em for most series. I was delighted to see that the weakness of this tier was energy-draining, one of the most iconic abilities of this series, a focal point for the villains' schemes and, this is just me speculating, but Sailor Moon is probably the series that made energy-draining the most famous. Loki was a neat surprise, very impressive magic and intelligence+manipulations skills. I think Yuuko does it better though, and she's my fave counter for this tier. It was great seeing you breakdown how she can toy with this tier (and verse in general) by showing her massive list of incredibly powerful feats and scaling to magical beings of immense power and intellect. Though of course, even if she's the one I like most here, she's not necessarily the perfect counter. That would go to your ultimate choice, Satori. Wow. I gotta clap for this one. She just shows up to the verse and wins by virtue of being there. This is THE definition and extremity of being OP in a verse. You even go into how she could manipulate the verse while being immune to their hax, but she doesn't even need to put that much thought into it! Now that's OP. Brilliant job Imp, excellently done!