Mikazuki Naishinnou

Mikazuki Naishinnou is a general Sailor Moon site that has information on the Emglish dub of the series. The site is about five years old, and according to the FAQ on the site, has moved around quite a bit and had more than a few layouts. The webmaster now has her own web server and the site seems pretty stable. A lot of work has been put in to the creation of this site as it is now, and of course, web servers and domain spaces are not cheap either.

All of this has been worth it.

Mikazuki is an impressive site, in part because of the extremes it uses in its presentation. The site is simple...it uses a white-backed square in the middle of a blue border to display the site contents. However, the artwork used for the site is some of the nicest Sailormoon manga that I have seen. The artwork is set off to the left and the content appears to the right of it. Navigation through the site is done through several small boxes along one of the edges of the artwork, or through text links in the content area.

One of the interesting aspects of Mikazuki is the creative use of cursor roll-overs throughout the site. I myself do not know how some of the effects of cursor roll-overs on this site are accomplished. This is not a rare thing, what with the way the Internet is growing in the various things that can be done, but one way to impress me is to show me something I did not know could be done.

Two effects used throughout the site are the roll-over scrolling, where you simply put your cursor on either the up or down arrow and the content area will scroll without you having to hit your mouse button. Very nice. I also liked how you can move the cursor over the button links and they "light up". I probably have seen these effects elsewhere, but I like how they are done on this site.

The content of the site is limited a bit to the more general aspects of Sailor Moon, although a quick look in the series information section reveals that the webmaster is aware of a few expansion possibilities. For instance, while the site is limited by the fact that it has only information about the collection of anime series, I liked it that there is a spot for information on such things as the collectable card game. I have not seen such information anywhere else. I have not played the card game, but I would certainly be interested in information about it. There is information on mythologies, voice actors, character biographies, and trivia all related to the series.

There is an image gallery of the Sailormoon artbook covers, a pretty good-sized collecton of midi files and lyrics, a pretty nice fanfic archive, and some desktop images in various sizes.

The only problems I had with Mikazuki are that it seems to load the graphics a bit slowly. This could easily be a problem from my end, but some allowances should be made for machines on the low end of the spectrum nowdays (500 - 600 MHz processors, that sort of thing...) Also, something about all of those dead links bothered me. Generally, when there's something I want to add to a website, I make myself a note and add it later. I don't announce it to the world until I actually have the material completed. While it's great to have some of that there to entice the user and give them a reason to come back, it is better to avoid the disappointment of seeing something interesting and then discovering that there is no link that leads to the interesting stuff...only a text line holding a place for a future link.

However, for a site that's been around for about five years, I am happy that the webmaster still has a lot of interest in Sailor Moon, and I hope that she will continue the good work on her site.

Artemis' Score: 9.7