The Sailor Moon Pocky Box : Reviews

Bunny Love

Date Reviewed: November 23, 2005

Category: The Bad

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Layout & Design

Is the layout intuitive and easy to navigate? Is it compatible across all browsers and resolution? Is it aesthetically pleasing?

Cyprine

For the record, the image used in this layout is one of my all time favourite BSSM manga images of all time. I used to print this sucker out and pasty it to the inside of my high school locker. I used to own a laminated card of this picture (and, actually, I still do). It used to grace one of my own layouts not too long ago.

That being said, I do not understand why this splash page is cropped the way it is. The image is a Princess Serenity / Prince Endymion image, and it's made sweeter because of the way Endymion is kissing the top of Serenity's head. Here, we get enough of a hint of Endymion's presence to see his chest and nose, but why is the rest of him strangely absent? You might consider this nightpicky, but for a site whose tagline is "v. lovely couple", one might want to consider including both members of the couple in the splash image. Especially because that splash image is small enough as it is, and wouldn't be hurt by including the extra 50 pixels wide and high that would be necessary to put at least part of Endymion in it.

Okay, my second nitpicky issue with this layout is the way the site uses CSS to force the cursor to remain as an arrow when you mouseover links. That, in and of itself is fine; I went through my "die-linky-hand-cursor-die" phase when I couldn't get enough of the crosshair cursor, but it's absolutely imperative that if you have a link to an image, and you don't make the cursor change, that something else happen to indicate to the viewer that there is a link there. Add a top and bottom border (this person knows enough CSS to know how to do that), use some javascript to mirror the image (although God only knows how much I hate that effect), or something! Don't just assume that we'll click randomly until we find a link.

Now, on to the actual page. Overall, I like the layout because of its simplicity. It is easy to read and the navigation is obvious. The layout was incredibly easy to design -- it was basically the unedited scan of Serenity and Endymion with four brushes splotched on, showing just how simple it can be for someone who knows what they're doing to make a tolerable site design.

The site uses CSS filters for the navigation headers (the fade from white to black, for those who aren't familiar with filters), which are very pretty in Microsoft Internet Explorer. Seriously, the filter looks phenomenal, and fits the layout quite well.

In Mozilla Firefox, it looks pretty ass-y. (Alright, not necessarily "ass-y", but certainly not nearly as breathtaking.)

In fact, this site is a textbook example as to why one should avoid using CSS filters and other MIE-only layout tricks as central components of your layout. The effect here could have been easily accomplished with a few images, and although this may have increased the load time somewhat, it would have been much more multi-browser compliant.

Part of the layout's annoyances include the popup ads that reappear with each page view. Not something the webmaster can necessarily help, but certainly worth noting on my part.

My last bit of nitpicky-ness on the site is to include some footer space between the text of long information pages and the end of the page. I find it much easier to read something if the page doesn't end literally right under the last line of a paragraph. It's not too hard to include an extra line break between your paragraph and the end of the page just to give us an indication that you really are done and make it just that much easier to read.

Alright, as you can see by the way that all of my stuff is very nitpicky, overall, I haven't got much negative to say on this site. I'm not in love with the layout (a little too uninspired and drab, for my tastes) but there's nothing actually wrong with it, and certainly a lot better than most of the layouts I've had to review.

Written Content

Is there lots of written information? Are all profiles, back story, and other textual content accurate? Does the site offer fanfiction or other miscellaneous written content?

Mimette

Alright I know once again that this isn't my section, but the point of a splash page is for me to be able to EASILY see what is going on and frankly, I am squinting because of the color choices used here..... I will now turn my backlight down so that I MIGHT be able read it.... Even worse is that I don't click the IMAGE but the word "enter" underneath it.... this is NOT shaping up for a good review already.

Now that I am in here though, lets get down to the written content.

Alright here is a problem and maybe this is a pet peeve, but if you are going to have an About Me section at least get it right... Somebody tell me what is wrong with this statement. No, really, please read it:

Fave SM Senshi Rei, Hotaru, Michiru, Makoto

If you haven't figured it out by now, please close your browser and leave my site forever because you are too dumb to be here. If you are one of the usual readers of our site you are now looking for something to bash your head with and I offer you this lovely hammer.

WHY THE HELL WOULD YOU PUT CIVILIAN NAMES WHEN YOU JUST CALLED THEM "SENSHI"?!

That is like saying "Who is your favorite civilian form" and answering "Sailor Moon".... I mean come on, it isn't that hard to read back over your writing before posting it. I blatantly tell my staff NOT to correct my spelling errors before they put my reviews up because if I didn't catch it, they shouldn't have to, but dammit, this one is UNFORGIVEABLE.

Hooray for profiles that are dollbox stats... moving on.... wait a sec... no it can't be... are those the AMERICAN dollbox stats?! Alright whoever took the hammer from me, hand it back so I can use it to put a sizeable hole in my own head as I move on to the next section... which is...

Season Summaries. There is ONE season summary and it is for SuperS. Could you please tell me web author why you decided to start with the Fourth season as opposed to the first one? And why were the first three seasons scrapped as well as the fifth? I can understand not having time to do them but why start with SuperS? It doesn't make sense... at all. Even worse, I have read stereo instructions that are more interesting than this. Not to mention, better written. Your points are in the negatives here web author, please redeem yourself with this next section.

Outers' Moon. I applaud your correct use of your apostrophe, and now lets count these and see that they are all there. Being a bit of an astronomy buff, I think I see that you are missing 2 of Saturn's moons all together, you have all of Uranus's moons, and Neptune apparently had 5 of her's stolen and poor Pluto got screwed out of Charon apparently. You might want to finish this section before adding it as it currently leaves me more than annoyed that you would put such a half ass section up with things blatantly missing... The concept is good, it is the execution that falls severely short. Also why just list them?

Even better in this section is this statement at the beginning of it, and I quote:

"These are the moons of the outer planets, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus. I do not, however, know any of the moons of Pluto. Sorry"

Uh you are missing a LOT of these planet's satellites and even worse, Pluto's moon is half the size of the planet and you tell me that you don't know of it?! Point of advice for you.... it is called GOOGLE, try it sometime!

Oh this section is going to be fun! "Japanese Language and Suffixes" As a first year student of Japanese in college I think I am a bit versed in some if not all of these terms and lets see how many of them are butchered. Settle back with popcorn and a drink folks cause this is going to be one LONG section.

anime: Japanese cartoons The more polite thing to say here would be "Japanese animation" as cartoons is a western term...

ara: oh; ne of Michiru's pet words I am not sure what you are even talking about here as it makes absolutely no sense

chibi: little, short; child Chibi does NOT translate into "child"

otaku: used for someone who has a great deal of knowledge about something, often anime. In Japan, it's an insult WRONG! Say it with me children "otaku: the north american bastardized way of saying fanboy/fangirl" I dare you to go to Japan and proclaim yourself "otaku". Please make sure that if you DO proclaim this in Japan that you include video of you being pepper sprayed...

-ko: common suffix added as a real part of a girl's name. See this person's halfassed definition of "chibi" for the real definition.

And this children shows you why "learning Japanese" from anime not only DOESN'T WORK but you shouldn't be passing out poor information on the internet to those people that have no idea that what you are teaching is wrong.

The "Naoko Takeuchi" section is a blatant rip off of other sites. Some sections have been rephrased a tad bit but most of it is blatant rips. Even better, why don't you let the fans know that Naoko doesn't know English despite what Cindra might be spreading around. Meaning that it would be considered INSULTING to send her a letter in English. Way to go author, you just made and even bigger ass of yourself here than you did in the "Japanese" section.

After the shoddy attempts at information in other sections, it is obvious that this information on the planets is copied. The person even gives a link to "Stardate" at the bottom with a "thanks". I am assuming that this is where the information is from but trying to view that site is like taking a lesson in how to blind yourself with baby blue menus...

I am trying to figure out the reasoning behind LISTING the voice actors other than wanting to fill another link on your site.

Lastly before I close my browser, I have to comment on something, what is up with the (-_-;;) in your poll about asking your favorite couple? Oh lemme guess you think they should have always been "cousins" right? Yeah, I thought so....

Thank god my browser is closed now, the poll almost made my eyes bleed with the FortuneCity broken image plastered all over the background.

Visual Content

What kind of visual content is offered? Is it efficiently organized and intuitively accessible? Are all visual media offered legally?

Tellu

Multimedia on this page is NOT so great. There are a grand total of 21 images in the gallery section. That's just sad. What's even sadder is the quality of some of the images... with as many high-quality copies of the Galaxia/Usagi LD cover floating around, the best this person could muster was a cropped version with horrible contrast.

There's a pretty decent collection of MIDI files here, but MIDIs REALLY should be the focal point of your multimedia section. I feel safe in saying that we've all heard those MIDIs thousands of times. And, of course, MIDI files lack any sort of musical quality to them whatoever. They're like cheap knock-offs of the real thing... like an imitation Mona Lisa painted using only Crayola finger paints.

Next, there are MP3 files. The site owner tells us they are ZIPped, but in reality, only one file is actually a ZIP file. The owner also tells us that these are all MP3 files, when all of the North American files are in .asx format. I'm not even familiar with .asx format, so I feel safe in assuming that is not a popular format. After some quick research with my good friend Google, I found out that .asx files are really just text commands that pull up a streaming file. Whatever, the files didn't work for me anyway.

I fail to see how lyrics constitute "multimedia." Multimedia brings to mind visual and audio files (such as images and MP3s), but certainly not text alone. Lyrics should really go under the "information" section. And since we're on the subject of lyrics, why do they open in a different page, with no layout supporting them? Just a plain white screen. And why are they not credited???

In conclusion, the media on this page is pretty sparse. A few images, some MIDIs, and a few working MP3 files isn't really much of a multimedia section...

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