Spoilers ahead…? Nah!
Though the battles in Sailor Moon may not be as action-packed as the ones you see in the likes of Dragon Ball or the Gundam series, the scale of what they fight for isn’t all that different: the Sailor Soldiers are generally all that stand in the way of the forces of evil enslaving, or even outright destroying, the people of Earth.
But have you ever stopped to wonder about which of Sailor Moon’s enemies came closest to winning?
Today we’re going to take a deeper look at the villains of the series and see if we can answer this important question. After all, there’s nothing more exciting than thinking about just how close the world has come to certain doom, right?
Ever notice how Queen Beryl has an evil tiara?
Unfortunately for us, we never actually see Sailor Moon‘s enemies battling it out against each other, so we don’t exactly have any direct data to work with. And of course, we have to contend with the usual “well, are you talking about the anime or the manga?” continuity issue that always seems to rear its ugly head.
So let’s get the easy stuff out of the way!
When it comes to the relative strength of Sailor Moon‘s villains, I think you can make a pretty strong case for the fact that the enemies continue to get stronger and stronger throughout the manga. That means that it’s a pretty safe bet that Sailor Galaxia / Chaos is the most powerful enemy in that version of the story.
There’s also the fact that, in the manga, Chaos was responsible for all of the villains the Sailor Soldiers had encountered to date (Queen Metalia, Death Phantom, Pharaoh 90, and Queen Nehelenia). Unless you want to argue that Chaos was capable of creating minions more powerful than itself — which would make it pretty silly for Chaos to even try to fight Sailor Moon after all its minions had failed — then I think Chaos’ manga is pretty much set.
Chaos Galaxia: Hobbies include writing poetry and listening to Death Cab for Cutie
But the anime, at least in my opinion, doesn’t suffer from this problem. While it’s true that the Sailor Team needs to continuously acquire new attacks and power ups as the seasons progress, I think you can make a compelling argument that this is more related to them fighting differently powered enemies that can only be hurt by other types of attacks rather than that they are fighting continuously more powerful minions of doom.1 After all, the Moon Frisbee Boomerang continues to be used all the way through SuperS,2 so it must be maintaining its effectiveness somehow.
Another thing that we need to consider is that Sailor Moon doesn’t kill all of her enemies in the anime. Fiore, Queen Nehelenia, and Sailor Galaxy, for example, were all healed in one manner or another rather than being destroyed. While I suppose you could consider this to mean that we don’t have a proper gauge on how powerful they really are, I’m willing to consider “healing” as being on the same level as “defeating.”
Why does Megatron put up with Starscream, anyway??
Last but not least, I’m going to assume that no minions were more powerful than their big boss. This is for similar reasons that I made above regarding Chaos creating the other villains — it simply doesn’t make any sense for Queen Nehelenia to face off against the Sailor Soldiers if Palla Palla was her strongest warrior.
Assuming all these things are true, then how are we supposed to tell who is the most powerful?
In a \roundabout fashion, of course!
In what I guess you could call a companion article to this, I previously wrote about who the most powerful Sailor Soldier is. For the sake of that discussion, I had to first exclude Sailor Moon and Sailor Saturn from the conversation because they’re somewhat distinct from other members of the Sailor Team, both in their sheer power as well as their roles in the series. But that fact actually comes in handy here.
You see, across the majority of Sailor Moon‘s run, our titular character is generally the one who destroys each and every enemy they run across. And this isn’t just restricted to the final bosses, either. “Now Sailor Moon!” is a constant refrain heard from the Sailor Soldiers, Tuxedo Mask, and even other characters of the day whenever they run across an errant Youma, Cardian, Droid, Daimon, Lemure, or Phage.
Pharaoh 90
And yet, there’s one enemy that Sailor Moon wasn’t able to defeat on her own: Pharaoh 90.
It took Sailor Saturn, the Galactic Reset Button,3 to take down this evil being from the Tau star system, and even then Hotaru died in the ensuing battle.
I mean, sure, Sailor Moon ultimately resurrected Hotaru as a baby after all was said and done, but I’d still say that Sailor Saturn did what Nintendon’t Sailor Moon couldn’t. And for that reason, I’d give the “most powerful villain award” to Pharaoh 90.
Sailor Star Maker is a close second…
Obviously this discussion involves a lot of assumptions. The theory basically falls apart at the seams if we were to decide that any of the assumptions weren’t true — and yet, I’m okay with that. It just means that there’s a new or different way to look at the question, and you may come up with an entirely different answer. After all, Jadeite is one of the few Sailor Moon villains who is neither killed nor reformed, so you could probably make some argument about him being an unstoppable force waiting to be unleashed.4
That’s just my take on the situation, of course. What’s yours? Would you throw your vote in with Sailor Galaxia? Or perhaps you’d put your money on one of the less discussed series villains, like Snow Princess Kaguya? Let me know down below! I’d love to hear if I missed anything!
References:
- The real reason is probably just that they wanted to sell more toys/products/whatever, but let’s not be too cynical. ↩
- Technically Sailor Stars, episode 184, is the last appearance of the Moon Tiara Action attack, but Eternal Sailor Moon throws a pizza at the enemy since she doesn’t have a tiara ↩
- I honestly don’t remember where I first heard this name applied to Sailor Saturn, but I’ve fallen in love with it ever since ↩
- However, you’d be wrong. The guy got beat up by airplanes. ↩
I agree with you that Pharaoh 90 would be the most powerful. However I would put Queen Beryl/Metalia in a close 2nd, if we take only the anime into consideration.
However would love to hear why you consider Taiki a villain?
Re: Taiki, that’s just a long-running joke I have here on this blog and in my personal life. I don’t actually hate Taiki, I just think that s/he is rather cold and uncaring and doesn’t add much to the story.
But I’ve been joking about how much I hate Taiki’s large forehead for 15+ years now… =p
I would say Doom Phantom since it took TWO silver crystals to beat him. Of course, I don’t have much more than that to support this theory, lol.
Talking about the manga (except Chaos) I guess Nehellenia is the most powerful. She is able to curse the Princess and Silver Millennium and she is the reason of the Silver Millennium’s falling. She is so much powerful to start the destroing of an entire population.
Jadeite has been cryogenically frozen. In a hundred years or so, when they invent a cure for whatever the hell was wrong with him, they can thaw him out. And he can go live in the Crystal Tokyo equivalent of a halfway house until he learns some kind of useful trade or skill.
Well, Pharoh 90 isn’t the only villain who couldn’t be defeated by Sailor Moon single handily, because Chibi-Usa helped take down Death Phantom in the anime and manga. And in classic, Usagi couldn’t take down Metallia Beryl without the ghosts of the Senshi to help, so could the Dark Kingdom and Black Moon be in the running for most powerful? And in Crystal, (haven’t read that arc of the manga yet) Saturn basically takes down Pharoh 90 herself, so wouldn’t it be considered weaker if a single guardian took it down?
That depends on how literal we assume the end of Stars to be: if we assume it’s completely textual, it took the combined effort of Eternal Sailor Moon from without and Sailor Galaxia’s true self from within – meaning, a juiced-up version of the Senshi that battled Pharaoh 90 plus arguably the strongest Senshi in the Galaxy in terms of sheer power – to stop Chaos; and even then, they weren’t able to defeat it, they could only dissipate it and now it takes the combined effort of the whole universe to keep it at bay, a small piece sealed within the heart of each and every being in existence. That alone is impressive and dwarfs Pharaoh 90’s resilience.
pgsm sailormoon destroied earth and the moon.
Hey i thought that the original worst enemy known is said to be ones self at the end of Stars Arc. When Moon says that no one should try and escape their darkness or get riof it. It should always be a part of you.
Also Death and Life had to work together to defeat Pharoah 90.
Pluto was the one to open the time door and it was Moons powers that healed everything that was hurt.
Saturn only lead the villian back to its own star system and was reborn threw the future queen.
I must respectfully disagree with some of your points here:
“I think you can make a compelling argument that this is more related to them fighting differently powered enemies that can only be hurt by other types of attacks rather than that they are fighting continuously more powerful minions of doom.1 After all, the Moon Boomerang continues to be used all the way through SuperS,2 so it must be maintaining its effectiveness somehow.”
Counterpoint: If Usagi’s Moon tiara attack is still effective in later seasons wouldn’t that support the idea that the villains are getting continuously more powerful. The Senshi in SuperS are unquestionably stronger than they were before, Usagi especially so.
To apply Dragon Ball logic to this, Goku’s iconic Kamehameha was effective early on when he was a kid and it remained effective when he was an adult Super Saiyan because his increased power in turn made his attack more powerful. Therefore a Moon Tiara Action from Super Sailor Moon in SuperS could be packing more punch that the same attack from Season 1 episode 1 regular Sailor Moon.
“it simply doesn’t make any sense for Queen Nehellenia to face off against the Sailor Soldiers if Palla Palla was her strongest warrior.”
Playing Devil’s Advocate here. In Power Rangers/Super Sentai often the main villain honestly is stronger than their minions. Lord Zedd was definitely more powerful than some of his monsters. Their reluctance to fight could be a case of arrogance. After all in real life monarchs weren’t necesarilly superior warriors to the knights under their command.
“And yet, there’s one enemy that Sailor Moon wasn’t able to defeat on her own: Pharaoh 90.”
Putting aside how you could argue Beryl/Metalia involved the 5 Senshi together, Wiseman required TWO Silver Crystals wielded by Neo Queen Serenity and Chibi-Usa in her Princess form to be defeated.
That doesn’t mean he was deffo more powerful than Pharaoh 90, but I think that then gets into a debae about whether Saturn is more powerful than 2 Silver Crystals. To me she is not because the Silver Crystals can resurrect and reincarnate people as well as heal them and annihilate entities like metalia who could affect the sun itself. So 2 of them together seems pretty powerful. Blowing up a planet takes a lot of power but I mean…in theory human beings could do that. The Silver Crystal operates with truly miraculous Godlike powers whilst Saturn is essentially doing what the majority of DBZ characters can do anyway.
For me anyway Galaxia surely has to be the most powerful. She was guardian of a Galaxy and then got powered up on top of that. Pharaoh 90 was never implied to have galactic scale powers nor Saturn.
But for this counterpoint to be valid, that means we must grant that the Sailor Senshi are getting more powerful, which I suggested may not be the case.
If we assume that the Senshi are powering up each season, then yes, of course the villains are also getting more powerful.