Usagi's Crisis: The Tiara Stops Working

Usagi joins her father Kenji and younger brother Shingo at a freshly opened virtual-reality theater, the same venue Ail and An have chosen for their next energy raid. Hoping to keep their Makai Tree alive, the pair loose the Cardian Hellant among the gamers. When Usagi transforms to stop it, her signature tiara attack refuses to fire, throwing the fight into chaos and forcing help from the mysterious Moonlight Knight.

Outside the theater Usagi runs into Mamoru, whose lost memories she longs to restore, and their group ends up going in together alongside a flirtatious An. Inside, Shingo suits up in VR gear as "Sneakers Shingo" while Hellant begins draining the other players. Kenji and Shingo stumble into the monster, and Mamoru is pulled in as well when all three are seized.

Sailor Moon arrives and launches Moon Tiara Action, but the disc never reaches its mark. A white rose then heralds the Moonlight Knight, who appears while Mamoru stands apart, puzzling Usagi since she had assumed the two were one man. The knight slices away some of Hellant's tentacles yet gets caught himself, until the inner guardians free everyone and Venus with Jupiter cleanse the Cardian. Back home, Usagi stays shaken by her failed tiara and by the knight's separate identity.

None of these events occur in the manga, where Sailor Moon's tiara never fails in the middle of an attack. The DiC dub cuts the moment Usagi puts Shingo in a headlock after he ignores her. One of the fake creature facades decorating the VR arena is Boxy, and this outing marks the final use of Sailor Moon's closing transformation pose for the Moon Prism Power Make Up sequence.