Sailor Moon villains are schemers and power-hungry abominations feasting on people’s souls. If they need to get their hands dirty, they are good at giving the Sailor Scouts a tough fight.
These villains tend to be recurring, and they usually bide their time before making themselves known, much like Power Rangers or Super Sentai villains. They often have minions to send, and generals to aid them in strategy and organization, but when they fight, their ability and strength are usually overwhelming and require a group effort.
Here are the 10 most powerful Sailor Moon villains, ranked from the weakest to strongest.
Note: Spoilers ahead for Sailor Moon, Crystal, and the manga. Content warning for discussions of death and torture.
10 Sailor Moon villains that prove major threats, from elemental to godhood
10) The Witches 5
Our first entry is a group that pushed the Senshi to the edge in Sailor Moon Crystal. These five were out to capture their souls for the benefit of Master Pharaoh 90, another entry on this list. They did so by disguising themselves as professors and heads of various classes at Mugen Academy, and tried to steal souls one way or another, as well as kill the Sailor Guardians.
Since they worked individually, they were all destroyed. However, when revived, they showed what a combined villain effort could do. They trapped the rest of the Sailor Guardians in their own fantasies and drained them of energy, leaving Sailor Moon alone to deal with all five. They weren’t shabby as individuals; their strengths with their elements being more powerful than that of the Sailor Guardians.
They just weren’t expecting the Outer Senshi (Neptune, Uranus, and Pluto) to arrive and kill them with a mass combined attack. The Inner Senshi (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Moon, and Jupiter) were nearly defeated, as normally, the Senshi can deal with the monsters and even get rid of the generals. The Witches 5 were a step up.
9) The DD Girls
Prior monsters that Queen Beryl sent after Sailor Senshi were usually one shot by Sailor Moon or any of the others. As storms raged around Earth, heralding the arrival of the dark goddess Queen Metalia, the Inner Senshi raced to the evil Queen Beryl’s Arctic base to rescue Tuxedo Mask. They would only meet their deaths.
The DD girls were made exclusively for the original Sailor Moon anime. They were the first to kill the Senshi, picking them off one by one with illusions, electrical spiked vines, torture by fire, and freezing them in ice. The only downside for them was the Senshi not going down without fighting, as all five DD Girls died from the other Senshi having to overload their powers to save Sailor Moon. They are this low on this list because while they did kill the Senshi, they also got taken out in the process.
8) Queen Beryl
The woman, the myth, the legend, the original villain of Sailor Moon herself! After being reborn thanks to Queen Metalia, Beryl set out on exacting revenge on the Moon Kingdom and Serenity's descendants for denying her Prince Endymion's love!
She's like Rita Repulsa from Power Rangers, one of the most memorable and oft-seen starter villains in all of Sailor Moon. Her sadism, powers of darkness that immbolized all the Scouts including Sailor Moon herself, and brainwashing powers gave nightmares to those that witnessed them. It took Sailor Venus stabbing her with a light-powered sword in the manga, and Moon destroying her necklace in the anime to get her to die. Even then, Moon had to go through a hypnotized Tuxedo Mask to do it.
7) The Black Moon Clan
Imagine the Android Saga from Dragon Ball Z, but if Trunks was a little girl and the Androids were hot on her heels. That’s the Black Moon arc from both the original 90s' second season Sailor Moon R and the Sailor Moon Crystal Infinity Arc in a nutshell: Sailor Moon’s future daughter Chibiusa/Chibi Moon comes to the past to warn the Scouts about the Black Moon Clan destroying her home, and begs for aid in saving the future.
The Black Moon Clan were a step up from Queen Beryl and her demons, from what they managed to accomplish. They devastated Crystal Tokyo in the future Earth, turning the entire population into stone. They brainwashed Chibiusa, turning her into Black Lady for a time. Wiseman’s second-in-command tried destroying the space/time continuum by combining two Silver Crystals together.
Their leader, Wiseman, himself turned into a planet in trying to kill Sailor Moon and end the Earth. It took the power of two versions of the Silver Crystal, and Super upgrades to Sailor Moon and Chibi Moon to finally kill him. The constant betrayals led to their demise, something not unheard of in anime.
6) Queen Metalia
An ancient demon of darkness from the sun, Queen Metalia corrupted Beryl to wage war on the ancient Moon Kingdom. While the war raged, Queen Metalia attempted to claim the power of the Silver Crystal but was sealed away in the Arctic region of Earth. For generations, she slumbered until she found Beryl reincarnated.
Metalia makes this list because of her widespread effects on the Earth. Her powers are a combination of soul draining, weather manipulation like Weather Report from Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean but with natural disasters, and wrath-inducing abilities similar to Wrath from Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood, which are demonstrated as the Scouts race to the Arctic.
She was also the first villain requiring a combination of everyone: Sailor Moon, Tuxedo Mask and the other Scouts to destroy.
5) Princess Snow Kaguya
Princess Snow Kaguya is a space-faring planet snatcher, akin to DC Comic’s Brainiac, from the Super Sailor S movie. She tried freezing the Earth long ago, but the light and power of the Silver Crystal prevented her from doing so. Since then, she froze countless other planets before circling around back to Earth.
Her powers are ice-based, so why is she so high up? She froze Earth over, her army of banshee-like snow dancers froze people over within seconds of arriving, and she took the combined powers of all the Senshi combined to defeat, complete with a Dragon Ball-style beam struggle.
4) Master Phararoh 90 + Mistress 9
This twisted combination of extraterrestrials would have succeeded had Sailor Saturn not made friends and loved ones to help her through the darkness. Mistress 9 was implanted in the young body of Hotaru Tomoe (the reborn Sailor Saturn) at a young age, thanks to Master Pharaoh 90’s minions (including Hotaru’s own father). The possession was slow and ultimately traumatizing for Hotaru, who was already stricken with social isolation due to violent seizures and blackouts caused by Mistress 9 to make her commit violent attacks.
Mistress 9 manages to, through using Hotaru’s body, do what all the others on this list could not: steal the souls of the Inner Senshi and consume the Silver Crystal. Were it not for Hotaru making friends with Chibiusa and the rest of the Scouts, Earth would have been terraformed into a dead planet. Despite everyone’s best efforts, only Saturn herself was enough to destroy the two demons using space/time powers.
3) Queen Nehelenia
A seemingly invincible, dream-eating, Maleficent style villainess sealed in a mirror, Queen Negelenia deserves the high spot for a few reasons. She was so durable that she could not be harmed by anyone else but Sailor Saturn. She was obsessed with eternal youth and beauty and stole dreams from her subjects to evade a prophecy that she would be old and haggard.
She was sealed by Queen Serenity after foretelling the fall of the Moon Kingdom and cursing the Princess Serenity to never inherit the throne. She has two different fates:in the anime, she gets sealed back in her mirror (Crystal just leaves it there, as does the manga), but she comes back as a servant of Galaxia and is eventually freed of Galaxia’s influence and healed.
As a villainess, until the power of the Golden Crystal was unleashed and Sailor Moon unlocked Eternal mode, she was nearly untouchable due to stealing dreams. Her darkness waves and strangling hair even constricted Sailor Moon herself, and held back all the Senshi except Saturn.
As an added bonus? She also corrupted the Sailor Quartet, making them her Amazon Quartet minions.
2) Sailor Saturn
As mentioned earlier, it is a good thing Hotaru made friends with Chibiusa and the rest of the Senshi. Sailor Saturn is the most powerful and feared of all the Sailor Guardians, and was also a rather frightening villain at one point.
She possesses the ability to destroy a planet and all life on it simply by swiping her Silence Glaive down with civilization reset to zero, and a whole host of frighteningly apocalyptic powers. Saturn was ultimately responsible for the Moon Kingdom’s destruction and would have eventually destroyed Earth to stop Pharaoh 90 and Mistress 9 had Chibiusa not stopped her. Ditto for Nehelenia.
Sailor Moon used her Super Mode to reincarnate herself and later speed up her aging. Despite her aid, she too fell to the final entry.
1) Galaxia, alongside Chaos
Think of all the final boss villains that have shown up over the years: Madara Uchiha, followed by Kaguya in Naruto Shippuden, Thanos and his Infinity Gauntlet in Avengers: Endgame, Kid Buu in Dragon Ball Z, Savathun in Destiny 2, and many, many others.
Now blend and put armor on that and you have Galaxia and Chaos. It would make Sagittarius Seiya of Saint Seiya call it gaudy.
From the manga, Galaxia was a warmongering and selfish tyrant who wanted nothing more then to have all the power in the universe because she was unsatisfied with her “trash” assignment of a planet. She sought the power of Chaos, the embodiment of all things darkness and the source of all the aforementioned evil, sans Saturn!
From the anime, Galaxia was one of the Senshi fighting Chaos for centuries. She let it possess her body and was soulless for a long time, with only darkness keeping her alive.
Whichever version is seen, the results are the same. Galaxia causes mass death with barely a hand wave. She tosses planets around and destroys them with ease, much like what Frieza dreams of: being a God of Destruction. She kills the main cast one by one, save for Sailor Moon. She reincarnates and brainwashes the other Senshi to have them fight Sailor Moon. She kills over 99% of Earth’s population, kills her generals if they even look at her wrong!
If Chaos itself is the embodiment of all things dark, Galaxia would be its best herald! It took Sailor Moon unleashing her own Angel mode to fight Galaxia, and even then, she needed the help of the Sailor Starlights as backup. She doesn't kill Chaos, but simply returns it to its native region of dark space, since it cannot be killed.
The final boss fight for the ages in both manga and anime form.
Conclusion
From elemental users to the very planets being torn asunder, Sailor Moon villains pack a huge punch that even Dragon Ball characters would bleed from. It just goes to show that darkness will always rise, and to face it, so will light.