The episodic nature definitely is the show's biggest problem. You have the villain cooking up some evil plan to steal whatever's required, and after that there's just way too much setup to get to the inevitable collision between the villains and the sailor soldiers. In the early part of the series, they often didn't even know there was something going on.
What didn't help either is that the action scenes that followed were pretty damn boring. All too often, most of the girls stood around doing nothing much. You'd think they would be a bit more proactive with their special attacks, but in most cases, they only executed those when someone had conveniently found some kind of opening. And it annoyed me quite a bit how those special attack scenes were included in every fight (always with same unaltered background and animation). It just wasn't a satisfying way of ending the battles. The repetitive transformation scenes didn't contribute much to me either. Because of all this, many episodes felt very uneventful.
But it's not all bad. The rivalry between Usagi and both Rei and Mamoru often served for a good laugh, and so did moments with Usagi's friends from school. Usagi is charactarised as a clumsy crybaby, and that lead to some decent comedy too. Unfortunately, it also started getting on my nerves after a while.
The influence of the anime can't be denied, and the comedy and character cast were okay, but I really can't say I enjoyed it as much as others did.
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