Saint Seiya Review and Thoughts

 Saint Seiya Review and Thoughts

Saint Seiya is a rather weird series for me. I watched the DiC Dub when I was a kid and I actually still recall watching it. I really liked the dub at the time, not knowing how bad it actually was, when it got cancelled, I was very disappointed back then.

Time Past and I would hear about this show from time to time, this series along with Jojo's Bizarre Adventure and Fist of the North Star I would hear was better than Dragon Ball Z a lot. And while I disagree with the latter two shows better than DBZ, I do think this show is good in it's own right and is enjoyable. I recently watched Netflix's Blood of Zeus and played the God of War games so a Greek mythos shonen sounded intriguing to me.

Alright, intro is out of the way, this show is a pretty well made fighting shonen that does a good job at ticking all the boxes of what I want out of an action story. It has constant looming of danger, the bad guys feel like a constant threat, and the characters are interesting enough to make me want to go through the next episode.

The interesting themes of survival of the fittest does make this show for me stand out from other shonen. The knights go through some tough and very rigorous training as children but it doesn't end there, many characters of the series have to prove their worth in order to prove that they are worthy of being what they are. It's themes of friendship while can be corny to many is more interesting here due to its themes of the survival of the fittest. The show's characters have to earn each other's trust through doing thing no normal person even with superpowers would even want to do. This makes the show's themes of friendship more endearing rather than corny. The Gold Knights later in the Sanutary arc have to be proven that the Bronze Knights are worthy of Athena's honor. Every character in the story has to go through some very tough trial and tribulations to prove themselves to each other which helps gives it's themes of friendship more weight.

Now here are my gripes, while the show's story is engaging, the fights are rather dull, this is something DBZ and Naruto are much better than this series at, the fights in Seiya are rather boring. There is no actual back and forth between any of the characters and a lot of the fights consist of characters doing the same signature moves over and over. They often feel like battle in a turn based RPG rather than an actual throwdown of fists. As a result the fights can repetitive rather quickly.

Another issue is how Seiya himself while not the worst main character in a shonen, is the least interesting of the main cast. All the other characters around Seiya are a lot more interesting than he is. Shiryuu goes through absolute hell to accomplish his goals, Shun is a gentle hearted kind soul who doesn't want to hurt anyone and  fights in self defense, Ikki is a lone wolf who prefers not to be overly attached to anyone and Hyoga is someone to driven by emotion and attachment, Seiya doesn't really stand out compare to the rest of them.

Ikki's resurrection ability can be rather confusing and weirdly defined too. He seemed to get brought back from almost anything super powerful attack that enemies can throw at him, which can get silly and can lower the stakes because of how undefined the rules for this ability is.

The final problem I have is that there is rough transition from the Sanutary arc to Posedian. This seems to be a problem in the manga too. When the villain Saga gets defeated, it just has a weird timeskip and then suddenly Posedian shows up. I know the anime had an original story with Asguard but I skipped that mainly because it was just there so the manga author can write more material, but the whole transition was rather strange and abrupt too.

Also, this isn't so much a flaw, but I know the anime got cancelled and it's weird how stand alone the anime's ending here knowing that there is still more content to come with the Hades OVAs.

These sound like major issues but I say the show is still worth watching for an older fighting shonen than got hyped for so many years by it's cult following it has, I actually enjoyed it.