Netflix's Saint Seiya is out. Full of weird surprises.
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Overall, 6 episodes of 20+ minutes each was weird at first, it feels like it's FAR from enough, but it wraps up the introduction, the Galaxian Wars, and the Black Saints quickly. It feels like the sort of series where it looks better when you have the whole finished thing. The pace is weird for someone expecting to follow the manga, but if you just look at it as a whole story, of course they'll zip past this whole arc fast.
I'm hearing there will be a part two in a few months already ? I hope so because 6*20 minutes was really lame. I'll be okay with the Silver Saints arc wrapping up like that too, give us the main beats without the fillers and time-wasters running around in the mountains, just get it done with the main fights.
The first time you see those eyes, it's super weird, painted on a flat surface, it really looks like a doll. But you get used to it and you don't notice it much (maybe it was only Seika). Except for Saori, she looks weird from beginning to finish, probably because of those doll lips.
It follows the original manga very closely, while fixing the weirder stuff and the stuff that fizzled out into nothing in the manga (I don't really care that the Black Saints aren't doppelgangers of the main ones, good riddance, but it's too bad they all have identical bodies while not showing their face - but it looks like Cassios really is getting on a good trajectory for his redemption arc, nice). The Galaxian Wars aren't a public tournament, Graad is the enemy but not Kido Mitsumasa, giving a reason to make the power scale more gradual with an army, which is wrapped up in one episode. It's both lame and obvious to watch them waste time on tanks and helicopters, and at the same time it's gotten over with fast enough, so...
Shun as a girl... So, okay, it loses the part where old fans liked that there was a Saint boy who wasn't willing to fight, showing different kinds of personalities still turning out to be heroes without having to be battle hungry. But then when Esmeralda is a literal visual clone of Shun, it makes a lot more sense all of a sudden (let's not pretend that Ikki seeing his little brother in his dead lover wasn't insanely creepy in the manga).
Fucking translation. I watched it in Japanese with English subtitles, half the time listening, half the time reading, and the English text was talking about something else entirely than the Japanese voices. So weird. And I won't even bother addressing the name changes.
It's okay without being really good, which is a lot better than a lot of what we've got for Saint Seiya in the past decade (after Lost Canvas anyway). A retelling without fucking around and going too weird like Omega and Soul of Gold. The terrible work on the sound department (both the fighting effects and the music) takes a lot of impact away from all the fights, but the animation is good enough and the fights are decent. The pace is weird on first viewing but it's good enough to get rid of that whole introduction arc while not being outright dismissive, it does the job. It's not like the Galaxian Wars and Black Saints arcs were anyone's favorite meaningful arcs.
Now we can just hope that we'll move on to more serious things in the next arc.
If I struggled to the end of my determination, to the end of my way of life with my followers, if the result is ruin, then this ruin is inevitable. Grieve. Shed tears. But you cannot regret.
Last Edit:
July 20, 2019, 04:50:43 pm by Byakko
