Anime Review: Saint Seiya: Knights of the Zodiac
The Greek gods are real. Well, kind of. They’re actually energy beings that periodically reincarnate in human bodies. Athena in particular is important, since her servants (called “Saints”) help her defend humanity against the more malevolent gods. Except that this time, the rebirth of Athena was accompanied by a prophecy that she would fail, and lead humanity to destruction. The Saints of Sanctuary split on what to do. The majority felt the proper thing to do was to kill the infant Athena to force-restart the incarnation process, while some (calling themselves “the Right Ones” refused, saying that the prophecy could be forestalled by other means.
The Sagittarius Saint took the baby to Earth, and delivered into the care of two humans, and billionaire Kiddo adopted her as his alleged granddaughter Saori Kiddo. His partner, Vander Gaard, initially supported this, but eventually came to believe that humanity would be better off without gods at all.
Seiya knows nothing of this at first. He only knows that a man in golden armor took his sister Seika away years ago, and now he’s started manifesting strange powers. He comes into contact with Saori and her grandfather, and is told that he needs training to control his abilities, and this will eventually lead to being able to find his sister. On a hidden Greek island, Seiya trains under Aquila Marin (who wears a mask but has the same hair as Seika) and eventually wins the right to wear a special armor, the Pegasus Cloth.
Marin then directs Seiya to join a secret fighting tournament, the prize of which is the Gold Sagittarius Cloth. At this tournament, Seiya meets Cygnus Hyoga, Dragon Shiryuu and Andromeda Shun, who become his friends. The actual purpose of the tournament was to find new Right Ones to be bodyguards for Athena/Saori. The Gold Cloth is stolen by Shun’s long-lost brother Phoenix Ikki, who is working for Vander Gaard.
Our heroes must retrieve the Sagittarius Cloth, while protecting Saori from both the forces of Gaard and the Saints of Sanctuary who want to kill her for slightly different reasons.
This Netflix-produced series is the latest reboot of the Saint Seiya franchise based on the manga by Masami Kurumada. The animated version was very popular both in Japan and around the world (except in the United States) with the international title being variations of Knights of the Zodiac. There have been multiple spinoffs and tie-ins. So far, there are two seasons out, stopping just before the Invasion of Sanctuary plotline.
Good: The introduction of Vander Gaard as a villain for the beginning of the series helps sort out some of the conflicting behavior of the enemy Saints in the original manga by assigning some of that to him. We get to see the Saints take on military hardware, which better establishes their power level. It also allows the story to combine the Dark Saints (evil versions of the Athena Saints loyal to Ares) with the Steel Saints (technological armor created by the Kiddo Foundation, anime-only) to have the Dark Saints be cyborgs created to fight the gods.
The new series is streamlined, and omits or shuffles off a lot of filler characters that Kurumada created but never did much with.
Seiya’s quest for his sister is a bit better handled here. In the manga, this was his initial primary motivation, and early hints that Marin was in fact Seika were plentiful. But then the subplot was just forgotten for ages, until the author was winding down the series and realized he’d never resolved it, so wrote in a quick scene to say “oh, and here’s where Seiya’s sister has been all this time.” Here, we’re given a reason for Seiya to stop focusing on his search for a while.
Best new character is the talking manhole cover.
The CGI works well; the cartoonier character designs make it look like animated dolls rather than uncanny valley humanoids.
Mixed: Shun is a girl in this version. Making the gentle warrior who’s non-gender-conforming and fights defensively be the token girl is a lazy choice. But because nothing else about Shun’s personality, behavior or story role changes, it’s overall good representation.
Less good: The Saints other than Seiya suffer from the streamlining, losing most of their focus moments. It’s much more “Seiya and his support team” than a band of brothers. And since like many anime protagonists, Seiya is the least interesting member of the team… I’m hoping that the Sanctuary arc will fix this.
I’m not keen on the dub names.
Overall: There’s certainly a lot of good ideas here, but the series is woefully incomplete at this point; you may want to hold off to see if the third season comes out so that there’s a more satisfying story.
