Blast from the Past: Saint Seiya

While theres tonnes of good current anime and all, I still have a soft spot for a lot of the original animes and movies that I grew up watching. Saint Seiya was among the first shows I ever watched as a kid, and I really enjoyed it back then... but being in Australia, it was hard to get the whole series. I saw most of it, but there were missing episodes from my collection... which were given to me by relatives, or rented out from the chinese video store that my parents normally went to at the time.

Anyway, in this day and age... everything is available somewhere, and I managed to get all of the original seasons of Saint Seiya on DVD... and eagerly watched it. However when I watched it, I came to realise that there was a lot of useless repetitive dialogue, because Seiya is the most stubborn ass ever... and his fellow saints are no different. But it was still good to be able to see all of the episodes again, especially the ones that were missing from my childhood.

So the basic outline of the anime... Seiya is a ' bronze saint of Athena', which basically means that he is a warrior destined to protect the goddess Athena, who has reincarnated into a teenage girl named Saori... who incidently grew up with Seiya and the other bronze saints. There are 3 levels of saints under Athena; bronze, silver and gold... bronze being the weakest, and gold being the strongest. Each saint is based off something from greek mythology. The main characters are the bronze saints; Seiya (Pegasus saint), Shiryu (Dragon saint), Hyoga (Cygnus saint), Shun (Andromeda saint) and Ikki (Phoenix saint). In addition there are the silver saints, but you only see some of them during the early story arcs... the most important ones are generally the teachers to the bronze saints. The gold saints are based off the zodiac star signs.

So its a pretty typical good vs evil storyline, with battles between gods and goddesses + their saints/warriors. The first story arc the Sanctuary arc, which has multiple parts to it. The first part is based on the Black saints, which are essentially the dark versions of the main bronze saints... its more of an introductory season, where you find out a lot about each saint's past and how they eventually became a saint. This is followed by the introduction of the silver saints, and then later the 12 gold saints.

The second arc starts off with the Asgardians... but this is only in the anime, so I'm guessing it was a filler at the time. After that one is the Poseidon arc, where Seiya & Co have to fight Poseidon and his mariner generals.

The anime ended after the Poseidon arc. More recently the Hades arc was finally made into an anime, to continue on from where the Poseidon arc finished. The Hades arc sports much improved graphics and what I could only describe as 'special effects' for lack of a better description to animations for their special attacks. In this arc, the bronze saints along with the gold saints fight against Hades and his minions, which include; his 108 spectres, the 3 judges of the underworld, and the 2 gods Thanatos and Hypnos, who serve Hades. Quite an uphill battle! but was good to watch, if you ignore a lot of their stupid dialogue. The diaglogue is usually one particular sentence, but five different people speak a portion of the sentence. I guess its to illustrate that they were all thinking the same thing, but it annoying after a while.

A couple of months ago, the Saint Seiya Lost Canvas OVA began... which is much more to my liking. It is based on the previous holy war with Hades, with a different generation of saints. The OVA has a more modern feel to it... as it leaves out the terrible style of dialogue that old animes tend to have. It is also fairly fast paced, so you dont have those moments like in DBZ where they spend 2 episodes talking to each other and another 5 episodes charging up before they fight for a few minutes and someone wins.

So far onyl 4 episodes are out, but its well worth the watch even if you haven't seen any of the original Saint Seiya episodes before.

Overall I'd give the following ratings:

Sanctuary - 5/10

Asgard - 5/10

Poseidon - 7/10

Hades - 8.5/10

Lost Canvas - 9.5/10 (losing rating for taking a while to release!)

Now I would normally talk about the ladies of the anime... but there isnt that many in Saint Seiya... probably the one I liked most is Shaina... who is the Ochiuchus saint. She is a female warrior, so she must always wear a mask by Sanctuary law. If a man sees a female warrior's face, she must either kill that man or fall in love with him.

So heres a nice picture of her that I found without her mask:

And here is a picture of her with a gold cloth... although I have no idea where it came from, but she looks really nice with it!