I’m done
What They Say:
After dying during the battle against the Underworld, Gold Leo Saint, Aiolos, finds himself mysteriously resurrected in Asgard. He encounters a woman named Lyfia who asks him to fight on Asgard’s behalf against a man named Andreas who seeks to take over it with the help of the sacred tree Yggdrasil. Now Aiolos must battle against Andreas’s warriors as he seeks out Yggdrasil and tries to discover the truth behind his revival.
The Review:
Content (warning as portions of this review may contain spoilers):
This spinoff or filler or whatever it actually is continues to chug along through it’s bizarre existence. Once again though it’s split into a dual focus of sorts and still doesn’t seem to be very clear on what it actually wants to do. On the brighter side, the character introductions are slightly less alienating this time, and it’s made for this show’s best episode to day, but frankly I’ve reached my limit with it.
So on the somewhat brighter end of this episode, after Mu parts ways with Aiolos and Lyfia, two other Gold Saints named Deathmask and Aphorodite hear he’s in the area and decide to look for him. While Aphrodite disappears from the episode pretty quickly, Deathmask and Aiolos actually do run into each other. Aiolos questions Deathmask as to what he wants to do concerning their whole mysterious resurrection but he doesn’t seem too concerned since he’d rather just live out his new life peacefully and the two stop just short of outright fighting each other. It works as the show’s best (and frankly the sole real) character introduction since it establishes pretty quickly that Deathmask is a jerk who does whatever he pleases. His persona in the original series took that a step further with taking pleasure in murdering babies and whatnot, and I’ve never been a fan of the fact that he was eventually “redeemed” but, eh at least he has something of a character here.
The same cannot quite be said for the other Saints introduced this episode. Apparently a Gold Saint named Camus has turned traitor and attacks another Gold Saint named Miro. Miro is saved by Shaka who tells him it may be a good idea to withhold fighting until they know who resurrected them and why but Miro wants to settle the score with Camus. He finds the base where Camus is (the show can’t even be bothered to explain how) and goes to fight him as he finds out the reason for his betrayal. Camus is fighting because…when he was a kid he punched a tree too hard, causing an avalanche that killed a God Warrior named Surt’s sister, and now he’s helping because he feels guilty. Yeeeaaahh…that’s the level of silliness we’re operating on at this point. I’m all for silliness as Saint Seiya is a campy franchise by nature but this is just crossing the line.
Though truth be told though, genuine campiness is probably the most lacking factor in this whole show. The Saint Seiya franchise as a whole has generally been full of machismo, hammy sounding prose and over the top special attacks, with the characters to match and plot generally being something of an afterthought to those things as it follows a pretty strict formula. What we get in this show though is a dull and slow moving plot with the stuff that normally makes the series being fun in the background as opposed to the other way around. It basically just feels like fanfiction for the Gold Saints and not even a particularly good one at that since the fights are lacking even by the franchises usual standards of limited animation (the battle between Camus and Milo in this episode is literally just a laserbeam clash). Perhaps I’m not as big on the Saint Seiya franchise as I thought I was but needless to say this show isn’t what I signed up for and I don’t think I can bring myself to sit through more of it.
In Summary:
Soul of Gold has a slightly better episode than it’s first two as it does a decent introduction for Deathmask, but everything else in the episode feels so rote it hardly matters at this point. I’ve lost my patience with this show, and much as I’ve enjoyed what I’ve seen of it’s other incarnations, this one’s just a straight-up drag and feels extremely lacking (in more ways than one). I’m out.
Grade: D
Streamed By: Crunchyroll, Daisuki
