Saint Seiya

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YokozunaBulldozer
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Saint Seiya

Let's talk Saint Seiya.

So 2016 is the 30th anniversary and I recently got hooked on Saint Seiya again after watching the CGI film that came out a year or two ago and Soul Of Gold.
Despite the repetitive plot and sometimes slow pacing, I cannot help but love the theme song Pegasus Fantasy, the cloth designs based on constellations, the extravagant finisher moves, etc.
But enough of my ramblings, interested to hear what everyone else has to say.
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Henyo
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Re: Saint Seiya

the CG movie is good? i was turned off by tag line "save your Athena" or something like that.
i agree wit the repetitive plot.its also the same with the battles. enemy uses attack. Saint takes attack and becomes immune.(at least that's what i remember them saying in the show) saint attacks. repeat until enemy is defeated.

BTW, i've watch all of the animated works. haven't finished the original TV series though. or its movies. what about SS Omega? what's yer take on that entry? :D
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YokozunaBulldozer
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Re: Saint Seiya

Henyo wrote:the CG movie is good? i was turned off by tag line "save your Athena" or something like that.
i agree wit the repetitive plot.its also the same with the battles. enemy uses attack. Saint takes attack and becomes immune.(at least that's what i remember them saying in the show) saint attacks. repeat until enemy is defeated.

BTW, i've watch all of the animated works. haven't finished the original TV series though. or its movies. what about SS Omega? what's yer take on that entry? :D
I enjoyed the CG movie solely for the elseworld factor.
I bet others could have made even better renditions if they wanted to but I thought the mechanism of the cloths were an interesting take and pointing out differences compared to the source was adequately fun.
It sure is not something to write home about but I was entertained.

As for Omega, the latter half was alright I guess compared to the first half cause the core of it was typical Saint Seiya but they tried a few new things while bringing back some fan favorites.
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Henyo
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Re: Saint Seiya

i see. might try the CG movie when i get more free time. i actually jumped in blind with Omega. didn't read up anything. even the fact that it had the same character designer as Heartcatch PreCure came in late. Omega for me turned out to be a 50/50 show. good character designs/ not so good story.

i need more powerful female saints. :twisted:
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Zeonista
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Re: Saint Seiya

I've been a Saint Seiya fan since 1988, for what it's worth. (My anime club obtained VHS tapes of episodes from Japan, including the wacky soba & candy commercials. Good times. :)) The stories from Kurumada have only gotten better over time. (I am somewhat conflicted over wanna-be sequel Saint Seiya Omega.) The anime has improved by leaps and bounds from the original first season, when it looked like they had about 10000 yen per episode.

The CG movie was a great compressed AU take on the first storyline, and it was nice to see them spend the yen to make it look great instead of cheap & cheezy. My #1 movie is still the third animated feature involving Apollo, which was pretty much the perfect encapsulation of the anime, with a great production to boot.

For those of you who haven't seen the series, it's worth watching because Saint Seiya is the father of all shounen hyper-powered martial arts team shows. Without Saint Seiya there would be no Samurai Troopers, no Poltergeist Report, no Naruto, and no Sailor Moon either, come to think of it. It crosses a few prior lines, drawing in girls with some melodrama and hunky bishie warriors, and holds the guys with awesome armor designs and some mighty attack/power scenes. Formulaic? Yes. Same thing happens every season? Pretty much. Will Seiya ever win initiative in a fight? Probably not! :D But it is all great fun, and the mishmash of Japanese and Greek mythology and legendary action shows that the Jungian subconscious is bigger than we'd all think.

Henyo: Definitely some more powerful female saints, in quantity and quality. Kurumada-sensei is good at drawing attractive woman characters in both princess/goddess and athletic saint mode. He should really do more of them. Saint Seiya: The Lost Tapestry has the most and the best, in my own estimation. The TV-specific episodes added more cuties, as if they had gotten permission from Kurumada to use unpublished stuff from his manga. Though to my mind, nothing still really beats Ophiuchus no Shaina 1.0, who was tsundere before tsundere was cool.
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Henyo
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Re: Saint Seiya

Zeonista wrote: For those of you who haven't seen the series, it's worth watching because Saint Seiya is the father of all shounen hyper-powered martial arts team shows. Without Saint Seiya there would be no Samurai Troopers, no Poltergeist Report, no Naruto, and no Sailor Moon either, come to think of it.
i thought the father of Shounen hyper powered martials arts was Hokuto no Ken. or are they considered both by some people? mind you i like me some ATATATATATA and i am quite familiar with the franchise. although the only version i've actually watched and finished is DD Hokuto no Ken Ichigo no Aji.(Yes, the parody.)

to other peeps who want to try old school Shounen: try B't X if you can't take in Saint Seiya. it's Saint Seiya with, wait for it, SCIENCE!!!

@zeonista: have you watched Soul of Gold? if so, how was is for you?
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Zeonista
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Re: Saint Seiya

I've been rewatching the series in sections over the past several months. It is a fine subtitle done by loving fans in 2007 or so with old friend of the forum Dominion. We've made it to #50, with Shiryu smashing Cancer no Death Mask into the Well of Souls, very satisfying! I had missed a few episodes here and there back when, and never subtitled, so they have all been something of a revelation in places. (The Steel Saints were a truly unnecessary addition though. :roll: )

Henyo: Hokuto no Ken did come up with the idea of the Martial Arts Champions anime, and that can be stated without reservation. However, it was first and foremost a post-apocalypse revenge drama, over the top with no apologies, with little of the standard appeal in its story or characters. Saint Seiya used the Five Man Team, gave the super-warriors a classical epic story setting, made a nod or two to boxing and ninja stories, made them all appealing to the TV-watching audience that wasn't already reading the manga, and then cheerfully created a heroic fantasy story in the present day, starring young heroes Just Like You. OK, if you had been kidnapped orphans who spent 10 years of your lives learning how to be warriors for a reiteration of a war among gods, but you get the idea.

(Re "Martial Arts Champions", That is a label I coined for the genre back in my college days, when my gaming group sometimes played the Champions RPG. It covered the idea of anime martial artists who had ascended their shouted out special maneuvers to the level of superhero powers, and would require a like RPG to re-create them.)

Soul of Gold was an awesome side story to the Elysium story arc. The Gold Saints have always been popular with fans, with all of us liking at least two of them. Seeing them all together on the same side against the same foe was mighty, properly epic, sort of like an Expendables movie with better writing and direction. :D It was also nice to see the Asgard setting revisited and more properly fitted & integrated to the official manga storyline. The production levels were high too, a fitting show of respect to a story that still has fans today. (Every now and then a comedy anime will do a brief Saint Seiya tribute joke and make me smile.)
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Zeonista
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Re: Saint Seiya

I've been rewatching the series in sections over the past several months. It is a fine subtitle done by loving fans in 2007 or so supplied by old friend of the forum Dominion. We've made it to #50, with Shiryu smashing Cancer no Death Mask into the Well of Souls, very satisfying! I had missed a few episodes here and there back when, and never subtitled, so they have all been something of a revelation in places. (The Steel Saints were a truly unnecessary addition though. :roll: )

Henyo: Hokuto no Ken did come up with the idea of the Martial Arts Champions anime, and that can be stated without reservation. However, it was first and foremost a post-apocalypse revenge drama, over the top with no apologies, with little of the standard appeal in its story or characters. Saint Seiya used the Five Man Team, gave the super-warriors a classical epic story setting, made a nod or two to boxing and ninja stories, made them all appealing to the TV-watching audience that wasn't already reading the manga, and then cheerfully created a heroic fantasy story in the present day, starring young heroes Just Like You. OK, if you had been kidnapped orphans who spent 10 years of your lives learning how to be warriors for a reiteration of a war among gods, but you get the idea. At any rate, it became the template for a number of popular manga & anime stories, which all did well and likewise still have their fans.

(Re "Martial Arts Champions", That is a label I coined for the genre back in my college days, when my gaming group sometimes played the Champions RPG. It covered the idea of anime martial artists who had ascended their shouted out special maneuvers to the level of superhero powers, and would require a like RPG to re-create them.)

Soul of Gold was an awesome side story to the Elysium story arc. The Gold Saints have always been popular with fans, with all of us liking at least two of them. Seeing them all together on the same side against the same foe was mighty, properly epic, sort of like an Expendables movie with better writing and direction. :D It was also nice to see the Asgard setting revisited and more properly fitted & integrated to the official manga storyline. The production levels were high too, a fitting show of respect to a story that still has fans today. (Every now and then a comedy anime will do a brief Saint Seiya tribute joke and make me smile.)
"I am fire. I am death. I am Hashmal."

"Discontent is the first step in the progress for a man or a nation." - Oscar Wilde
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Yaminoseigi
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Re: Saint Seiya

I used to watch some of saint saiya episodes when i was a kid and planning to give the series a full watch sometime in the future. Managed to finish the series clone though such as Yoroiden and Shurato which both would have been really good series if they were not convenient cashgrab capitalizing Saint Seiya's fame and focusing on their theme instead.
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Arbiter GUNDAM
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Re: Saint Seiya

Shouldn't this be over in the anime section?
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YokozunaBulldozer
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Re: Saint Seiya

Arbiter GUNDAM wrote:Shouldn't this be over in the anime section?
I was at first thinking of making this thread there but because it is not mecha anime/manga related I thought it would be more befitting to make the thread here.
My apologies if I misunderstood.
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Nagato21
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Re: Saint Seiya

I have been a fan of Saint Seiya since I was a kid, back in the 1990s it came in France where I used to live and it was so popular that a French singer made an OP for the French version broadcast which they called Kinghts of Zodiacs. Even my mom and aunties used to watch it because of the drama and epicness. My favorite will always be the second movie, where they battle against the God of the Sun, many tend to believe that he is Apollon but he is in fact Helios, another sun god but less known. Lost Canvas was also very awesome and I loved how it fit with the overall series. My only criticism is the repetitive of saving Athena, she is the Goddess of War for Kami's sake and Seiya stubborness is a bit of a downturn. Oh yeah my favorite character is Shun of Andromeda, a true bishonen but also arguibly the most powerful amongst the FIve saints but he holds back because of his gentle heart, a true saint.
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Henyo
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Re: Saint Seiya

unfortunately for me, i have yet to finish the original anime.(just TVtroped my way through it more or less.) Omega, Lost Canvas and the more recent Soul of Gold are the only entries I've watched from start top finish. i jumped through episodes of the Hades Arc and from there the Movie with Apollo.
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Zeonista
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Re: Saint Seiya

Yaminoseigi: I never really watched Yoroiden, although my friends who did watch it said it was a good take on Saint Seiya with its own identity. The girls at the anime club liked having another anime about heroic bishounen, which made it quite tolerable. :) I liked Tenki Ken Shurato overall, which tried to be its own version and not be a Seiya clone. Unfortunately the art production in the second season was so bad it turned fans off and put a premature end to a world that still had some room to run in it.

Nagato21:
The French fan community for Saint Seiya is much respected. I wish the American community was at the same enthusiasm.
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battletech
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Re: Saint Seiya

I tried to get into it with Lost Canvas. That got canceled which really upset me and I haven't tried Saint Seiya again.
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Vent Noir
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Re: Saint Seiya

Never really got into the original anime (and despite that, Pegasus Fantasy is quite possibly my favourite anime theme song of all time), but enjoyed Omega, so I'm quite possibly the opposite of most Saint Seiya fans.

For those looking for more female saint action, there's a manga called Saint Seiya: Saintia Sho that I've recently gotten into.
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Henyo
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Re: Saint Seiya

Zeonista wrote:Yaminoseigi: I never really watched Yoroiden, although my friends who did watch it said it was a good take on Saint Seiya with its own identity. The girls at the anime club liked having another anime about heroic bishounen, which made it quite tolerable. :) I liked Tenki Ken Shurato overall, which tried to be its own version and not be a Seiya clone. Unfortunately the art production in the second season was so bad it turned fans off and put a premature end to a world that still had some room to run in it.

Nagato21:
The French fan community for Saint Seiya is much respected. I wish the American community was at the same enthusiasm.

same here comrade. i prefer Shurato over Yoroiden. it was aired with a local dub back in the 90s. really liked the armor turning into surf boards. one of the character i remember the most is the one that could pass off as KOF's Benimaru.(sans gravity defying hair.)

i have to make room for Shurato some time. yoroiden...i'll get to that one eventually. :twisted:

as for the Saint Seiya community in the Philippines, there's a small, and i mean very small, fanbase. there's a very good Hades in his God Cloth Cosplayer in some of the major cons.(and i think he won one.) that's pretty much it.
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