Saint Seiya 18

Masami Kurumada – Viz – 2006 – 28 volumes
The English title is “Knights of the Zodiac,” the Japanese title is “Saint Seiya.”

It’s been too long since I read a volume of this series, but I think it’s safe to say that I am so ready for the Hades saga.  I mean… the Poseidon stuff just wasn’t epic enough.  We had three knights killing themselves again and again in the face of Poseidon’s cosmos, and Seiya fired off an arrow again and again knowing it would spin right back around and hit him… and others took the arrow for him, too.  Eventually, after all the Libra cloth weapons fail, they just start throwing themselves at the pillar that holds Sienna/Athena.

Outside, Ikki is fighting the last remaining Mariner/Poseidon Soldier/knight, and theirs is a battle of words.  Words like “The full force of that attack would have driven you insane, be grateful that I showed mercy” and things like that.

And yet, with the deaths over and over again, with all the spared sanity, it just wasn’t ridiculous enough for a volume of this series, let alone one that wraps up a major story arc.  Even with Shiryu wandering around completely blind and still managing to throw down his special moves, even with people taking blows full of cosmos without a cloth to shield them, even with the epic final panel of Seiya walking out with Sienna in his arms… none of it was enough.

I need undead Knights of Athena.  And I need it now.  Thank goodness I have a few volumes of the Hades saga on hand with me.

Saint Seiya 17

Oh dear, what am I going to do with this series?  The story… the story isn’t GOOD, and I think that has to do with the fact that the Poseidon arc here isn’t very good, but it continues to do this thing where the characters have no problems doing more and more insane things in order to beat their opponents.  Neither the characters or the opponents have any problem with people not dying, fighting with blood gushing from neck wounds or eye sockets, or people returning from the dead for no apparent reason.

I mean… Hyoga fights one of his old friends from Russia on the ocean floor.  Just… you know, runs into him down there.  A friend he saw die when a glacier plowed into his face.  In order to beat this friend, he has to get his powers down to absolute zero.  Except, apparently, they can both do this.  So then Hyoga is possessed by the spirit of their dead teacher (who Hyoga killed a few volumes ago), and uses his dead teacher’s finishing move.  Twice.  For some reason, the second time kills him.  Or they may have just been discussing how the first finisher would kill him, and then it didn’t, so then they got the real finisher out.  This series is good for talking up moves, using them, and then talking up even more deadly moves that are somehow more powerful than their former most powerful move.

Yes.

Lots of armor is broken in this volume.  Some new and bizarre skills emerge despite the broken armor, and I suspect all will somehow end up with gold upgrades when all is said and done.   I’m actually kind of surprised that didn’t happen at the end of the last story.  An… evil half emerges, which was something I suspected at first during the Sanctuary fight and was explained away, but I am not surprised it was used as a story element here.

Also, that panel of evil Roshi was pretty awesome.  I don’t even know that he’s supposed to be evil, which makes it even better.  This series would do something like that.

Saint Seiya 16

While I had some sort of moral quandary about whether to call a series LoveCom or Lovely Complex, I have no problem calling this one by its Japanese name, which is entirely unrelated to the English title.  I don’t know why it doesn’t give me pause.  It probably should.

I’m told that the series gets better again after the Poseidon Saga, and I just need to power through this part, which is not very long.  I mean… it’s got all the stuff that makes the series awesome, like characters being killed and miraculously coming back to life, characters being blinded, characters dealing the “final blow” again and again and again as they try to outmatch each other, and lots of marveling over each other’s cosmo.  If you don’t like this stuff, you probably don’t like Saint Seiya.

But I feel like these talents could be applied in better ways than fighting the Poseidon Knights.  Though Lymnades does manage to lay everyone out.  That was actually quite impressive.  I also got a ridiculous kick out of the part where he begins to fool Ikki again.  I have no idea why the story went through all the motions just to fool the reader.  I wish more manga did that.

Saint Seiya 15

I’ve got… maybe two or three volumes of this.  I’ve been having trouble getting myself worked up enough about it to read them though, and this volume is a pretty good example of why.

So Seiya fights one of Poseidon’s generals.  The battle is tough, he gets taken down, then he perks back up and defeats the general.  He tries to knock down the pillar, can’t, then something happens that allows him to do so.

Repeat for Shiryu.

Repeat for Shun.

Absolutely nothing else happens.  I was kind of excited, because whenever a knight revived, they started talking about the cloth shining gold and I wanted them to suddenly become gold knights.  That would have been great.  But that was not so much the case, even though I’m still kind of wishing for that further down the road.  If I’m lucky, the same story from this volume will happen next volume for Hyoga, then Ikki will suddenly come back and do it too.

Two things, though.  One is that Shiryu is run through with a spear and doesn’t die.  This isn’t really explained, but… Shiryu is run through with a spear and doesn’t die.  That was probably the highlight of the volume for me.  Also, Shun’s fight WAS kind of cool.  He took a beating, then gave a beating right back using the Andromeda Chains, which are a pretty cool weapon.  He’s also really…. well, girly.  I don’t know how else to describe him.

Saint Seiya 14

This is just the beginning of the next story arc, and it very much tickled my fancy.  The four heroes (apparently Ikki is… space dust now) are at death’s door in the hospital, but there is no rest for Athena.  First Sienna is hit on by some sort of tycoon, and when she shoots him down, he finds that he’s actually got the power of the sea god Poseidon.  Poseidon has his own underwater kingdom, complete with knights of his own.  Most of the volume establishes the fact that Poseidon and his knights are no match at all for Athena’s knights, but then he decides to play God and flood the world, killing everyone on it.  Athena just gives herself up as a sacrifice, which is supposed to stop him and doesn’t, so the four main characters snap out of their comas and go for a swim.

By the way, my brain shut off while reading this since I was unable to fathom how more water was created in order to cause flooding like this.  No explanation was ever offered, or if it was offered, it was a total blow-off explanation, like that was just the strength of Poseidon’s cosmo or something.  I’m not sure why I couldn’t let this little bit of science go, but it was definitely giving me trouble.

Okay, so.  If I’m reading this right, Poseidon’s kingdom is underneath the ocean, and the ocean is held up by pillars, and then there’s breatheable air underneath the water.  In order to save Athena, who is held in a pillar in the middle of the castle that is slowly being filled with water to drown her, the knights have to knock down the other pillars holding up the ocean, and each one is guarded by a general.  The fighting for this has not really gotten underway, but I sincerely hope that the Poseidon arc has more to it than the boys just fighting pillar general after pillar general.  We just got through the 12 zodiac knights, I don’t know if I can do this again.

Also, as I mentioned before, the knights did mop the floor with every opponent in this volume.  Aside from that, apparently the fight between Athena and Poseidon is an ancient one, and one that is fought every time the two are resurrected.  Apparently, the Knights of Athena always win the fight.  I’m not sure why I’m even still reading, since it’s spelled out right there, but I’m sure there’ll be some fun insanity along the way.

Saint Seiya 13

So here’s the end of the Sanctuary arc!  Hooray!  The identity of the Master of Sanctuary, as well as how he wound up in his position and what happened to that gold knight that was mysteriously killed all those years ago, all is explained, and far more coherently than I would have given this series credit for.

The first part of the fight is between Ikki and the Master, and then Sena steps in for one final stand.  Of course good wins out in the end, but one wonders what the second half of the series is about since all five of the main characters are apparently dead.  Death seems to be only a temporary situation in this series, though, so I assume everyone will be back next volume with not a whole lot of explanation given.  That’s mostly why I like this series.  Well, there will be an explanation.  They come back to life because their cosmos are just too big to be believed, I guess.

There’s a short story at the end about Hyoga and some Siberian adventures he has.  Gotta love little girls flash-freezing themselves in blocks of ice as a method of showing sadness.

There’s also a really nice reference in the back listing all the characters in the series so far, be they bronze, silver, gold, master, or just little girls.  It’s useful since I have a hard time remembering names and ranks.

Saint Seiya 12

I… dont’ know.  The master of Sanctuary was revealed in this volume.  It… was supposed to be a surprise.  I don’t know if I’m supposed to know who it is and just forgot, or it’s just Saint Seiya’s way to do everything as loud and in your face as possible.  Probably the latter, though everyone else seemed to know who he was.

The resurrections in this series just kills me every time.  There’s lots of that in this volume, and I laughed every time someone who was supposed to be dead came back.  I love this series for killing its characters off, and I love it even more for feeling like there’s no reason in the world why they shouldn’t be able to come back to life when its most convenient.

But yes.  Lots of fighting.  A few things are explained, but not much.  Mostly it’s just fighting.  Over-the-top, in-your-face, invented-on-the-spot fighting.  It… has limited appeal, but I love it well enough to space the volume out and keep reading.

Saint Seiya 11

…yup.  Still in the temple, still fighting the Gold Zodiac Knights.  How many of the main characters die, or “die,” in this volume?  Maybe two of the main four boys.  One for sure.  And when I say “for sure,” I mean that I fully expect him to be back next volume via some insane piece of logic, possibly involving the characters traveling to the land of the dead and tossing bodies into a volcano.  Only if we’re lucky, though.

Shiryu fights the Gold Capricorn Knight.  This fight ends in the most ridiculous way you can possibly imagine.  Well, maybe not the MOST ridiculous, but it’s still pretty insane.  Hyoga fights his master again, and this time, it comes down to a battle of the Cosmos, not of moves of ice.  Because it is the strength of the Cosmos that help ice knights lower their temperature to absolute zero, and the one closest to absolute zero wins.  Always.

We have the fight with the “beautiful” Pisces Aphrodite to look forward to next volume.  Shun and Seiya are together, though everyone is doubting Shun’s ability to fight like a man, so he may just be taken out of battle prematurely this time.  Or take it like a man.  You can never tell.

Saint Seiya 10

What is up with this volume?!  It took me forever to find a copy!  No place, either in the city or online, seemed to have a copy!  I couldn’t believe it.  Why is only volume 10 out of print?  How and why does that make sense?  I finally found a copy, but I paid way more than I wanted to pay for any volume of Knights of the Zodiac, justifying it to myself by saying that I got the rest of the volumes incredibly cheap.

More nonstop action this time around as the Phoenix Knight is destroyed body and soul by his opponent.  Of course, only Ikki can fight this opponent since he is so destructive… Ikki is the only one who can inexplicably come back to life.  So having all his senses, including his thoughts, destroyed doesn’t phase him in the least.  His opponent, the Gold Virgo knight, is pretty impressive, and a lot of his attacks consist of multiple-page spreads of Ikki being dragged through the torments of hell or the like.  Very cosmic.

The Knights are running out of time, and the totally unforseen complication of an assassin sent for Sienna as she lays wounded outside the palace arises.  Of course the guy that they left her with can’t do anything to protect her against assassins, so other things have to happen instead, things I don’t remember happening in the first place.  Oh well, that’s just how this series rolls.

What else… another battle between Hyoga, this time with the Scorpio Knight.  Hyoga’s just a badass, and there’s no two ways about it.  Of course, his last opponent was also a badass, and I have a feeling that only Ikki will be able to match him should that person pop up again later in the maze.  The boys keep splitting and coming back together, which I don’t mind so much, because it seems like the others just sit and watch while one of the takes on one opponent.  Seems like if they were worried about time constraints, they could just all take one on at once… but of course, there are reasons given why this isn’t possible, plus each enemy seems suited to fighting only one of the four bronze knights.

Saint Seiya 9

Hm.  I don’t know.  I just wasn’t feeling it with this volume.  The four boys are still working their way through the palaces/temples of the gold knights.  Each of the four boys (and even a fifth) get their moment to fight in the volume.  But… it’s just not as insane as it usually is.  Or maybe I just think that because I haven’t read it in awhile.

The best thing that happens was easily Shun’s fight, where he dies and is resurrected no less than three times.  I mean, that’s pretty cool.  The end of his fight is also pretty cool since the dead come back to punish his opponent.  He is saved during the battle by the prayers of a little girl, which is also cool.

We get to see the girl with the mask again, but only briefly.  The rest of the fights are pretty straightforward and mostly just guys beating on each other.  But that’s not what I want from this series.  I want insanity, dammit.  Dragging Shun to the underworld multiple times is a good start, but I need a constant stream of this if it’s going to claim to be a volume of Saint Seiya.