#2: Saint Seiya - The Hades Chapter

I miss the original 80's opening for Saint Seiya. It was all synthesizers and sound effects and yelling lyrics. It was loud and fast and hilariously dated probably the second it was released and I loved it. The opening for this OAV series is much more sedate, with a pretty female voice singing soft lyrics and very little sound effects nonsense backing her up. It just isn't the same.

Unfortunately it isn't the only thing that isn't the same. Made almost 20 years after the original television series, Saint Seiya - The Hades Chapter has the same character styles (giant hair, rounded limbs, pointy faces) as the original show BUT the animation itself uses more modern techniques. It's done with computers instead of being hand drawn so it's all smooth and shiny but it looks weird with the old school style. I had trouble getting passed how odd it looked so focusing on the story itself was a little difficult.

It may have also been a little difficult because I never finished the original Saint Seiya series, so don't know exactly what happened with all of the characters. I did some internet research on it so I could kind of follow along with the new show, but surprisingly enough the plot of Saint Seiya is kind of complex and there are dozens of characters so it can still be confusing trying to figure out what is going on.

Basically what I got from the first episode was that Hades was coming from the Underworld to fight Athena, or Saori in this incarnation, and the Saints were going to have to stop him. But Saori forbid the Bronze Saints (like Seiya) from helping out as she was worried they'd all just get their butts kicked. Mu, the Aries Gold Saint, was told to do Hades' bidding and kill Athena/Saori, though I'm not sure why exactly he had to follow Hades' orders when, as a Saint, he should be working for Athena. And Seiya showed up out of nowhere and picked a fight with some dead Saints who were brought back by Hades to do bad deeds, but was told off by Mu for being a weak little Bronze Saint who had been dismissed by their goddess.

Really there was a lot of talking and fighting and surprised facial expressing in the first episode. I'm kind of surprised to look back and realize just how much happened when at the time it seemed like mostly talking. But maybe I was missing things cause I really was stuck on that weird combination of 80's/early 2000's animation. With only 31 episodes in the OAV series, I'll probably get around to watching the rest soon, to see if I can follow what all is going on finally if for no other reason.