I know, I dropped the ball on the Saint Seiya Omega reviews. I will say it again, I LOVE SAINT SEIYA. It’s my favorite anime of all time, and I had high hopes for Omega. I know nothing can ever be as good as the original, but Omega has some interesting ideas that I was willing to try to accept. The whole element thing, the fact that the new order of Saints seems to be under the rule of someone who fought the legendary Saint Seiya, and some others. I watched pretty consistently every week, up until I stopped writing the reviews here. The reason for that? My interest waned as I got more tasks, and the series wasn’t holding that much interest for me. I knew the path that they had to follow getting all the cores, but I just didn’t care that much, I didn’t see where it would all lead. On episode 28 I got my answer, and I won’t spoil what was pretty much the first season of Omega, but now we have the second season, in territory that is very familiar and beloved by us Saint Seiya fans…the twelve houses!
First off, there is a new intro. Even though Pegasus Fantasy is one of my all time favorite songs, this new one is pretty damn good. It gets me excited about the battle to come. I won’t go into details now(I may just do an entire review of the first season later), but as of now, the five Bronze Saints have landed at the bottom of the new Twelve Houses. They have twelve hours to get to the top(sound familiar?) and stop Mars before the world gets plunged into eternal darkness. They are definitely trying for fan service, but they have to be careful on how much they do, since it’s really easy to mess up a story with so much history. So we start with the first house…Aries.
This should come as no surprise. The Saint of Aries is none other than Kiki, Mu’s apprentice. Apparently he did so well he surpassed the other 4 legendary Saints and landed a role as a Gold Saint. Still, it beings like you figured it would: he repairs Kouga’s armor, explains the seventh sense, then repairs the rest of the armors while Kouga goes alone to Taurus. It’s a touching speech from Kiki, and the nostalgia really kicked in as I saw what used to be this tiny boy grow up into a Gold Saint. This is half of episode 29, and now we get into what we all want to see…
The Taurus Gold Saint, Harbinger! He takes one of the anime clichés of having one side of his face scarred due to injury, and I can’t say I like the fact that there is now color in the Gold Cloth, but I’ll keep an open mind. As before, this is the time to show these young Bronze Saints the power of the seventh sense. Kouga begins his battle with Harbinger, and as expected, takes a good beating. The battle is pretty physical, meaning it’s just not the two of them using their special techniques. That does come later, and Harbinger has some new ones. He has a “Shadow Horn”, which is just fancy teleporting in shadows followed by quick strikes. It’s an interesting battle, and sets up what we all expect: Kouga raises his Cosmos enough to make it serious. That’s when we get what we’re familiar with though…the “Great Horn”! Kouga falls.
At this point the other four Bronze Saints step up to the plate, only to get beat up by Harbinger. He then goes into his origins, and they are kind of lame honestly. I won’t spoil it, but it is fairly cliché by anime standards. Needless to say, he loves the sound of broken bones, and a broken human spirit. Kind of odd how some of these Saints just like to make people suffer and then reach such a high level of consciousness…but regardless, it continues. We get to see his “Greatest Horn” a few times, then Kouga finally comes to. He raises his Cosmos again, gets the attention of other Gold Saints in the twelve houses, and goes after Harbinger again. They both use their greatest techniques, we see a flash of light…and the other Bronze Saints are now gone. I guess this is their way of splitting the group off so we can get more one on one fights. So episode 30 ends.
I don’t believe that this is written in the best way so far. I’m trying to keep story spoilers to a minimum here, but there feels like there are a lot of questions that aren’t being answered. Although considering the nature of Saint Seiya, part of the magic is not knowing who is coming up next, and with Omega, we get the added bonus of seeing how the original five Bronze Saints are tied into this new history. We see Shiryu in the preview for episode 31, in which Ryuho goes up against the Gemini Saint, Paradox…a female. Well done guys, I was wondering if we would take that step towards having a female Gold Saint, and we did. She seems to be a bit of an illusionist too, so this should be interesting…and it’s little nibbles like this that will keep me interested enough to keep watching. Bring on the rest of the twelve houses! Saint Seiya Omega may have just received the shot in the arm it needed.