Anime Attack! Saint Seiya Part 3: Inferno and Elysion

Saint Seiya Part 3: Saint Seiya Hades Chapter: Inferno and Elysion Inferno Year: 2005 - 2007 Genre: Action Episodes: 12 Elysion Year: 2008 Genre: Action Episodes: 6 Based on the Saint Seiya Manga by Masami Kuramada Here’s the final part of the original Saint Seiya manga's Anime adaptations: the two OVAs Inferno and Elysion. This should conclude all of my Saint Seiya semi-reviews for a while. With these the Hades chapter is finally concluded. I've grouped these together because they have the same exact feel to them and the only thing that really separate them are the names. The Inferno OVA picks up where Sanctuary left off and shows their journey through Hell to defeat Hades. The Elysion OVA follows this as they go into Hades private heaven of Elysion, battle the gods of death and sleep (Thanatos and Hypnos), and finally defeat Hades. While Saint Seiya TV had some epic parts hidden in a long and boring mess of mediocrity and the Sanctuary OVA was everything it should have been; these final parts just didn't really entertain me so much. There is a large departure from the awesomeness of Sanctuary where all the things they had brought back in Sanctuary are completely gone along with the dark but still crisp art style. From what I can tell the only voice actors that returned are on the secondary characters and the narrator. I have read that part of this was due to the fact that the original voice actor for Shiryu had died. This issue wasn't very large and you get used to the new voices rather quickly but it does have a slightly detrimental effect on the feel of the show. Although; I am pretty sure one of the Silver Saints they encounter is voiced by the actor who voices Zetsubou-Sensei, so that kind of gave me a chuckle. The awesome (in my opinion) old theme song and opening are also gone and replaced with an extremely awful Japanese pop song. This kind of angered me because although changing the theme song isn't all too bad, replacing it with a crappy song is the worse thing they could do. The art style though is what kind of killed the show for me. Where Sanctuary was new and yet fit with the old, these are just new and look like a rather cheaply made modern anime show. The main problem is in the background. They are in hell, and although they were most probably restricted to what the manga looked like (I haven't read it so I don't know) it just doesn't look like it should be hell. Apart from the Icy bit it just looks boring and generic. I think they really failed in the background of this show because I think Hades' hell should have looked pretty epic but this was just average with only the occasional nice scene. The characters and all don't really look any worse than they did but it all looked a little too crisp and clean especially for them being in hell. Some people might like the modern normal anime look they have going in these OVAs but for me it just felt all too new and it made it not feel the same as the other parts. Plot-wise this plays out a lot like the original Saint Seiya did, there’s a reasonable amount of mythology tie-ins, but the plot doesn't really do a whole lot that is interesting. The end of Inferno is a bit entertaining and there are some interesting bits here and there, but in large I just wasn't as impressed by the plot of these as I was with Sanctuary. Elysion just isn't all that long enough for the plot to go anywhere other than the end. It's basically just them going to defeat Hades and rescue Athena, while getting their God Cloths along the way. Still the ending does tie up all the lose ends. Far too often have I seen an anime that left things unsettled and I was pretty happy that they actually took care of everything in the end of this. Although I do think that some things were crammed into the end here like how they present the conclusion to what happened to Seiya's sister. It kind of feels like it’s rushed to a close given the amount of time every other part of the anime took for the plot to move. Generally I would like the fact that things move at a decent pace, but it feels like they could have spent more time exploring things and they just left things out. Overall I was glad to see the conclusion to Saint Seiya in these OVAs, but I do think they just felt too mediocre and generic. Perhaps I was tired of Saint Seiya by the time I got to these but I think it was mostly because these OVAs just weren't that unique. They just got the job done where Sanctuary and the original TV series presented a little more than that. My Rating: 3.5/5 Next Week: Who knows! Maybe we can expect Dave to attack the site with Anime since I've been on a journey through the lands of Detective Conan as of late.