I did not grow up with the Saint Seiya/Knights of the Zodiac franchise as a kid but it was one that I heard some about once I became an anime fan. It sounded somewhat interesting, especially since apparently the franchise had all of South America in a thrall. But I also heard examples of how the female characters were treated and, well, I had other series to read and watch that put their female characters on equal footing instead.
Which means that I was of course interested in this latest incarnation, Saint Seiya: Saintia Sho, which focuses on an all-female-cast of badass characters. As far as I can tell, this series is in fact set in the same continuity as the original Saint Seiya, but again, I’m not very familiar with the franchise (and I’ve also been told some conflicting things and canon and non-canon entries in the series over the years) so I could be wrong. If it helps any of our readers, the manga provides this explanation for why there are suddenly female saints (saintia) in the series:
Thankfully, at this point it does not appear that the reader needs to be familiar with Saint Seiya at all so this series seems to be a rather good jumping in point for new fans like myself. It helps that the premise of this first volume is quite simple: Shoko is a high school girl who dearly misses her older sister who was sent off to an elite school years and years ago and hasn’t been allowed to contact her family since. Shoko doesn’t seem to be jealous that her sister Kyoko was given such a special opportunity, or the implication that her sister is both smarter and better at martial arts than she is, but Shoko is about ready to fight someone if she doesn’t hear from her sister soon.
As it turns out, Kyoko’s disappearance is for a much more sinister reason than Shoko suspected: Kyoko had been selected to train as a saint with the Goddess Athena to fight “evil entities in this world beyond human understanding” and she’s already had a brush with these forces as a child. Shoko is let into this secret when she is attacked by one of these minions of evil, intent on using Shoko as a vessel for the reincarnation of the Goddess Eris, and things progress very quickly after this point. I appreciate that the volume sets up everything so thoroughly for new fans like myself, but it did seem like the story was rushing to get through as much of the exposition as possible in one volume and the “real” story will start in the next volume.
Perhaps it was due to the digital nature of how I read this first volume but unfortunately I found the fight scenes a bit hard to follow. Fighting is clearly going to be a major part of the story but I found the pages overstuffed and that the panel order wasn’t always the easiest to follow. Hopefully this will all be smoothed out as Chimaki Kuori settles into drawing the story, although I do also wish that the art was a little more stylized, like the Saint Seiya Omega anime series from a few years back.
Overall I really enjoyed this opening bravado to Saintia Sho. Shoko is the kind of female lead I like to follow in an action series: she adapts quickly to new situations, she already has some martial arts prowess so she isn’t completely helpless when attacked by supernatural forces, and she’s not a hot-headed idiot who gets herself into more trouble than she gets herself out of.
Honestly, my biggest complaint about this entire volume was the weird use of the untranslated “okaa-sama!” over and over when Eris’ minions are talking about her. I don’t think anything was “kept” by not translating the word into “mother” and since there are pages where the characters are practically chanting “okaa-sama! okaa-sama!” it got annoying fast. But that’s not a big enough irritation to keep me from being interested in the next volume in this series. I’ll just hope that it doesn’t come up as much.