Emissary from Hell. Bunnygirl Byzantinist. My evolution is faster than light. Call me Cat.



So Saint Seiya, a show I like a lot, finished its original anime run with the penultimate arc, leaving the final storyline unadapted. Not without trying--pre-production stopped and started for a few years, finally being abandoned then resurrected in 2002 as a trio of OVAs (one of which is really good, one of which is fine, and one of which is...doing its best).


But those initial attempts yielded some production material; character designs much more in line with the classic anime than what we ended up getting, and an entire soundtrack album, which they released alongside the show's other soundtrack CDs as an additional one. Honestly, if I had to pick one aspect of the production reaching this stage before work stopped, it'd probably be the soundtrack; Yokoyama Seiji's mix of power ballad and classical strings gives his work (outside of Seiya, tokusatsu fans might have heard his work on Choujinki Metalder) a really unique and beautiful sound.

I say that, but the only piece from this I'd listened to before today was not by him; the prospective OP, 'Dead or Dead' (Kageyama Hironobu, to be fair). It was always a cool feeling, like hearing a ghost talk. But today I listened to the whole album, and that feeling was intensified, because they'd clearly released this knowing this was all fans were going to get of the Hades arc for the foreseeable future. In addition to a bunch of new Yokoyama tracks (some of them building on classic-series tracks I'm long-familiar with, instantly calling the appropriate part of the story to mind), I was surprised by interstitial dialogue sections, replicating major conversations and monologues from this part of the manga.

It added to the sense of listening to the album as a chronological journey through this storyline, but it was also a strangely emotional experience. The original voice actors for the main five Saints were replaced partway through the 2000s Hades OVAs, so this little relic is the only way to hear that original cast get to finish their story. Somehow, that got to me. Then, on top of that, the penultimate track is followed by a message from original author Kurumada Masami, whose voice I'd never heard before, issuing those Saints a heartfelt thanks for all their hard work, ending as a final "big slow chorus farewell thank you" type ED song fades in...

It's kind of funny, this getting to me, because they did animate this story in the end. But there's such a distinctive identity to this cancelled version from over a decade prior, and some of the things being said goodbye to here really didn't come back. Man. The things that get you weepy, huh?


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