Sunday, October 26, 2014

Saint Seiya Weekend – Lost Canvas Manga

[Note: Minor spoilers in this post]

The Lost Canvas anime ran for two seasons. It was not renewed for a third season much to the fans’ disappointment. I still can’t quite figure why TMS Entertainment would not continue producing such a good series. Anyways, because of this, I decided to read the manga. I vaguely remember reading the end of it a few years ago but I can’t quite remember it. I found out the anime ended slightly less than halfway through the manga. Instead of just reading the end, I decided to read from where the anime stopped right until the end. It was a daunting task; there were around 100 chapters in total to read!

I delved in and WOW. The manga literally kept me at the edge of my seat for several of the chapters. There is a lot more that should be adapted to the anime. Just like Albafica’s quote when he faced Gryphon Minos, “My cosmo, my life, you haven’t seen anything yet!”, the same applies to the manga. At the end of the anime, we still haven’t seen Aquarius Degel and Scorpio Kardia in action. Leo Gold Saint and Gemini Gold Saint had not even been mentioned yet. Although we had seen Sagittarius Sisyphos in action in the anime, we had yet to see him in a one-on-one combat with one of Hades’s Spectre.

And boy did the manga deliver. The manga showed how the Saints and Spectres gave their all. You would think that it would be repetitive to watch one fight after another. Sometimes the lines do sound the same but because the characters and their backgrounds are so different, it doesn’t feel too repetitive. Camaraderie, loyalty, honour, love, arrogance, rage, sorrow and pure evil collided in a spectacular tale of human tragedy.

There were a few plotlines which raised an eyebrow, for instance, Tenma’s training in Kanon Island, and Aquarius Degel and Scorpio Kardia’s mission to Bluegrad. There were a few instances of friend against friend and brother against brother which I found slightly discomforting. But that was nothing compared to the dismay I felt at the introduction of Mephistopheles. That plotline reminded me too much of Code Geass and I really felt the story could do without it. I couldn’t fathom why the mangaka decided to include this. It disrupted the whole momentum and feel of the overall story even though it did give a plausible reason for Alone/Hades growing up together with Athena/Sasha and Tenma.

The motivation for certain characters were not made clear but that could’ve been due to the inaccurate translation or the mangaka’s intention of letting the readers figure it out. Nonetheless, I thought the manga was a very gripping read and would remember the stories for a long time to come.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Venus

 I see fireworks, as Venus hangs low on the horizon.