Seinto Seiya: The Lost Canvas - Meio Shinwa

By far the best story line of all Knights of the zodiac, it fufills my nostalgia from the original 80s. Strong characters personality, engages you in every aspect through out the series. Grate graphics and extra thumbs up for keeping the original audio in Japanese.

I'm a big fan of the original Saint Seiya anime from the 80s as well as the 2000s Hades arc. This story is a solid addition to the legacy. Like the Hades arc, it's more modern than the original, but what sets it apart is the superior characterization. Characters here are deeper and more complex; I found myself caring about even those who appeared only briefly. My favorites, as with before, are the gold saints. Here they bear resemblance to their 20th century incarnations, nearly everyone more fleshed out, but there will be some pleasant surprises. For example, I was glad to see a dignified Cancer, while the Pisces saint is beyond cool.

One of the problems with SS was it started getting repetitive after a while. I'm happy to say not so with this story. It does draw many parallels to Kurumada's SS, making old fans feel warm and fuzzy. Yet, the story here is refreshing and unpredictable. I couldn't take my eyes off the screen for all 26 episodes.

The 2 minor imperfections are one, the series ends before the manga, leaving you hungry for more, and two, it does get just a little repetitive and formulaic with the way gold saints are introduced and their fate. All things considered, the solid story and execution are quite possibly the best we've seen in SS thus far.

I HAD to give this series 3 stars, and give up watching 10 episodes in, because I just couldn't stand the hypocrisy anymore. This anime is beautifully drawn, the characters and actions are smooth; the voice actors are very good and quite famous ones; the story is an interesting one - to an extent, but boy did they screw the pooch...

In this series, the storyline is set back in the 1800's in Italy long before Seiya and the rest were born, during Athena's last incarnation. I hate spoilers, so I won't get into too much, but I'll say this, the story revolves around 3 orphans who grew up together, 1 a boy who becomes the Pegasus Saint, 2 &3 are a brother and sister, the sister gets adopted to Greece and becomes the new Athena, and the brother who is supposed to be the purest of souls ever born becomes the next Hades incarnation. In this series, the whole band of brothers with Andromeda, Dragon, & Cygnus doesn't exist! NO ONE, even Master of the Gold Libra Cloth, who we KNOW to have been over 500 years old, is NOT the master of the Libra Gold cloth!!! NONE of the characters from Saint Seiya even make a flash forward in the series!!! A lot of the "rules" of the cloths and Cosmo AREN' T followed, they just rewrote things to please themselves while capitalizing on the Saint Seiya franchise!!! The whole thing just feels rushed, false, cheap, and contrived. I FEEL CHEATED!!!

In a day and age where a LOT of the anime I grew up with, like Cyborg 009, Ultraman, & Robotech are being remade to look and feel shiny and new, THIS ONE went off the rails!! BIG NOPE for me!!!

And with that I mean one specific aspect: the fact that this series is clearly an attempt to give to the fans of the original '80 Toei classic a copious amount of fanservice by showing the version they wanted of certain characters...without understanding practically nothing of them, or at least what made them interesting to their fans in the first place. The absolute main offender being Albafica of pisces, who is what the non-fans of the poet warrior Aphrodite Pisces from Saint Seiya and the Youth of The Crimson Blood movie wanted without understanding what made him compelling to me and other people to begin with. Other gold cloths are not treated differently, in particular the other favourite of mine Virgo, and there are also copious amounts of continuity errors such as athena female saints removing their masks because reasens. On a side note, the OST is barely fit for a Saint Seiya product IMHO, reeking too much of bog-standard medieval fantasy tones and not enough of greek-inspired tunes. Better than the snooze-inducing, CGI infested Hades Chapter because of its fluid animation but still not really worthy of appreciation overall.

It's such a shame that TMS didn't continue this series because the art and animation was captivating. The fights were so fun to watch and this anime kept me on the edge of my seat. I also read the manga. I wish the anime was continued so we can see epic fights between the saints like Regulus and Radamanthys.