JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind – Back to Basics

Production

Have you read my reviews for the other seasons of JoJo’s Bizzare Adventure? If you have, you can skip this bit. It’s the same as before. You know, amazing character designs, fantastic costumes. LSD-inspired colour schemes all meshed with surprisingly fluid animation.

The overall look of the series seems pretty much unchanged from Diamond is Unbreakable. You know, slightly more rounded than in earlier seasons but overall still clearly JoJo. It seems that breezy man chests have also become a more permanent feature. I hope this bleeds over into real life!

Story & Characters

Man, where do I start? OK, it’s largely useless to describe the actual events of a season of JoJo’s Bizzare Adventure. Not only is that not where the magic resides, but it’s also likely to sound almost nonsensical if you just plainly spell it out. These are long seasons with convoluted storylines, lots of turnarounds and tons of characters. On top of that this season (4 or 5 depending on how you count Stardust Crusaders) brings back some past characters without much explanation.

What I’m saying is that if you really want to know “what happens” in JoJo’s Bizzare Adventure: Golden Wind, you really have to watch it. You can try the wiki summary but you’re not going to get much from it.

Instead, let me give you more of an overview. Compared to last season, Golden Wind goes back to the roots of the JoJo series. By that I mean that it really resembles Stardust Crusaders much more than Diamond is unbreakable. It’s a single long plot with a powerful nemesis established from the beginning that needs to be brought down.

There is a subplot, that is directly related to the main story, where the main cast have to protect the boss’ daughter on a cross country trip, but that ties in directly with the original goal of discovering the boss’ identity to bring him down. Ostensibly, it’s set in the world of organised crime but it’s a JoJo story, everyone is a supervillain.

As such, Golden Wind is pretty focused, narratively. Episodes don’t go on wild tangents and there’s not much random weirdness. The only sort of loose threads that sort of bothered me were that Kouichi and Jotaro are introduced in the early episodes and it seems like they were looking for Giorno, you think maybe the generations will meet once more but no. Their presence is quickly forgotten about and that bit just goes nowhere.

The other this that I personally thought was a shame, is the fact that Giorno is Dio’s descendant. OK, so we find this out in like the first or second episode and I thought it was cool. In fact, I thought it was ice cold! A JoJo that happens to be Dio’s kid. Oh man, I loved this so much. The possibilities seemed endless. But it sort of doesn’t matter at all. Giorno acts like a mix of Jonathan and Jotaro and after the reveal, no one even mentions Dio at all. This seemed like a huge waste and I can only hope it’s because it becomes relevant in later seasons!

Oh man, I’m about to sound very negative. I wrote the outline of the post and I realize that I only wrote down elements I didn’t like as much. But you see, I liked Golden Wind. I preferred Dimond is Unbreakable because it’s a much goofier season but I would say this is in second place. Or maybe the first season, that one was super goofy as well. In any case, Golden Wind is a good season of JoJo and if you like the series, you won’t be disappointed. But it wasn’t perfect.

Let me try to complement sandwich this. Compliment: as usual, I thought the characters were great. In fact, I think these may be some of the best-developped cast and I started to care about them. Never a good idea in either mafia or JoJo stories. Even the main antagonist was good.

Reproach: Because it’s structured as a mystery, you only really find out about the big bad at the end so there’s no time to develop him that much and to me, it seemed like he had a lot more potential.

Compliment: Most of the new stands are sort of simple but that works very well. By contrast Golden Wind has a very unusual talent and it was super interesting to see how they manage to utilise this talent and make it fit into this type of story.

Reproach: But they went a bit overboard and by the mid-point, Golden Wind became a Deus Ex Machina capable of doing just about anything needed for the plot. In fact, if you actually think about it, there are tons of obstacles and conflicts that could have been avoided altogether with Golden Wind but there wouldn’t have been much of a story if they just did that.

Compliment: Golden Wind manages to distinguish itself from its predecessors. As long as you understand the basic rules of the JoJo universe, you don,t need to have seen anything else to enjoy this season. Even if you will likely miss out on some references.

Reproach: It also sort of felt like a detour. I’m not sure how to explain it but even though Diamond is Unbreakable had almost a slice of life quality to it, for me, it seemed to fit better into the larger canon. Golden Wind seems as though it’s somehow separated from the rest.

Here is my last one, compliment, I really loved the ending. By that, I mean the very ending, those last few minutes but I wish I knew what happened next… So I guess that is really a good thing! Oh an apparently, turtles don’t have souls?

You might like this anime if:

You like JoJo.

I save all my screencaps on my Pinterest and you can find more there if you are interested. But I still like to show you a few in the post. If you’re like me, screencaps are something that really helps you decide to watch an anime or not.