Review of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind

I have to give Jojo’s bizarre adventure credit for how it evolves from season to season. While part one (phantom blood) and part 2 (battle tendency) were great, the series really got pushed in a new direction with part 3 (stardust crusaders). Stardust Crusaders helped establish what jojo would be structured off of in later arcs with the introduction of stands. I bring up Stardust crusaders because part 5 (golden wind) reminds me a lot of it. Both arcs have the protagonist, Jotaro (Stardust Crusaders) and Giorno (Golden Wind) have a main goal of defeating a central antagonist. To defeat them, both characters team up witha variety of other individuals and face off against other stand users on their quest to defeat their main foe.

Of course, Golden wind does contain elements differing from Stardust Crusaders. Initially, some of the most interesting draws of this arc come from the setting in Italy and the story seeming to follow a sort of mob story line. While Dio’s shadow looms heavy over Stardust Crusaders and the majority of the jojo franchise, the identity of the main antagonist in golden wind (aka the mob boss) is unknown. The little that is known about him is that nobody knows his past or his identity and his influence on Italy is largely negative.

The main character (Giorno) desires to stop him in order to keep the organization’s constant influx of drugs from destroying his community. However, the boss won’t let just anybody get close to him. So, Giorno and Bucciarati plan to gain the boss’s trust and find out his identity so that he can be defeated. However, they need to proceed with caution in order to achieve their goal.

In order to get close to the boss, the characters have to defeat multiple other stand users as part of a mission. When I first began watching the show, I began to see potential for Golden Wind to stand out from the previous arcs. Having to gain the boss’s trust could lead to various situations where characters have to make hard decisions that conflict with their personal morals or goals in order to stay incognito. It also could have set up scenarios where the tension isn’t in the fights alone, but in the character’s struggle to keep their intentions hidden.

Essentially, golden wind could have resembled a sort of undercover cop story with the charm and eccentricity of the jojo universe. This meant episodes could be structured to not only have great fights, but instill thick tension episode to episode in dialogue and drama. Unfortunately, that isn’t where the series goes.

A lot of jojo episodes are focused around a similar setup: Characters are in a new situation, something weird occurs, characters find out it is because of a stand, characters discover an enemy, characters try to find out the enemy’s abilities, the enemy’s ability is discovered and they are defeated. It is a simple but effective formula.

Golden Wind uses this formula as a way to not only provide the viewer with entertaining fights, but also introduce characters and flesh out their personalities and stand abilities. The first 10-12 episodes of Golden Wind are particularly interesting because the fights are effective ways to introduce our main cast of characters. In addition, compelling backstories are paired with each character to grab your attention and make them feel interesting.

One big improvement of Golden Wind over past jojo arcs are the stand abilities themselves. I was consistently surprised episode to episode by the creative ways stand abilities were utilized. I was consistently saying to myself “wow, that’s cool” or “That’s an interesting way to use that ability”. This made it stand out from an arc like Stardust Crusaders where I didn’t really find the stand abilities themselves particularly interesting. For instance, golden wind has characters with ice or poison abilities that utilize them in interesting enough ways to make their ability seem unique despite the fact most anime viewers have seen these abilities appear before in other shows.

I kept coming back episode to episode in order to see how the fights would progress and resolve themselves. Similar to other Jojo Arcs, the fights in golden wind remain some of the best parts of the show. I love how strategy plays a key role in achieving victory in fights instead of simply overpowering an enemy or resorting to standard Shonen tropes. Not only that, every character in the show has great fight moments episode to episode. This makes it feel like every character is useful and plays a different beneficial role in the plot. Because of this, it never feels like any character is useless.

Despite this, I was pretty disappointed at how Golden Wind turned out. Instead of doing something unique with the setting and time period like I expected, it just emulates the structure of Stardust Crusaders where the characters have to fight stand user after stand user in order to get to a destination or get to the main villain. While this isn’t inherently bad and could have been done well, the show is weakened significantly by events that occur mid-season that make most of the events leading up to the it seems pointless or unnecessary. This really made the show appear to be poorly written.

I started thinking of the show’s many flaws and how it would have been much better with various changes. Some may just come to jojo for the fights, so they may be able to dismiss the flaws in the writing/plot since Golden Wind delivers on that front. However, I’ve seen jojo bring great fights and nuance them with effective writing for an overall better experience in previous arcs. While I enjoy Golden Wind a bit more than Stardust Crusaders, I felt like Stardust Crusaders did have better writing at least. Also, I loved Diamond is Unbreakable because of the creative way it’s setting was utilized and how characters seemed written to just seem more memorable. Thus, I can’t give Golden Wind a pass for what it falls short on when other arcs have done well. It is expected that later arcs should build upon what previous arcs did well. Instead of doing that, golden wind takes a step back quality wise.

One problem that I have had with jojo since Stardust Crusaders is the lack of character depth. Sure, the fights are great and characters have great, memorable moments in the fights, but I often don’t find myself invested in the characters themselves. Even if something tragic does occur, I feel apathetic to it since the show didn’t put in the work to make me care about the characters beforehand.

One of the problems with jojo is that it seems so preoccupied with putting fights in front of your face that characters don’t get chances to bond with each other emotionally or have developed backstories. It would be nice to see the characters exhibit genuine emotion from time to time instead of just exhibiting the stock emotions of shock, confusion, anger, or victory expressions during fights.

While I can give golden wind some credit for giving every character a backstory that drew me in initially, it wasn’t enough to really make me care about them. Many characters just seem to appear stoic or slightly odd, but this doesn’t inherently make their character interesting. The character backstories get introduced almost as throwaway story devices as soon as we get introduced to a character early on so it lacks any real meaning or significance. Also, their backstories rarely get referenced or show any indication of affecting the characters in question.

Finally, I found the ending of Golden Wind to be rather contrived. It really didn’t add anything to the plot. It felt fairly out of place and was pretty confusing. Instead of wrapping up lose ends and bringing the show to a close, it feels like the final episode shows us something we don’t know the significance of or really care enough about to be invested in. I kept asking myself what was going on or why the episode was showing me these things. For a final episode, these questions should not be in one’s mind.

Although I was happy to consume more jojo content, I was disappointed how the show turned out. I saw a lot of potential with the setting and the mob story line, but the show just turned into a standard affair. Coming off the coattails of the fairly strong diamond is unbreakable arc, I simply expected the same strength to be present with golden wind. However, I was let down.

I still enjoyed the show, but I felt like it could have been so much better. As far as the arcs of jojo are concerned, this is probably one of my least favorite. If you are a fan, you should watch it, but don’t expect anything unique out of this arc.