Alternative Names: JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Part 5: Golden Wind, JoJo no Kimyou na Bouken Part 5: Ougon no Kaze, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure Part 5: Vento Aureo
Score: 6/10, 4/5
Length: 39 Episodes, 3 Recap Episodes
Genre: Action, Adventure, Mystery, Comedy, Super Powers
Summary: Born and raised in Italy, Giorno Giovanna has been working to gain the attention of the local mafia, Passione. His dream is to become the next boss and work from within to reform the mafia's ways. Rather than being a bunch of needlessly cruel, lawless gangsters, he wants to make them into "GangStars." To do this, however, he'll have to not only enter the mafia's ranks but also work to kill Passione's current boss, a man who has made a great effort to conceal his identity from the world. Luckily for Giorno, however, he is gifted in ways many others aren't. Being the illegitimate and forgotten son of Dio Brando, Giorno naturally attained a Stand at a young age, instantly making him an equal to the Stand-possessing ranks of the Passione Mafia. All he needs is to find a faction within the Mafia who might be willing to go along with his mad grab for power.
Review: Like with my review of Diamond is Unbreakable, I'm going to try to keep things short for a few reasons. Firstly, Jojo still stands (no pun intended) as one of the largest, loudest, and most devoted fan bases in the anime world. In all likelihood, anyone reading this will have already read or watched this show and is already intimately familiar with the story as a whole. Secondly, while this arc of Jojo might function better as a stand-alone title than most of the other Parts in the franchise, it is still better to be generally knowledgeable of the world of Jojo that's already been covered. So, if you're one of those people who has somehow managed to avoid the world of Jojo, then you've likely done so deliberately or would be better served starting from the very beginning. Lastly and most importantly, though, I just don't like Golden Wind all that much. It's still a perfectly serviceable Jojo story but it is easily the weakest one yet (excluding Part 1). While most of the problems found within Part 5 are present in the previous entries in the franchise, they are much more obvious this time around and far more egregious.
I bet "Jojo Without Context" had a blast with Part 5.
While I have little to complain about the general push of Golden Wind's story, because who doesn't like a good Mafia/Spy thriller, there are a lot of nits to pick about everything that builds on the general story. Most notably, the characters of Part 5 are generally a lot weaker this time around--and I'm not talking about their power levels--more on that later. From the protagonists to the main villain of this Part, none of them seem to have been nearly as well thought out this time around or are so misused that it becomes easy to forget that they even exist. For example, one of the Part's biggest issues is the fact that there's some confusion as to who the main character of Part 5 actually is. As the name of the series blatantly states, you'd assume that the Part's "Jojo" would be the main focus of the series, as has been the case with Johnathan, Joseph, Jotaro, and Josuke. Much like how his name doesn't neatly fit the "Jojo" title, though, Giorno Giovanna doesn't fit into the role as this Part's lead character. Despite being the son of Dio Brando, aka the source of all evil in the Jojo-verse, and despite being the main push for the series' plot, Giorno isn't focused on that much in Golden Wind.
Yes, even though the show's subtitle is literally the name of his Stand,
Giorno isn't actually that important for roughly 80% of the show.
Instead, we spend most of the Part centered on Giorno's boss, Bruno Bucciarati. Bruno, for his part, falls into the role of the series' main character very well. Introduced initially as an enemy to the series, Bruno quickly proves himself to be a generally good person with solidly good intentions for being in the mafia. Like Giorno, he wishes to take down the boss of Passione and destroy the drug trade that has ruined his and many other people's lives. Yet, unlike Giorno, we're given a solid explanation for Bruno's hatred of the drug trade and general disdain for Passione's enigmatic Boss. There's simply no ambiguity to Bucciarati's rationality. There's no ill-defined "dream" that pushes him forward like there is with Giorno, whose dream to be like the mob boss he looked up to as a kid and become what he calls a "GangStar" is nothing short of nonsensical. For Bucciarati, everything is fairly reasonable and down-to-earth even though he is in a gang full of people who fight with disembodied "punch ghosts." More than that, though, Bucciarati makes for a better main character simply because he is the actual leader of the group the same way every Jojo was up until now.
Sure, he might be gangster, but he might actually be my favorite Jojo protagonist next to Joseph.
Now, to be fair, the rest of the main cast aren't nearly that problematic. Narancia, while annoying to the point of absurdity, makes sense in the fact that he is the idiot child character of the team. Considering his lack of education and abusive childhood, it makes some sense why Narancia is so screwed up. Mista, for his part, is given a solid enough background to explain his mentality and approach to various issues. It's nothing short of idiotic that he ends up getting shot with his bullets more than the various villains of the series but that doesn't so much reflect his character so much as the general issue with power levels in this Part. Abbacchio, like Narancia, is also given enough of a backstory to make his general bitchiness and hatred of anyone and everyone but Buccarati understandable if not reasonable. It might not make him likable as a character but it serves as explanation enough to justify both his presence and personality. A reasonable backstory isn't enough to justify some characters, though, as is the case with the last member of Bucciarati's team, Fugo Pannacotta.
You know what, nah, I take it back. They're all pretty awful in their own way.
While not necessarily a terrible person, due to his traumatic past and bipolar disorder, Fugo is the most solid example of how bad the power levels get in Part 5. Specifically because his Stand is too powerful to justify in the series, so much so that his mere presence would have ended the final battle prematurely, the author needed to forcibly write him out of the story. Rather than being killed off like most of Araki's over-powered characters, though, Fugo simply wimps out on the "kill the boss" plan at the most reasonable opportunity presented. While I can't necessarily blame him, as a character, he is still given the short end of the stick in comparison to the rest of the cast simply because he just wasn't written that well. Along much the same lines, though, Giorno suffers from a similar issue. Namely, the series seems to struggle with ever recalling what Giorno's Stand does. Abilities come, go, or are introduced at the most convenient moments for Golden Wind that it always feels like a foregone conclusion that nothing bad will ever happen to Giorno. Rather than relying on sheer dumb luck, tactical skill, or physical prowess, Giorno's fights only ever seem to go his way because that's what the script says, regardless of whether or not the script is consistent.
Yes it does, Buccarati, because Giorno isn't allowed to die.
Add that to the fact that Giorno's Stand is given a healing ability that outright outclasses those we saw with Josuke's Crazy Diamond and you start to see where the dramatic tension of Part 5 just falls apart. This might be especially the case with Giorno's fights but one of the biggest flaws of Part 5 as a whole is that all the dramatic tension simply vanishes the moment you pause to think for even a moment. Put bluntly, most if not all of the show's fights and dramatic crescendos fail to function as they should simply because we can be assured that Giorno can and will cure any wound. Mista, by all rights, should have died six times over during the series simply because he accidentally shot himself but he manages to stick around for the vast majority of the series. So, while Araki might have written out the offensive domination of Fugo's stand, there was no getting rid of Giorno or his survivability factor and the issues that caused for the story.
I legitimately lost count how many times Giorno ended up saving the day because of shit like this.
The worst problem of the series by far, though, is that it seems like just as little care was given when creating the main villain of this Part. All the one-off villains and minions might be some of the best seen in Jojo to date but the enigmatic Boss of Passione is easily the weakest villain this series has ever had. Like Dio in Stardust Crusaders, the series spends a great deal of time keeping the villain's identity under wraps. Rather than seeing him plot or scheme, Diavolo acts in the shadows and through cat's paws that ensure that his identity is never made clear. Until the final arc, all we ever get to identify him is a vague outline that, in the end, doesn't even match what he looks like in any way. For Dio, this kind of tactic worked because we had already spent a Part getting to know Dio as a character. His battle with Johnathan established him as a villain and made it clear that this was a character to be feared. His concealment in Stardust Crusaders, then, added a layer of mystery on top of what we already knew about Dio since it was established early on that he has changed as he's gotten stronger. Though he might have Johnathan's body, the threat he poses because of his The World makes him, once again, something of an unknown that'll only be revealed when the cast is ready to face him. Diavolo, by comparison, isn't established whatsoever. Rather than building on a known quantity, his concealment only serves to undermine the threat he's supposed to represent. What's worse, the series even goes out of its way to downplay how bad Diavolo is by having its last one-off villain described as evil by Diavolo himself. Bring those issues together and you're given a villain that just can't be taken seriously or seen as a threat on any level.
And don't even get me started about how stupid and stupidly powerful his Stand is.
There is, of course, the issue of there being a lot of stupid things that happen in this Part but I think I've picked enough nits for one day. I feel like I've made it clear, by now, that Golden Wind is my least favorite Jojo yet. It lacks the dramatic punch of the previous Parts. Its characters, while serviceable in some ways, are weaker than some of the minor characters in other Parts. And, unfortunately, its main villain is actively worse than some of the quirky and imaginative nobodies he uses as cannon fodder for the hero team. Add the fact that the series ends on an uncomfortable note, given the fact that Giorno is Dio's son, and we're left with a final product that I might honestly consider weaker than Phantom Blood, aka the pilot arc for the Jojo franchise. Now, to be clear, don't think for a moment that all my issues and complaints mean that I dislike Golden Wind. Quite the opposite: I like Part 5 a great deal. It might be the weakest Jojo thus far but it is still Jojo when all is said and done and there's nothing that could knock me off the Jojo hype train.