SAINT SEIYA: Knights of the Zodiac ran for three seasons and 36 episodes, from its first airing on July 19, 2019, to its last on June 10, 2024. Netflix and Crunchyroll carried it. The show sits in three genres at once — animation, action and adventure, sci-fi and fantasy — and it never quite settles into any of them.
That is the tension worth naming up front. This is a series that wants to be a myth and a weekend fight card at the same time, and the best episodes are the ones that stop pretending otherwise.
Trailer, via Netflix.
Seiya and the Prophecy Over Athena
The premise is simple enough. Seiya and the Knights of the Zodiac rise again to protect the reincarnation of the goddess Athena. A dark prophecy hangs over them all.
That prophecy is the engine. It gives the show a clock, and a clock is what a story like this needs. Without it, Seiya is just a young man in armor who punches upward at gods. With it, every fight carries a question: is this the one that ends it?
The problem is that the show treats the prophecy as decoration more often than as pressure. It gets invoked, then set aside for a tournament-style bout, then invoked again. The stakes reset. That is a structural choice, and it is the wrong one.
Masakazu Morita Leads a Deep Cast
Masakazu Morita voices Pegasus Seiya. Fumiko Orikasa voices Saori Kido, the Athena figure. Takahiro Sakurai is Dragon Shiryu, Hiroaki Miura is Cygnus Hyoga, Satomi Sato is Andromeda Shun, and Katsuyuki Konishi is Phoenix Ikki. Hideyuki Tanaka narrates.
That is a real ensemble, and the show leans on it. Morita’s Seiya is the anchor, but the series is smarter than most of its kind about spreading the load. Shiryu and Hyoga get room. Ikki gets menace.
A second cast track runs alongside it. Bryson Baugus voices Pegasus Seiya, Emily Neves voices Sienna Kiddo and Athena, Blake Shepard voices Dragon Long, Patrick Poole voices Cygnus Magnus, and Luci Christian voices Andromeda Shaun. Note the name changes — Long for Shiryu, Magnus for Hyoga, Shaun for Shun, Sienna for Saori. That is a localization decision, and it is a jarring one for anyone who came up on the original names.
Both tracks are competent. Neither is the reason to watch.
The Armor, the Fights, and What Actually Works
Here is the ranking that matters for this show — the elements that carry it, in order:
- The armor designs and the transformation sequences. These are the show’s best asset, and they know it.
- The ensemble fights, where two or three Knights have to solve a problem together.
- The prophecy material, when the show remembers to use it.
- The solo Seiya bouts, which are the most common and the least interesting.
- The exposition scenes, which explain what the last fight meant.
That order is not arbitrary. The show is at its strongest when it is visual and collective, and at its weakest when it is verbal and solitary. A Knight in armor, mid-transformation, is worth more than a Knight explaining his own power level.
The fight staging is clean. The animation holds up across the run, which is not nothing for a series that stretched from 2019 to 2024. Three seasons is a long time to keep a look consistent, and this one mostly does.
What it does not do is surprise you. The beats are the beats. If you have seen a tournament arc before, you have seen this one.
Where the Show Loses Its Nerve
The dark prophecy is the show’s best idea and its most wasted one. A prophecy should make the audience afraid. This one mostly makes the audience wait.
Part of that is pacing. The series has 36 episodes to fill, and it fills them the way these shows always do — with a fight, a recovery, a training beat, another fight. The prophecy advances in the margins. By the time it matters, you have spent so long not worrying about it that the payoff lands soft.
Part of it is tone. SAINT SEIYA: Knights of the Zodiac wants the weight of myth without the cost of myth. Gods show up, but nobody really loses anything permanent. The armor gets dented. The Knights get up. That is a fine formula, and it is not a myth.
The show is at its best when it lets a Knight be afraid. Those moments are rare. When they come, the series briefly becomes what its synopsis promises.
A 7.4, and What That Number Means
The published audience score sits at 7.4 out of 10, across 672 votes. That is a fair number, and it is the number this review lands on.
A 7.4 is the score of a show that does its job and not much more. It is not a disaster. It is not a landmark. It is a competent revival of a property that has been revived before, made by people who understand what the audience came for and are content to deliver exactly that.
The case for going higher rests on the cast and the armor. Morita, Orikasa, Sakurai, Miura, Sato and Konishi are a genuinely strong lineup, and the transformation sequences are the kind of thing that sells a show to a young viewer in ten seconds. The second cast track, name changes aside, holds its own.
The case for going lower rests on the prophecy. A dark prophecy is a promise. This one is a premise the show keeps in its pocket and forgets to spend. Thirty-six episodes is enough room to make an audience dread something. SAINT SEIYA: Knights of the Zodiac never quite does.
The three-season run from 2019 to 2024 also raises a question the score cannot answer. A show that airs across five calendar years and 36 episodes has survived something — a streaming landscape that cancels faster than it renews, a franchise with a long memory and a demanding fanbase. Survival is not quality, but it is evidence of a floor. This show has a floor.
What it does not have is a ceiling it is willing to reach for. The prophecy was right there.
Worth watching if you want the armor and the ensemble. Worth skipping if you want the myth the synopsis sold you. The gap between those two things is the whole story of this series, and it is a gap the show never closes.
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