JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind Episode 22 Review: The 'G' in Guts

Waiter, waiter… there’s a shark in my soup!

This is where Golden Wind truly begins! Not only do we have a new opening and ending, but the Team Bucciarati are now officially enemies of Passione. The first assassins to target them are the absolutely gorgeous Squalo and Tiziano, who bring us the type of bizarre fight that is truly in keeping with the name of the series.

Japanese title: ガッツの「G」

Plot

Bucciarati’s group continue their journey without Fugo. They discuss what to do from here and realize that they will probably now be the subject of assassination attacks in the orders of the boss of Passione himself. Trish herself is quite aware of this, and she just wants to learn who she is and where she is from. The first assassination attempt comes sooner rather than later when Narancia notices a Stand in his soup that can teleport between liquids. It doesn’t stop there, as he is also attacked by a Stand which forces him to lie, meaning his can’t tell the team what’s going on! Giorno for some reason seems to be the only one that actually has his head on his shoulders this time, and just when he works out what is going on with Narancia: he is attacked by the shark Stand!

Highlights

The new opening! Although it doesn’t quite match up to ‘Great Days’ in my opinion, it’s still a catchy song and the lyrics fit Golden Wind very well. The opening has some giant hints as to what’s going to happen in the series. Mentioning these particular parts would be spoilers, but manga-readers should take a close look to see what they can notice!

This anime is really going all-out when it comes to casting popular voice actors, and this time we have the wonderful Tomoaki Maeno and Kenjiro Tsuda as Squalo and Tiziano. Tsuda has a naturally mysterious and erotic voice so it’s obvious why he was cast as Tiziano. I was really impressed with Maeno’s Squalo, though. I’ve been a fan of Maeno for many years so I know he’s very capable of this (ahem) erotic style of speaking. However, I didn’t really expect them to go full-throttle with it for Squalo. It was a good… no… a perfect choice. Thank you to whichever director made this decision.

~ The moment with Abbacchio calmly drinking his wine then joining in the beating-up of the stranger was pretty hilarious.

~ The way Narancia was speaking while lying was so cute and refreshing. How the gang couldn’t notice something was wrong from that is beyond me!

We have a new ending! The song is ‘Modern Crusader’ by Enigma (Enigma was also the name of the Stand from DiU which could trap things in paper). Not only does the new song fit the series way better than the previous (just listen to the lyrics!), but the visuals are so good this time. We get a slow pan-up of all the Stands of the series so far. It’s golden, it’s Italian, it’s a little erotic. It’s JoJo Golden Wind.

Trivia

The name of Squalo’s Stand is named after punk band The Clash. I was really amused to find out that the localized name for the Stand is ‘Crush’, as clash and crush are pronounced exactly the same in Japanese.

The opening sequence contains easter eggs that reference some of Araki’s full-color illustrations. These include the shot of Giorno with his hand on GE’s chin, as well as the shot of the gang falling through the sky. The precious freckled boy we saw sports a purple color-scheme and golden eyes. These colors are likely a nod to the illustration which adorns the front cover of volume 12 of the manga (DON’T look it up if you don’t want to get a big spoiler!!). He may get a different color scheme in the actual episodes. Either way, he’s beautiful.

‘I want to know! I want to know who I came from!’

The animation this episode was unfortunately pretty poor, but I get that it is a price to pay when we start getting this deep into the series. The close-up shots with Squalo and Tiziano were thankfully pretty good, and we could truly enjoy the pair draping over each other in true JoJo-style homoerotic glory. The short-term goal for the gang has now changed from handing over Trish to standing up to the boss. Something I especially liked this episode was Trish herself. She had such a strong look of determination in her eyes as she told Bucciarati she would not die before finding out the truth. She’s more than just a helpless teenage girl.

Ciao for now.