JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Vento Aureo S04E37 Review: Nessuno può sfuggire dal destino scelto

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Golden Wind, Season 4, Episode 37: King of Kings

As we speed through the finale of Vento Aureo, I do want to acknowledge that, yes, the fifth part of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, more than any of the other parts, is more about the themes more than about the actual concrete plot of whatever is going on in the fights. Like, yes, it is very awesomely thematic how King Crimson's ability is essentially a reflection of Diavolo's own desire to feel like he is the Chosen One of Fate and the One True King, which is why, just like his own personality, his power involves him practically ignoring events that would defy him. Themes like that end up being way more prevalent than actually explaining things like how King Crimson or Chariot Requiem or Gold Experience Requiem works, which... is understandable, to an extent. 

While the anime does a particularly great job at explaining King Crimson's infamous "it just works" ability to a far more coherent degree both during its introduction and during the actual animation in the fights themselves, the sheer sequence of events that just happen because they happened throughout this episode and the previous one honestly feel like they could've been foreshadowed, explained or generally told better. 

Anyway, the episode starts off with the continuation of the previous fight. King Crimson has punched Trish through the chest and everyone can see, dramatically, how Trish's soul is ascending to the heavens. It's your typical "moment of despair bit", where yet another one of their allies ends up dying, and King Crimson actually catches the arrowhead in his arms and it seems to pierce his hand. Oh no, King Crimson Requiem, how powerful will that be? Except, of course, it's a subversion too, because King Crimson's hand itself is becoming translucent and crumbling, and the arrow's just moving through said hand. And... and I don't think the episode really explains this, but I'm assuming it's because Diavolo/King Crimson is tethered to Trish's body, and by killing said body, that also causes the Stand to fade out. 

Of course, the next scene ends up giving a slightly different explanation, showing that the souls are moving around back into their original bodies. Bucciarati gives a badass speech, asking the Boss if "bullets are the only things you can predict", because Diavolo certainly didn't predict what Bucciarati was going to do -- which is unzipping the sun behind his own head, which will completely destroy Chariot Requiem. 

Oookay? I'm genuinely not sure why Diavolo still needs the effect of Chariot Requiem to be active, or why he didn't completely destroy the 'sun' in the first place, or, honestly, what the fuck that 'sun' is in the first place. Whatever the case, Chariot Requiem completely shatters, and the souls return to their body... including, for whatever reason, Trish's soul from the heavens. All the while Diavolo is ranting and yelling at Bucciarati to "think about who's truly worthy! Look at me! I am worthy!" As much as I might have a problem with some of the pacing of the series, we really do get a very, very thematically appropriate villain in Diavolo, huh? In a lot of ways, his egomania and his vulnerability makes him so much more interesting to the hammy-but-kinda-generic Dio. 

And it's at this point that Bucciarati finally expires, because his physical body was killed at the Colosseum, and he ascends to the heavens in a gust of golden wind (get it?) heralded by cherubs, and it's an amazing scene that really, really fits with the general religious vibe of Rome in general. And I do like the contrast between Bucciarati's death and Narancia's death -- again, Narancia's death was sudden, senseless, brutal, and shocking. We've had the better part of half of the series to speculate if Bucciarati was a zombie, if his fate is inescapable, and even between his explanation during the Green Day fight to the current episode, both the audience and the characters have had time to prepare that, yes, Bucciarati's going to die in the near future, and he dies knowing that he's accomplished what he set out to do and bequeathed everything to Giorno. There's also a brief talk about how his "soul was reborn" thanks to Giorno, which I take to mean that Bucciarati wasn't going to do the whole revolutionize Passione thing before Giorno came along. 

Bucciarati's dead, Mista and Trish are back but are in no shape to fight... but as the smoke twirls around the battlefield, we get to see that Giorno is holding the arrow, because, of course, the theme of Vento Aureo is fate, and Giorno's fate is to be chosen by the arrow. Which you might think is kind of a boring Chosen One storyline, but one of the running themes throughout the entire part is that unlike Diavolo, who chooses to ignore events that doesn't go his way, people like Giorno and Bucciarati fight tooth and nail and suffer to, well, basically fight their way to reach their fate. Again, a neat theme, but I really wished the episode did just a mite more to show that this is their 'reward' for their struggles, so to speak, instead of making it feel kinda-sorta like a deus ex machina. 

Meanwhile, Diavolo himself is ranting about how the arrow should be in his hands, how "everyone is a soldier of fate, but fate has chosen me above all!" And perhaps in the clearest depiction of Diavolo's character flaws and egomania, he actually has admitted to himself as the smoke is swirling around that he needs to "retreat, but not admit defeat"... but a random comment from Trish about how "Diavolo is fleeing!" basically caused his pride to take over, and Diavolo ends up charging in to attack Giorno. It's at this point that Gold Experience stabs himself in the heart...

And then Gold Experience's heart explodes. Diavolo laughs, mocking that Giorno's been rejected by the arrow, and we get a pretty brutal scene where King Crimson just utterly smashes a huge chunk of Gold Experience's skull. We get to see briefly a weird, robotic eye under Gold Experience's visor-like eyes... but as Diavolo picks up the arrow, it moves away from King Crimson and up into Gold Experience's skin, in a way not too dissimilar to what it did to Killer Queen in Part IV. 

Of course, the specifics of the events that happened that birthed Gold Experience Requiem, Chariot Requiem, and Killer Queen: Bites the Dust is different. So is the arrow, and it seems like the arrow that turned Killer Queen into Bites the Dust is a slightly weaker one compared to the beetle arrow in Vento Aureo, but it is very, very interesting to note how these arrows apparently can and will choose who they empower. While with Killer Queen it seems like the arrow's just reacting to the sheer strength of willpower in Kira's desires, here, it's the whole 'fate' business and the fact that Giorno is the one that fate -- and the arrow itself -- chooses. 

And in another neat little homage to Part IV imagery, when King Crimson unleashes his own Stand punch barrage, Gold Experience shatters, but only leaves behind a cocoon just like Echoes... and we get to see Giorno Giovanna floating in the air with his evolved stand. Gold Experience Requiem, a Requiem stand that looks pretty dang majestic. 

I also really love the little detail that a fully-formed, fully-realized Requiem Stand ends up taking the full name of its original Stand. It's "Gold Experience Requiem", as opposed to the half-formed, berserk Chariot Requiem not being "Silver Chariot Requiem". 

And the rest of the episode is just Gold Experience Requiem just absolutely brutalizing Diavolo. We initially get what seems to just be a stronger version of Gold Experience's ability -- shooting Diavolo's arm with a weird finger laser, then transforming random rocks into scorpions that attack Diavolo. Giorno gives this huge, huge speech about how "the righteous actions born of truth shall never be destroyed", and how despite his friends' death, their actions and will remain in him. And, I suppose, that is what the whole thematic significance of Giorno's powers are. He gives life to inanimate objects, which is similar to how he's going to take the will and spirit of his dead friends' struggles and make them a reality. I guess something along those lines?

All throughout this sequence, Diavolo interestingly makes liberal use of Epitaph instead of King Crimson to see slightly into the future in order to predict the attacks, which, of course, leads to another rant about how he can change fate because he's the chosen one and shit. And finally, for the first time in this episode, Diavolo uses King Crimson's time skip ability. Really kinda wished that he did it a bit more in the events leading up to this, because there literally was no reason other than "the plot has enough going on". 

Diavolo ends up using the time-skip to splatter blood on Giorno and Gold Experience Requiem.'s eyes, and using Epitaph, he moves himself into a position where he would be able to punch through Gold Experience Requiem and win. And then... time suddenly reverses. Mista's bullets return to his gun. The blood splatter move away from Giorno's eyes and back into Diavolo's hand. And we get the trippy imagery of Diavolo seeing a full line of other Diavolos going "what?"

And it's all trippy and shit, but then Gold Experience Requiem itself -- not Giorno -- speaks. It tells Diavolo that he's seeing the movements of the fate he's trying to change, but he will never arrive at the truth that's going to happen, because none who stand against Gold Experience Requiem can reach there. It's... it's sort of an ambiguous ability, but I do really like how Gold Experience Requiem states that this is more of a 'passive' ability unknown even to its own user, and honestly sitting down and thinking about it, it sort of is similar enough to Chariot Requiem's "turn Stands against their owner if they try and grab the arrow" 'passive' ability. Gold Experience Requiem just does this on a grander scale, turning back time and events itself and altering reality. 

This ends up with Diavolo finding himself back when he first started, not having moved at all... and finally he finds himself to the mercies of a good old-fashioned MUDA MUDA MUDA MUDA barrage courtesy of Gold Experience Requiem. 

Overall? Honestly, it's not a terrible finale. If nothing else, it reminds me a lot of an improved version of Part 3's finale with Jotaro fighting against Dio, with the hero awakening an upgraded power halfway through the climax... but Diavolo is a better written and better themed villain than Dio, whereas Gold Experience Requiem is foreshadowed and explained a lot better than Star Platinum: The World. But still, despite my good feelings about so many of the events that happen in this episode, and how great scenes like Diavolo's rantings, GER's first activation or Bucciarati's death are handled, my original complaints about the finale of Vento Aureo being slightly messy and sometimes not making a whole ton of sense really still stands. Most of it has more to do with the whole thing about Chariot Requiem, the soul-swapping and how our main characters deal with it, and I really felt like that whole bit was something that the pacing had been dealt with a bit better. 

Still... I'm honestly not complaining all that much. I've always had a soft spot about Vento Aureo as a whole, viewing it as easily one of my favourite JoJo parts (although honestly at this point it's really hard to choose, since the anime gave me a renewed love for Diamond is Unbreakable as well), and the anime really does end up enhancing that love by a hundredfold. Overall, we're just waiting for that delayed two-parter finale to finally conclude Vento Aureo, which, warts and all, is such a great, faithful adaptation that even improves upon its original source material.