JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Vento Aureo S04E38 Review: Dumb Ways To Die, So Many Dumb Ways To Die

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Golden Wind, Season 4, Episode 38: Gold Experience Requiem

Vento Aureo's ending is one of the most divisive parts among the JoJo fandom, and that boils down to the way it ends. It doesn't end with an epilogue after the final battle, but rather with a prologue arc that sort of re-affirms how the theme of the Part as a whole has always been about the fight against fate. And depending on how much you like the Sleeping Slaves arc, it's going to either be such an eye-opening outlook on how the Part has been, or it would end up being kind of a pretentious attempt to shoehorn in some themes that were barely present in previous arcs. And... I dunno, I did like the Sleeping Slaves story a fair bit, but I do agree that slapping it at the end of the series after the climactic battle is kind of a bizarre pacing decision. If nothing else, it definitely is different, y'know?

And episode 38 basically opens up with a random-ass flashback to the Sleeping Slaves time period, where the pre-Giorno members of Bucciarati's gangster cell is just eating lunch in the cafe... and then Mista randomly talks about how they think human flesh would taste like. Cut to the opening, and then we return to present day, where Gold Experience Requiem muda muda muda's the fuck out of Diavolo, completely breaking King Crimson's face and throwing him into the river. 

And honestly, considering the kind of shit other final big bads like Dio and Kira ended up surviving and prolonging their respective final arcs, it's not hard for the audience to get wrapped up when Trish and Mista basically tell Giorno to continue looking for Diavolo's body in the river... but Giorno tells them that Diavolo is never going to be a problem ever again. 

And what happens to Diavolo is kind of an infinite death loop of sorts. But first, we get to see him crawling into the sewers, where he's attacked by a crazed hobo man who's shot up on drugs, and, clearly crazy because of said drugs, stabs the shit out of Diavolo to death. And then... Diavolo wakes up in the morgue, still conscious but unable to say anything, but able to feel as the doctor cuts him apart clinically. And then he randomly shows up on a discoloured street, and when he gets surprised by a dog, he falls backwards into traffic and gets killed in "a stupid manner".

This is the infinite 'death loop', and apparently Gold Experience Requiem has doomed Diavolo to experience death over and over again. As Giorno puts it, he can't "reach the truth of his death", an eternal endless-end, and we last see Diavolo screaming and begging for a random little girl to stop coming closer. No context is given for this, but presumably Diavolo just continues to die over and over again. 

And as Giorno, Trish and Mista regroups with Polnareff (who survives as a ghost in the turtle), and they return to the Colosseum, Giorno looks up and hears Bucciarati's voice, talking about how "fate is a sleeping slave", and Giorno sees the visages of his dead allies in the clouds. 

And... and that's technically the end of Vento Aureo's present-day storyline, but we still have one and a half episode to go on. And we return to the past, to the pre-Giorno team, where Mista pontificates and talks a lot of shit about how the best-tasting meat are the meat from herbivores, whereas carnivorous meat tastes like shit, so most human meat wouldn't taste great. This absolutely feels like one of those random conversations that Araki draws from some book he read one time or whatever. We also get the timeframe that this is around the time that Giorno killed Leaky-Eyed Luca. 

Then Bucciarati enters, and in perhaps one of the most actual Godfather-y scenes in this entire supposedly mafia-themed part, we get some random florist begging Bucciarati for a favour, kneeling down before him and bringing a lot of money, asking Bucciarati to look into the strange circumstances behind his daughter's death. The florist blames the daughter's sculptor boyfriend, while Bucciarati basically tells the upstanding citizen to not get involved with them if he's been an upstanding citizen that pays taxes, again, showing just how much Bucciarati actually cares for the people around him. He's a hero of the people, y'know? But while Bucciarati believes that such matters should be left with the police, he believes the grieving father's statement enough to investigate the boyfriend. "If he really is the murderer, cripple him for four or five years, then leave it to the police". Again, some great mafioso stuff here. 

Which is when Mista, technically the main character of this mini-arc, ends up encountering Rolling Stones, the antagonist-sort-of of this arc. There is a rock on his chair with the words "bad luck" on it, and a bunch of words with "kill me" appears on his fingers. But Mista shrugs most of it off since the rock disappears, although he keeps getting extra-jumpy as he looks at random rocks in the street, leading to a hilarious shot of Mista getting the "menacing" kanji sprouting out of a rock. 

And as Fugo and Bucciarati see Mista off, Bucciarati decides to stop and follow Mista, noting that maybe a Stand might be involved. The episode ends as Mista meets with the sculptor, Scolippi, in an elevator, and he immediately unleashes bullet hell onto the rock-like stand... which transforms into Bucciarati's image. 

And that's where we end for now. And... ultimately, while I do think that it's quite short (and probably would've worked better as the end of the previous episode), it's a neat enough ending to Diavolo's story arc. I think one of the problems people had with this problem was the massive break between the airing episode 37 and 38, and how some viewers expected a full-on confrontation against Diavolo, not realizing that episode 37 was it, and that 38's just going to act as an epilogue showing us just how fucked Diavolo's fate was. Sleeping Slaves is an arc that I felt I wasn't super impressed with when I first read it in the manga, realized the themes and the connection to the arc during my reread, and appreciated a lot more in the anime. I still think some of the criticisms towards the Sleeping Slaves arc is valid, but I do appreciate it, at least, as a way for the writer to do something different and to end Part V in a different way. 

The JoJo Playlist:

• Both the opening and ending themes for episode 38 and 39 are changed -- the opening gets an even more extended sequence of Gold Experience Requiem 'breaking' Diavolo, sending him into the infinite possibility loop and giving us a badass cracking evolution from Gold Experience into Gold Experience Requiem, something we don't actually see in the actual events in the anime and manga. The ending finally adds Gold Experience Requiem, completing the stone sculpture of Part V Stands. 
• Rolling Stones, of course, is based on the '60s English rock band of the same name, famous for many, many singles like I Wanna Be Your Man, Satisfaction, Paint It Black, Gimme Shelter, Sympathy for the Devil and You Can't Always Get What You Want. 
• Scolippi draws his name from a bastardized reading of scaloppine, an Italian sliced meat dish.