Saint Seiya: Next Dimension - 15 years of patience and emotions

Although the last volume of Saint Seiya: Next Dimension was released in November 2024, it was only yesterday that I deigned to read it, but actually I have been following this particular manga for 15 years. For those who are not aware, after the Hades saga which ended with the definitive victory of Athens, another journey began in which Saori would try to save Saiya who has Hades' sword stuck in his chest, which in a matter of time would end up killing him.

In 2009 the first volume of what would be known as the Next Dimension was released, which can be considered as the prologue for the sky saga, but I will talk about that later. In this story, Saori tries to travel to the past challenging even the gods themselves, we must take into account that time travel is forbidden because it generates a distortion in space-time that could destroy heaven and earth, but Saori's love and determination make her go through all that, so after dealing with her older sister Artemis, goddess of the moon, Saori and Shun leave to a lake where Chronos resides who is the only being who can control time.

This is how Saori and Shun set off to the past and managed to reach the sanctuary of approximately 200 years ago, where the holy war against Hades was about to be fought, but they were still waiting for the Athens of that time to reincarnate. The truth is that the arrival of the Athens of the past (Saori) generated a great commotion and confusion in the sanctuary, she arrived as a baby and Shun had the responsibility to protect her, but what the visitors from the future did not expect was that at that time the thirteenth golden saint, Ophiuchus, was about to awaken, who intends to kill Athens at any cost.

The truth is that I could go on telling you the long story of the Next Dimension, but that is not my intention, believe me I would have to write dozens of paragraphs. What I really want to emphasize is what this long manga left in me, and that is that, after seeing for so many years how the anime developed, I was curious to know what would happen after the saga of Hades. For many years it was speculated that what followed would be the saga of heaven, which was unsuccessfully attempted to be portrayed in the movie Seinto Seiya: Tenkai-hen Josō ~overture, but it was dismissed from the canon.

The aforementioned movie would have a world of infinite possibilities in which Artemis, goddess of the moon and Apollo, god of the sun, would be the main rivals along with countless formidable warriors, which would undoubtedly make the saga of heaven a very epic and perhaps the best of all for its complexity and the large number of characters involved, however, the good news is that the end of the Next Dimension left us practically in the same situation, so the hope for a new holy war is quite high.

I was always very curious about the fact that the volumes of the Next Dimension were released so far apart (16 volumes in 15 years), that made the story develop quite slowly and generated a lot of anxiety for those of us who were attentive to the events, but I must say that it was always worth waiting for those few annual chapters because they were full of emotions and a complex story that gradually took shape until it reached the magnificent ending that it had. I want to make a special mention to the enigmatic saint of Ophiuchus, I never thought about the possibility that there was an additional golden saint to the 12 already known, it was great to meet him, you can see his appearance in the image above, you can also meet the saint of Pegasus from the previous holy war.