Arion is an old anime movie roughly based on Greek mythology, I haven’t seen that many with that sort of setting which I guess makes it unique in that respect, the only other show similar to this is Reign: The Conqueror which is about Alexander the great, although that is not exactly about Greek mythology it has certain aspects of it. Arion is an action show with a romance sub-plot, although it takes around half of the movie for the romance sub-plot to become the main plot where the hero, Arion has to go to save Lesphena, his half-sister(?) from Apollo and Zeus.
I came across this movie through this lovely Anime Music Video below.
The love song playing in the background by the way is the ending theme of the movie.
At first I had the impression that it was going to be one of those anime where there are too many plot elements going on at the same time which are not properly explained or explored, I think that it suffers from the first half of this problem although not as I had expected it to as there are too many plot elements and too many characters to care about but the plot is explained clearly enough often through captions on the screen so that even someone like me who doesn’t know that much about Greek mythology can understand the general story by the end. That said some terms were only vaguely explained and the plot had one too many twists especially about the protagonist’s ancestry that were quite underwhelming – basically don’t expect an explanation for everything and don’t try to come up with one either – it’s just a romance-action show about a hero saving his lover. The character motivations are simple but clear enough. If you are a geek of Greek mythology you will probably get the references but I didn’t feel it was that important. One complaint I have read about in another review by someone familiar with Greek mythology is that the Gods have been reduced to kings with not very powerful super-powers who are largely concerned with local conflicts – basically war lords.
The movie is around 1 hour and 40 mins, the first thirty minutes or so are spent on exposition about the main character’s background, there’s a little bit of romance then some boring battles in the middle more exposition, the protagonists intentions suddenly turn towards the quest of saving his lover, there’s a final battle which again is sort of a mess with ghosts coming to help the protagonist and an antagonist who controls everyone been revealed and then summarily killed and then the ending, I won’t say what it is but it should be pretty obvious. I think that AMV I have linked does a better job at conveying the emotions of this story.
The animations look good but the battles are a badly choreographed mess in which it is hard to say who won, who is fighting whom until we are informed about by the captions.
5/10 Average It could have been better but I have seen much worse. I basically watched it because I liked the ending song and the AMV.