JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind – 04

「ギャング入門」 (Gang Nyuumon)
“Joining the Gang”

In the unluckiest episode of Golden Wind to exist, Koichi enters the fray in helping Giorno take on Polpo’s stand Black Sabbath. Some questioned why Koichi would appear out of all of the Part IV representatives, but his personal experience with every generation of the Joestars aside from Jonathan, stand arrows, and the one-on-one fight he had with Yoshikage Kira turned out to be exactly the right qualifications to seek out Giorno. The last two points come in handy particularly with Black Sabbath as a remote stand like Killer Queen, but with a stand arrow that happens to stab souls it can drag out. But Koichi’s inclusion offers Giorno more information to work with on the ability of stands and the stand arrow’s powers before they win each other’s respect with their personal ambitions. It was a good send-off to Part IV’s involvement with Part V as the latter series takes on an identity of its own with Giorno’s induction into Passione.

In the process of justifying his dream to Koichi, we also learn about Giorno’s personal ethos. The spark that Koichi saw in Giorno that he saw within the other Joestars was the respect they had towards the lives of others. To explain why he would want to save Koichi after taking his luggage and running, he told him of the responsibility he has to protect those around him, and that those who take or ruin a person’s life, especially someone who had nothing to do with his own problems, are disrespecting that person’s existence. It not only shows why he would want Koichi not to be wrapped up in a fight that only he should have been involved with, but also why he wanted to exact revenge on Polpo for killing the janitor that relit the lighter. Even if Giorno is not above committing crime or having Polpo’s banana turn into a gun, his criminal activity is for the sake of protecting those like the janitor and Koichi who are uninvolved with the mafia’s drug ring, and only got caught up in Polpo’s exam out of bad luck.

As far as the fight went, Giorno and Koichi’s battle against Black Sabbath is an earlier instance of Part V’s inventive fighting scheme. Although the punch ghost aspects came into the fold with Giorno pulling of a “muda-muda-muda” to cause Black Sabbath to fade, a puzzle element came into the fold with the tactics that Giorno and Koichi had to make in order to minimize the threat of Polpo’s stand. Because his weakness is in being under direct sunlight, the strategy boiled down to how exactly they can lure or trick him into getting out of the shadows. Gold Experience having better utilization as a support stand made this a fun fight in the sense of how quick-witted he’d have to be to gauge how to transform his surroundings into proper enough setting to have Black Sabbath let its guard down before ultimately robbing the stand of the shadows it needed in order to avoid the wrath of Gold Experience and Echoes. With Polpo gone, Koichi off to enjoy the rest of his holiday in Naples, and Giorno making his way to Bruno’s hideout, it’ll be neat to see how they handle the rest of Passione and how Giorno will mingle with his new partners.