JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind – 10

「暗殺者チーム」 (Ansatsusha Team)
“Assassination Team”

I can’t praise how the Vento Aureo adaptation has been handled enough with how much they flesh out and develop the source material. Using this episode to take the small details about La Squadra and creating an entire segment dedicated to them was a brilliant way to give us insight into the upcoming enemies that Passione will have to face.

David Productions helped do justice to the characters of La Squadra by elaborating on their relationships, how they work together, and why they built up a vendetta against Passione and their boss. With the resentment the execution squad has over being compensated very little in comparison to those in the drug trade, their pursuit of the boss’ identity and eventually his daughter’s whereabouts has much further insight now that we can see them argue amongst themselves about toppling the established order.

It also helps that we get to see the other members’ personalities with the stubborn Formaggio, the insensitive Illuso, the anxious Pesci, the degrading Prosciutto, the perverse Melone, the agitated Ghiaccio, and the calm & collected Risotto. Their ability to stay uniform as friends came through with the gory assassination plot Formaggio staged with a car shrunken and regrown inside of someone, but their unity was also their strongest bonding point. Sadly, Gelato and Sorbet were written out of the picture very early on as their gruesome deaths prompted La Squadra to put a hold on digging for the boss’ identity. They were also particularly cruel to the couple as they had a certain someone be the guy to dismember Sorbet. But it is a treat to see the anime take what were short, minute details or a couple pages of content and expand on them so that we already have some familiarity with La Squadra before they come after Passione.

The battle was no slouch either with Narancia having to come up with clever thinking to use Aerosmith to get him out of the predicament he is in with Little Feet slowly shrinking him. Because he didn’t catch on until it was too late, he had to take advantage of both his opportunity to try to contact Bruno and chase the already-shrunken Formaggio while he’s hiding in the sewer. Although it was odd to see the Little Feet battle stretched out to three episodes, it was great to see that it was for the sake of fleshing up the members of La Squadra.