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The story
A claim that “Milo might be the weakest Gold Saint” in Saint Seiya sparked a lively debate on 5ch’s Nandemo Jikkyo G board.
Starting from whether it’s really fair that his Antares needs 15 hits to finish an enemy off, the thread spiraled into Death Mask’s fitness for the Underworld, Aiolos’s lack of named techniques, and even a “weakest four” theory covering Cancer, Pisces, Taurus, and Scorpio.
What people said
Re: #1
The 15 hits are just him waiting for you to surrender. If he actually wanted to, he could land Antares on the very first strike.
The same move doesn't work twice on a Saint, you know.
When you remember a Gold Saint's real job is fighting the Underworld, that "technique" turns out to be completely useless.
Uh, Shaka exists.
Everyone's fine once inside the Underworld. You only get debuffed if your Cloth hasn't received Athena's blood at the castle just before the entrance.
That's the limit of creator Kurumada-sensei's mythology knowledge.
Well, there's Shaka (Buddha) too. Greek gods run the show in that world, but Asian religions seem to have their own separate thing going on apart from the gods — not totally clear how, though.
Let's not start trash-talking Krishna and his whole Kundalini speech…
You're thinking of the tale of Orpheus, the strongest Silver Saint.
Only needing 15 hits to land sounds easy enough. Lightning Bolt takes way more attempts than that.
Exactly. That's purely Milo's mercy talking — he's choosing to spread it over 15 hits.
Shun, who's secretly the strongest, was using Nebula Storm, so yeah, he's no pushover.
More like Milo wasn't entirely against letting them through. The only ones who truly meant to stop them were maybe Cancer, Shaka, and Afrodite?
To begin with, half of them already suspected the Pope, so they weren't even defending seriously.
Thought he'd turn out like Kenzaki from Ring ni Kakero, but he was Ishimatsu all along… 😞 (both boxing-manga characters — one's a real rival, the other's comic relief)
Pegasus and Unicorn, both horses — it really does read as an obvious rival setup. He probably just flopped in popularity during the first tournament arc and got demoted to background cast.
You disrespecting Jumping Stone or something?
He was holding baby Athena the entire time, though.
Shura was already a Gold Saint by that point.
Cancer — can warp to the Underworld
Pisces — can heal
Taurus — can dodge like a turtle
Scorpio — a meathead whose own technique is garbage
that's basically how it shakes out.
Milo gets retconned into some brainless meathead in Soul of Gold and stuff, but if he really were a meathead he wouldn't have let Hyoga through, and he wouldn't have let Kanon off either.
What's a "stalemate draw" here? What do they do about bathroom breaks?
He's got a minor move called Shadow Arrow that locks down the opponent's movement.
He's got Atomic Thunderbolt, come on.
Isn't it basically just a Niflheim situation? (a supposed instant-kill spell that famously fizzles on strong enemies, from Dragon Quest)
It's just Death Mask himself who's pathetic — every generation's Cancer Saint has been a genuinely strong character.
Background and Key Points
Saint Seiya (known in the West as Knights of the Zodiac) is Masami Kurumada’s Weekly Shonen Jump series from 1986-1990, whose central conceit is that Athena’s strongest bodyguards, the twelve Gold Saints, are each modeled on a zodiac constellation and each guard one of the twelve astrological “houses” leading to her sanctuary. Milo is Scorpio, whose finishing move Scarlet Needle requires driving fifteen strikes into an opponent’s meridian points before the “Antares” kill-strike lands. Death Mask is Cancer, whose Sekishiki Meikaiha technique banishes a foe to a death-like dimension. Aiolos is Sagittarius, killed roughly a decade before the main story while shielding the infant Athena from his own treacherous master. Worth flagging for non-Japanese readers: although the Saints’ cosmology is nominally Greek, the manga freely folds in Shinto and Buddhist elements too, including Yomotsu Hirasaka, the mythic slope to the land of the dead from the Kojiki, and Shaka, whose name is simply the Buddha.
The thread wasn’t actually arguing about a power ranking; it split over whether traits that look like weaknesses (fifteen hits needed, an underworld-themed attack, no flashy named move) are real limitations or just restraint, mercy, or narrative flavor.
What’s easy to miss if you don’t follow the franchise: none of this reflects an official strength tier, and the “weakest Gold Saint” framing is fan speculation the manga never settles, further muddied by how later spin-offs like Soul of Gold have retconned Milo’s characterization into something closer to what several posters push back against here.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “Is Milo the Weakest Gold Saint?“
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