For the treatment never-ending fighting shonen get when it comes to adaptations, A-1 Pictures deserves a high five, for not going cheap and lazy on Seven Deadly Sins. There is close to no downtime or sloppy presentation for the viewer to get bored.
- Where all others are given low budgets so they can minimize expenses at the cost of quality, over here you get pretty damn good animation during fights and very little off-model designs.
- Where most are censoring violence so they can maximize the audience that is allowed to watch them on mainstream hours, here they show gore and brute violence in detail and hide nothing.
- Where most are deliberately made to be slow paced so they increase the episodes count as much as they can, here the pacing is decent and has no fillers. And that last part is actually the reason why the show lasts only 24 episodes and ends incomplete; it covered 100 chapters and is now out of material to adapt. But I don’t mind, it’s better this way than the ugly slow-ass sh*t other anime do to stay away from the manga.
Another plus is how colorful the characters are. Although personality wise they are very one-note, they are vibrant and comical enough to never feel passable. Even after their introduction arc is over and the spotlight moves away from them in favor of the next character who gets introduced, they still manage to remain relevant to the plot instead of becoming background decoration; something which happens in almost all shonen. There is always something more to show regarding powers, flashbacks, and relations with new characters, thus they never become stunts.
As for the downers, the worst one is the very random and inconsistent script. It feels very crafty while you see how each individual event plays out, and yet it makes no sense nor has consistency if you see it as a whole. It’s like anything can happen at any given moment because it sounds cool, and not because it is excused. There is literally a character who at first seems to be a midget, that turns out to be a huge man in disguise, who turns out to be a slim fairy in disguise, who turns out to be a corpse controlled by a holy knight, who turns out to be an evil knight, who turns out to be a demon.
Holy crap man, these twists go way beyond keeping the viewer excited, and move into the realm of ridiculousness. Which is a shame, since there is a decent amount of effort placed on the drama of every character, the set up of every conflict really makes you believe the heroes can be killed, and they get ruined by all the nonsensical stuff that are happening one after another. The very premise of the show is about our heroes running away from an army of knights ten years ago because they were too strong for them, only to face them a decade later with less members, less weapons, less preparations, no extra training, while the enemy knights have received a power boost by drinking demon blood… and the heroes defeat them. Damn, power levels get rewritten depending on the situation, new special attacks are asspulled into existence when the plot calls for it, wounds are magically healed within seconds, and deaths of important people are overlooked in favor of slapstick jokes that follow immediately afterwards.
The second downer is the fan service which gets out of hand at points. Yeah, ok, all shonen have it, and it’s supposed to make shonen more attractive, but here it’s borderline deviant. It makes even Fairy Tail to seem tame. The protagonist constantly acts like a pervert towards a princess, and has no shame while folding her breasts or lifting her skirt three times per episode. And not only she constantly forgives him, even though she hates it every time he does it, but she also treats him like a knight in shining armor. There is also another girl in the team who has the hots for him and allows him to do any deviant stuff he wants to her, but he refuses because she is his nakama. Well, what the hell is the princess to him then? She was right in front of him when he said that, and still deifies him as a paragon of good. This is f*ed up beyond repair.
To sum it up, Seven Deadly Sins is a well animated action show, with colorful characters, good pacing, and non-stop plot twists. But it is also very weak in storytelling and almost deviant in its erotic humor, making it entertaining on a superficial level and very bad on a critical level.
