...wait? This isn't Se7en? You mean, we aren't watching the David Fincher movie? Oh, you want me to review SACRED Seven, not Se7en. Oh, okay.
Alright, let's talk Sacred Seven. Now, let's say you're a producer at Studio Sunrise and you are asked to produce an anime for the Summer of 2011 Schedule. What do you do?
Why, remake Scryed of course! With Code Geass visuals!
Now, Sacred Seven is basically that: An updated version of Scryed with the appeal of Code Geass. It's pretty much one of those dumb things you get while you're at a meeting room brainstorming for an idea. It's like a cupcake. It's sweet and might get you fat, but it looks really good.
The story revolves around Squal...i mean Alma Tandoji (voiced by Takuma Terashima), an outcast high schooler who gains the power of the "Sacred Seven", which is used to defeat Darkstones. Darkstones are pretty much the tamer equivalent of Angels, except they have the bodies of rocks. His power is so strong that she is summoned by a socialite named Ruri Alba(voiced by Megumi Nakajima) to help her defeat these Darkstones once and for all.
And while he's not defeating Darkstones, he spends most of his days looking for rocks on a river with the help of The Rock Club, led by a "rock otaku" named Itou.
As the series progresses, Alma & Ruri met with various individuals using these Darkstones like Kenbi Yuuji(voiced by Katsuyuki Konishi), a multi-millionaire and Knight Kijima(voiced by Nobuhiko Okamoto), a former lab patient-turned-fugitive. It also delves deeper into Alma and Ruri's relationship as well.
The story is really stupid, and when it has filler episodes, it goes into boring slice of life tropes. It also has the laziest writing in a Sunrise anime, and the fight scenes are filled with bad pacing and thus you are unable to care about what is happening during those scenes. It's weak, and proves how lazy and rushed this series is.
The characters in this series varied from "Boring" to "boring". Seriously, Alma wants "to turn into a rock" because he is one, and he is such a bore in this series, along with almost everyone else in this series. The closest thing we have to interesting characters are SP and Ruri most of the time. And SP is nothing more than Kenbi's subordinate so when a suppoorting character with less than 5 minutes of screen time is more interesting than most of the main characters, then you'll know something is wrong with this series.
And Miyu Irino plays an asshole battle butler who's pretty useless in the "battle" part of it. And he's only there to ramp up the fujoshi potential between him, Knight and Alma for the next Comiket.
But, the good thing about this series is the visuals. They are beautiful, and it pretty much uses Yuriko Chiba's work to it's full potential. It's great to look at and it has elements of scenery porn here and there. Now, i heard that the budget for Tiger & Bunny got halved for the animation of this series which causes lots of controversy, but i'm kind of neutral in this issue so i don't want to go further into that.
The character design is really cool. Alma resembles a certain Final Fantasy character, but he is well-drawn for a character without an interesting personality. But i love how Ruri is drawn. She's a loli, but she is not drawn like one. Instead, she is drawn in a way that she doesn't resemble a loli at all. I like that kind of design, because it's rare since most lolis nowadays look like stock character designs taken from a JC Staff artbook.
And the music in this is what kept me from dropping this show. I love listening to the music, especiallythe OP which sounds like the classy 90's Techno/Trance tunes i used to listen back during my rave days. And it also has amazing orchestra scores which are pretty fitting for this series. The OP is composed by Yuki Kajiura, and the full score is done by Toshihiko Sahashi, so you know that the budget also goes to it's amazing music.
And to be fair, this series manages to be humble with itself and not make it cringeworthy for the viewer. because atleast it doesn't turn into another shallow vanity project like Star Driver. Even with it's flashy visuals, character design and music it's pretty good that SUnrise manages to not make it another Star Driver or Code Geass in both production and marketing aspects, because if it does then it'd suck. It's already low on the character and story aspects so let's not go lower and turn this into another Brain Powered.
Overall, Sacred Seven is a rushed project that was conceived out of Yajime Hatate's ass. It's filled with a stupid story and uninteresting characters but it does have a great score and amazing visuals. Will i recommend it? Well, it's okay but i'd prefer you guys to watch the fansubbed version of this series instead of an official sub/dub release. Fansubbers have done a fun job with this series, like replacing the OP with Gangsta Rap music for example. the fansubs are trolltastic. And if troll fansubs are your thing, then this series might be for you to accompany the great visuals and musical score that comes with it.
