When I first heard about it, it was more or less when it was released on Netflix back when they were heavily marketing their original programming following the release of shows like Bojack Horseman and the Marvel Defenders series.
This was also at a time when Netflix as a streaming service was at the top of it's game in terms of success and quality, before other services that could actually rival it on even ground were introduced.
So when they announced they would start streaming original anime, I was curious as to how this 7 Deadly Sins would fair and I started watching it...4 years later, sorry I was busy around that time. Didn't really have time to make a start.
But when I did start watching it, I thought it was...good. Like I knew within the first few episodes it was going more for style over substance and I thought that was totally fine, an anime doesn't have to have a deep message to be good and I thought the 7 Deadly Sins was delivering it's fast paced battles and action really well.
The characters are even well characterised, they're essentially all medieval avengers style superhumans with their own backstories and unique powers who work off each other and supporting characters organically.
So if everything I've said has been good so far, that must mean the anime itself as a whole deserves high praise yes?
Well...not really.
I mean I still consider myself a fan of the show, in fact when Season 5 suddenly appeared on my Netflix account, I took a break from my Dagashi Kashi viewing just to binge watch it over a weekend. But there's one big inherent problem this anime has, and that's the fact it is actually really poorly written.
I did say earlier that it's style over substance isn't an inherently bad thing and I still stand by that, what gets me about the 7 Deadly Sins story is how completely oblivious it is to it's own flaws.
One big example for me is the implementation of Power Levels. Now anyone who knows Shonen writing will know what a power level trope is, it basically takes the skillsets of a character in a story and scales a number to them based on their abilities, like in an RPG or a character card in the vein of Top Trumps. It was Dragonball Z that essentially made this mathematical designation a common narrative aspect when the Z-fighters or their opponents were having their strength compared, and so the 7 Deadly Sins being a Shone inspired story, it includes this idea. Only it's treat with the utmost seriousness to the point where it loses any real meaning.
Whenever a character gets a character boost, another character will almost certainly say "Their power level is almost 5.1 squintillion" or whatever, and it just leaves you with the question, "well what does that mean?". All you've basically said is a number and we're supposed to feel something about that as the audience.
It comes to a level of ridiculousness when it starts getting applied to characters with almost godly levels of strength and ends up undermining their threat. There's two high ranking demons introduced later in the story who are basically viziers to the demon king himself and their power levels are said to be at "200,000". But I just ended up thinking, "oh that's fine then, all we need is someone with a power level of 200,001 and they'll be no problem".
It concepts like this and the fact that new characters, good and bad, are just introduced at the drop of a hat without real build up and character backstories are retconned more times than a convention for renewable energy fans got me to the conclusion that the story felt like a story campaign in Dungeons and Dragons that has gone on too long and the Dungeon Master was having trouble coming up with ways to raise the stakes as it went on, resulting in something that is actually funny to pick apart but difficult to take seriously in any capacity, no matter how much the show itself tries to.
Despite that all that though, I would still say it's worth a look if you're just after a brainless explosion fest of action with some decent characterisation.
