The story takes place in a very summarily characterized fantasy scenario, perhaps in the first volumes a little superficiality was acceptable as the story is still in its beginning but going forward it will never be fully explored. The main setting is the kingdom of Liones, ten years after the seven deadly sins, once the group of knights directly under the king, became criminals accused of trying to overthrow the kingdom by subverting the established order. Traces of them are lost but for Princess Elizabeth they are the only hope of stopping the order of the sacred knights that threaten peace. Traveling in search of them, Elizabeth manages to meet Meliodas, the captain of the seven deadly sins, who runs a bizarre tavern called Boar Hat with the talking pig Hawk, a mascot that is immediately unbearable.
The sacred knights therefore present themselves as the villains of the story, although at first they may seem intriguing, they will soon seem devoided of any charm. They are evil usurpers who presumably have lost all their ideals after being corrupted by the two leaders of the sacred knights, who have a characterization bordering on ridicule and motivations behind their actions dictated by the simple "we needed a bad guy to defeat because he does very bad things as a villain ": Hendrickson who wants to resurrect the clan of demons motivated by the desire to wage holy war because that was the way he was feeling.
But sadly they are not the only ones, the author leaves the characterization of many characters to chance, in fact he makes them move according to the circumstances, as needed in the moment, that is, they suddenly pass over to the side of good or evil motivated by a bizarre sense of justice - they really change their minds even in the turn of a page - or that between various coincidences they make decisions that are inconsistent with their previous actions.
Proof of this are the often ridiculous foreshadowing attempts and clearly the result of a badly done retcon.
Certain choices give the very idea that the author was motivated only by the need to have plot twists at all costs and did not have the faintest idea of where to end the story, demonstrating only a great presumption of being able to effectively spread the story over 41 volumes or simply underestimating the intelligence of their readers who should bear an embarrassing number of coincidences and inconsisent explanations.
Also, in this manga everything seems to be driven by love.
Surely there would be nothing wrong with giving more space to relationship issues but in this manga they are incredibly abused to keep the plot going and to motivate anything, it is a sequence of actions and reactions of the characters based exclusively on emotions and feelings. In some cases it succeeds, as for Ban and Elaine but for other characters the amorous component is forced and at times even boring. Think of King and Diane - not to mention Escanor and Merlin - the author again uses the trope of the girl in distress to show an angry King who comes to her rescue, against the backdrop of a flashback to a tearful past. The problem is that the girl in distress in question is a 915 cm giantess who in previous battles had not had any problems, indeed she had been presented incredibly strong and able to look after herself. Unfortunately, inconsistencies like this with the force hierarchy are a constant in nanatsu no taizai, starting with the quite ambiguous power system itself with the usual things like "I was not really serious" and other stuff to make Meliodas stand out above all others. Various power ups, characters mortally wounded before and who inexplicably look great shortly after, characters who come back to life to be recycled, powers randomly assigned in the clumsy attempt to give the clashes more pathos (since if nothing has more sense it is easy to make it impossible to know who will win, spoiler: in any case Meliodas is always the coolest), up to the ridiculous idea of the pig with the magic pendant that sees the fighting rank of the people as a Dragon Ball scouter. As these increasingly bad villains appear in this genre of manga, some sort of hope should arise in the reader that their favorites will have the upper hand, but the illogical motives that pervade them all make them lose interest in seeing them triumph.
Sore point are just Meliodas and Elizabeth, the most unpleasant protagonists of any shonen I have ever read. I found it impossible to empathize with them, Nakaba Suzuki makes never seen before favoritisms towards the protagonist, it is inevitable to assume that it is trivially a pathetic self-insert. From the beginning, Meliodas is detestable: he has no charisma, he always has the same indecipherable expression on his face, he is immediately very strong, he has no growth path and his only quirk is being a pervert. He is probably given the appearance of a child to make the constant groping of Elizabeth, who we remember being 16, less disturbing or even innocent.
While some fanservice may also be bearable in the context of some comic skits, the way in which Meliodas clings to Elizabeth and acts like a maniac become annoying and repetitive quickly. To make it less ambiguous, the author also immediately makes Elizabeth fall in love with her molester to give the readers a non-sense love story with a really creepy explanation that'll come later in the manga. With various embarrassed blushes the author gives the premise of some sort of consent and makes the girl remain motionless and mute while undergoing anything without reacting.
Elizabeth is truly insipid, she is always whimpering, she acts to be the perfect waifu and every clumsy attempt to make up for her uselessness is ridiculous. Obviously she is naive, she always thinks only of others and never of herself, she is always portrayed in weird positions for panty shots but at the same time is modest and genuine and oh my, what a bore, an extremely demeaning character whose role is commensurable to that of an ornament or to be more blunt to a sex toy in skimpy clothes that screams "noble Meliodas" over and over.
Not to mention the other female characters, if the main characters already lack charm the secondaries are even worse, both males and females, but in particular any attempt to deepen the psychology of girls is ridiculous: Diane, that becomes more and more useless and subordinate to King who has always to save her, Vivian, Liz, Jericho, Veronica, all demeaning. No girl in this manga seems to have a will of her own, they all act only in function of a man and above all they are all always half naked. Guila seems to be the only female character not overly sexualized, but she too unfortunately she gets lost later in the story.
It can be said that of the 7 deadly sins Ban is the only one with a decent characterization, along with the interesting power of Escanor, who is also badly treated.
Leaving out the poses and proportions of the characters at times a bit strange, the drawings are full of details and the backgrounds have well-made perspectives. The art style is perhaps the only merit of this manga.
Some decent characters with whom you can at least empathize, rare funny moments and a few successful clashes in a sea of mediocrity: the seven deadly sins can be said to "arrive late", bringing typical stylistic features of previous works that are already outdated (it is practically Dragon Ball in the Middle Ages), maddening fanservice, various sentimentalisms bordering on trash, disturbing love affairs as a result of the author's innumerable perversions and fetishes and making a mess of fantasy elements without anything innovative. One of the few manga that after reading it left me absolutely nothing, if not a sense of annoyance and remorse for having wasted my time and my money, which is why I had to let off steam by writing this very long review for the unfortunate who will want to read it all.
