English Dub Season Review: Seven Deadly Sins – Dragon’s Judgement Part 2

All good things must come to an end, and on an unrelated note, so must the Seven Deadly Sins. Netflix finally dropped the remaining twelve episodes of the anime (along with a second movie taking place between the last two episodes), so now we can see how well it concludes this tale of ancient times. Wrapping up a long running series is a pretty tough feat and is bound to leave many dissatisfied more often than not. Some series can absolutely hit the mark like Full Metal Alchemist’s manga ending, or even a mostly well liked conclusion like Naruto’s ending, or sometimes you get something like Bleach’s ending that felt like it dragged on way too long and then wrapped up because it was being shoved off stage. On that scale, I guess I would say that Seven Deadly Sins ends up a bit between the latter two, with a sound enough final chapter but the process getting there being an increasingly insane journey. If you thought Return of the King or Zack Snyder’s Justice League had a hard time getting to the end, just wait until you see this.

Essentially, as I mentioned in the previous review of the first half, that ended with a pretty sufficient conclusion of Meliodis and the Sins finally defeating the Demon King and ending the curse placed on both Meliodis and Elizabeth so they can live their lives out together without him being forced to watch her die over and over. The Sins are disbanded again (for probably the second or third time in the series) and all’s well. A couple episodes into the second half and things seem pretty primed to just conclude, but that would be pretty silly with ten episodes after that, so we’re thrown into another big final fight that takes up the next half a dozen episodes and requires a big sacrifice from a main character to finally put the Demon King down for good this time. Once again, things seem pretty much set on staying calm and peaceful for the remainder of the series, the Sins are disbanded again, and THIS time you could believable say they’d use the last four episodes to just focus on character stuff instead of fighting. BUT THEN a dangling plot thread starts up a WHOLE NEW FATE OF THE WORLD CONFLICT that irreparably damages a formerly cool character into being a horrible asshole, a truckload of retcons are poured into our mouths like kegstand, and the battle is finished before any of it even remotely makes sense, but FINALLY the series ends with a timeskip and a look towards to future…by which I mean a sequel manga that’s probably due to be adapted soon.

So, even if this is the end of this story, it’s not the end of the story because now we’ll eventually get Seven Deadly Sins: Z Shippuden Next Generation. I don’t know the author of this very well, but what these last few episodes tell me is that they clearly did not know how to end their story and were sticking anything against the wall until it stuck. And then unsticking it and throwing something else. This series has had THREE FINAL BATTLES. FOUR if you count the second movie, which is also about gathering a few more dangling potential plot threads to fill up an hour and a half, though at least that, despite also being animated by Studio DEEN, is a lot better animated than any of these past two seasons. The distractingly terrible animation was hard enough to swallow when the story was actually engaging and building to something, but it only becomes more apparent when the plot has been turned on its head, and not in the way they probably intended by incorporating a being called “Chaos” into the story, who is built up as the next big boss but is then usurped by a different other thing. I could go into greater detail, but there really is no greater way of insulting this show than by describing what happens in it at this point.

I’m not going to sit here and lie to you that Seven Deadly Sins was revolutionizing or being all that clever with any Shonen tropes or devices or anything like that. In a lot of ways, it was behind the times, but it had fun with what it had and seemed to be leading it to a serviceable endpoint. And yet, what we got was completely unrecognizable and felt like it had been written into a corner. For all I know, maybe this WAS how it was always planned to end, but that doesn’t do any of this any favors. Maybe that Four Horseman manga about their kids will be given to a better studio so that at least this madness will be a lot better on the eyes. Or else I’m about to take the sin of Wrath out on some animators.