We once again return to the world of The Seven Deadly Sins and its spin-off sequel, Four Knights of the Apocalypse. And because of Netflix’s weird ass release model, this is the third chunk of episodes coming out but the first of the second season…and because of the animation studio’s weird ass release model, this is the ONLY batch of the second season despite it being half as long as the first. Picking up where we left off, Percival and his platoon arrived in Leonis to meet with the now fully assembled Knights of the Apocalypse, who it is revealed are called that because they will destroy Camelot. Or rather, the strange dimension named after the fallen land of Camelot that is now ruled by the inexplicably evil King Arthur, who plans to bring all of humanity into it to live out their fantasies away from the real world. After briefly defeating him, he escapes, and the Knights begin a quest to find entry to Camelot by taking a route through the Demon Realm. There, they must all train to prepare for their battle, as well as unlock secrets of Percival’s past, and not all of them will be making it there alive.Being the shortest of these seasons so far, the story is naturally a lot more compact than the last one, though that doesn’t mean they don’t make use of that time to do a lot. It feels like a full season, with the first half or so being about setting up the Quest for Camelot, as it were, and the rest taking the group to the Demon Realm and training. What’s strange is that this season stops a handful of chapters (basically an episode or two) before the end of the apparent Part 1 of the manga. I haven’t read the chapters that weren’t adapted, but it seems odd to stop the season just short of that and use up an episode doing so in the next only to do a time skip or something like I typically expect from separating manga stories by “Parts”. Either way, this season does give significant development for Percival, which makes sense as the protagonist, revealing bigger revelations about his existence that feel unique to him, but do border on making him feel a bit TOO special, namely in how it reveals his retroactive connections to some established characters. I don’t mind sequel protagonists having those connections in general, but when one of them is saying “you’ve always been like a son to me” kinda out of nowhere, you’re laying it on a bit too thick.Other than that, it’s the franchise’s usual eccentricities, with some leaning on the concerning. I went into GREAT detail about how fucked up the plots surrounding Lancelot were, with both an adult woman and a twelve year old girl apparently lusting after him and…yeah, those feelings have not changed. Both of those things are an active ongoing detriment to this story that become worse the longer they are there. But it’s not all gross implied pedophilia, some of it is just stuff I don’t like! Most of the designs are pretty doofy, the animation is lacking at times (though not nearly as bad as the later seasons of its predecessor), and the love dodecahedron they have going on feels pretty frivolous. In addition to the gross stuff with Lancelot, we also have further confirmation that Anne likes Percival, but also so does Nasiens (two characters who I have not needed to mentioned before now, and you can probably guess why), while Isolde likes Tristan (in reference to their namesakes) but Jade, a Holy Knight, likes Isolde. And then there’s Chion, who I just…hate seeing whenever he’s around. Like just the worst. Why couldn’t he die instead? Anyway, that’s the second season, more of the same for better or worse. Who knows when we’ll get the next but it’ll apparently be a big shake up of the status quo when it does.
