English Dub Season Review: Scissor Seven Season One

Our Take:

Scissor is told to be an assassin, because assassins get paid well. He, living a relatively poor life while suffering memory loss, agrees. After all, why not? When he starts out, he begins to realize that being a killer isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

He becomes an assassin for very arbitrary reasons, and as it turns out, is not that good at it. While he is able to camouflage himself very easily, he is arrogant, and often thinks that he’s in a better position than he actually is. He often gets distracted while on the mission, and this usually leads to a lot more comedic mishaps. It wouldn’t be much of a comedy if he was excellent at his job, after all!

Most importantly, he is kind at heart. One of the key traits for an assassin to be is to feel as little as possible, and to be highly efficient. If Seven could do that, then he would be a perfectly fine assassin, barring tempering his other problems. He’s not though, and this leads him to more often than not, sympathize with his targets. He can’t just kill them, or let himself be strung along with someone else’s plot, he has to stand up for those in need. As we find out, this is what caused Seven to lose his memory in the first place, sympathizing with the target. It got him injured, but that still isn’t enough to make him stop. He may be talented, but he is more kind than he is ruthless.

A lot of the humor was mostly crude humor and while that’s fine, it is not exactly my thing. As such, I wasn’t able to enjoy it as much as I would have liked. I don’t think I’m its target audience.

A majority of my enjoyment from this was realizing that this was a Chinese animation. The Chinese animation scene is growing significantly over the years, and they are testing out a lot of different styles. I personally haven’t delved much into Chinese animation, haven’t really touched King’s Avatar or MDZS, so this is one of my first exposures to the upcoming industry. The animation was extremely fluid, and you can tell that the animators worked very hard. The humor might not have jived with me, but I could definitely appreciate that the visuals were trying a lot. Each character has a simple but unique way of moving, and we are able to quickly tell what each person is about. For such a relatively short show, I think they did a good job with the animation work, even if the visual style is quite simple.

While I don’t think the series is anything special, I don’t think it aims to be. It’s a short, slice of life comedy with some action thrown in. The world building is there, but it’s mostly used as a backdrop, something where the action tends to happen rather than being a concrete part of the cast. It’s the kind of show that you watch to put on to waste an afternoon, or have on in the background. For that, it’s pretty okay.