Anime Reviews: The Seven Deadly Sins - Colorful

It's been a while since I did one of these. I finally got around to watching a new animu. This time it's The Seven Deadly Sins, a Netflix original.

The Seven Deadly Sins is set in the nation of Britannia, and takes a certain amount of inspiration from Arthurian legends. The kingdom is watched over by the Holy Knights, a powerful and exclusive order of magical knights that have a very much "Paladin" aesthetic. They tend to have over-the-top classic anime style magical powers: one of them controls lightning, another can create explosions at will, and so on.

We're told that the most powerful group of Holy Knights are the titular Seven Deadly Sins, all loosely (and I do mean very loosely) themed after one deadly sin or another. Ten years ago, they betrayed the Holy Knights and slaughtered a whole bunch of them, along with their current grand master.

As our story begins, Elizabeth, the third princess of Britannia wanders into an inn in search of the Seven Deadly Sins, as it turns out the Holy Knights have secretly overthrown the King, and are running the Kingdom. She soon stumbles into their captain Meliodas, who swears to help her with her quest to free the Kingdom again.

What follows is a fairly disjointed but charming collection of events that I hesitate to call a story. The group typically shows up somewhere, meets a few new characters, fights for a few episodes, and leaves, sometimes having gained a new member. These little stories are entertaining, and don't tend to drag on too long. I can't say the action or the characters are particularly special. Fights are pretty standard anime fare: big explosions that throw people into cliffs creating massive dust clouds, a lot of speaking about "His power" and "At this rate, we'll...", a lot of people miraculously recovering from massive wounds because the power of friendship and so on.

The character roster is similarly good but not great. The main cast are all endearing, with the exception of Elizabeth who I found ridiculously boring, each having their own little fun quirks that come up enough to be distinctive but not enough to be annoying. A surprise favorite of mine is Hawk, the over-excitable comic relief talking pig who I thought would be insufferable.

Side characters are usually more like vignettes than proper characters. There's a small amount of characterization, a few motivation, an emotional moment at some point, and then we move on. This worked surprisingly well for me, especially considering that I'm definitely a character-based guy when it comes to my entertainment. The exception comes in the main characters (for obvious reasons) and the main antagonists, who do get a bit more depth. I found the antagonist pretty cookie-cutter. They did their job, but they didn't really stand out, and I can't say I particularly cared.

The result of this is a show with a tonne of variety. The things that the characters are physically doing are constantly different. They'll be breaking into a prison, and soon having a fighting tournament, or reminiscing about old times. On the way, there's a bunch of colorful characters who will entertain you well enough. The show feels constantly fresh and exciting, and thanks to the sheer amount of fighting styles and locales to fight in, the action never gets stale, even if it never is that fantastic. There's also just enough humor there to get the occasional chuckle without being overbearing with constant forced laughs.

Character and World Building: 7/10
This very much focuses on variety rather than depth. This means that there's no particularly fascinating characters, but you're constantly in the process of meeting a new one, which keeps the show really fresh throughout.

Story: 5/10
I can't say the story is good or bad. It's very much just present. We go around, fight a dude, fight another dude for some other reason, and blah blah blah. I don't really care. Can I see the talking pig again?

Presentation: 4.5/5
I really like the music, and I actually adore both Hawk's voice and sound effects. The sound effects for battles are fine too. The visuals are pretty top-notch with plenty of cool looking magic things in fights. Character faces do tend to look somewhat weird though.

Enjoyment: 13/15
This is a show feels like it's constantly on the move, yet is never quite overwhelming. Instead of feeling like it's fast paced, The Seven Deadly Sins manages to constantly harvest that honeymoon period where you're meeting what seems to be a cool new character for the first time. Whilst they never evolve past that, they manage to stay at least somewhat entertaining in the finale, and the result is a show that constantly feels shiny new. and is entertaining throughout.

Overall:                29.5/40
A Bit Under         7.5/10

While by no means a masterpiece, The Seven Deadly Sins is a bunch of fun, and I deeply enjoyed my time with it. It's not that it has a lot of flaws, it's simply that its strengths are rather superficial. I'm not going to go round recommending it, but I think most people would not regret giving this one a watch.

The Best Thing I Played In 2015

Dragon Age: Inquisition

You know when a studio seems to be chasing a certain ideal, and never quite nails it? You love what their games promise, what they try to accomplish, and they get close enough that you're very much satisfied with their results, to the point where they're some of your favorite games anyway?

That's, to me, what BioWare has been doing since KotOR. Their games have always been trying to achieve a certain something, and I think that most people misconstrue what BioWare games are about. "They're great, in-depth RPGs" people say, but that really hasn't been true. KotOR was pretty complicated, but it was pretty much a port of DnD in terms of combat. Something similar is true about Neverwinter Nights After that, every BioWare game has actually been pretty simple, with not many stats to dump points in. They're not really about being in-depth RPGs.

"They've got great stories", people say. Once again, I beg to differ. KotOR and Jade Empire had memorable, great twists, and that's about it. Everything else was pretty cookie-cutter. Hell, even KotOR and Jade Empire were a simple McGuffin hunt and a quest for revenge, respectively. And, as much as I like the Mass Effect series, if you look at its story with even a tiny bit of skepticism, everything falls apart massively a couple minutes into the second game and keeps crumbling on and on.

What keeps people coming back to BioWare are two things: the worlds they set up, which are usually full of interesting lore and fascinating conflicts, and the main cast of characters, who are there as much to provide interesting arcs as an inside (and often different) perspective on this great world.

KotOR didn't nail it. I love Star Wars, and have read too many of the novels to be comfortable quoting a number, but it's not a universe that holds up when explored. Characters were also somewhat too one-note to really be that interesting. I still fail to remember a moment when I found Juhani anything but dull.

Jade Empire felt too short to nail it. This was an interesting world, with the best story BioWare had done since Baldur's Gate, and a fantastic (by BioWare standards) combat system, but it didn't feel like I had the time to really explore it before the game was over. A cast of blandish characters, and a weird reluctance to return to the universe sealed the coffin on it.

The Mass Effect series was probably the closest the studio had come. The first game had a really good story, unfortunately ruined by the following two entries. They were set in a sci-fi universe that was absolutely fascinating, with its past reflecting on modern-day politics and even events in the story. The cast of characters was definitely the best BioWare had done. They were endearing, fun to be around, and usually provided great perspectives on the world that you wouldn't really understand without them around. Unfortunately, the weak story in the later two games, as well as just clunky, not particularly fun gameplay the entire way through weakens the series, and the ending... well, that was definitely a massive clusterfuck.

The Dragon Age series was cool. Pretty good combat, and a world rivaling Tolkien in detail and just weird little details, but considerably more interesting. The stories in the two first games were pretty cool, with plenty of political intrigue in the first one, and an unusually personal, small-scale story in the second. Both games were also blessed with great casts of characters: people who were more than they seemed, people with unique perspectives, funny people, scary people... But still, something felt like it was missing. After all, Dragon Age II ended on a weird sort of cliffhanger, and the tension between Mages and Templars that both games had expertly built up was never really satisfactorily addressed.

Dragon Age: Inquisition is not only the perfect culmination to that storyline, but also the best individual game in that series. It's fun to play, and explores the world much more in-depth than the previous installments, looking at the existent lore from  new perspectives and adding interesting new tidbits here and there. Most importantly, it's got the best damn cast of party members that any BioWare game has had. It is, in every sense of the word, a masterpiece. This is the game that I feel BioWare has been trying to make for over a decade, and they finally succeeded. Dragon Age: Inquisistion has me ecstatic every time I play it, every time a new conflict of opinions comes up, with no clear correct answer, every time I have a philosophical conversation about whether one of my decisions was right or wrong with one of my friends, and every time I sneak around my fortress with my weirdo of a girlfriend planting buckets of water on top of doors to important dignitaries offices.

Dragon Age: Inquisition is a game I've wanted to play since I've been into videogames. You can play it right now.

The 2nd Best Thing I Played In 2015

Dark Souls

For the longest time, Dark Souls seemed incomprehensible to me. All the talk about how hard and brutal and how hardcore it is and how much you will suffer and die die die over and over made it seem like the most unappealing thing you could possibly pitch to me.

Somehow, though, I ended up playing it. And I finally got it. The main issue is the fanbase, which is awful at presenting why Dark Souls is a fantastic, phenomenal, absolute classic of a game. This is a game that presents a dark, desperate world. This world is hard to live in. It's full of things that are bigger, smarter, and more dangerous than you. You are an Undead, bound to resurrect if you die. If you give up, if you loose hope in this harsh, harsh world, you will go Hollow, you will become a mindless husk that just wants to kill to steal people's souls.

Dark Souls wants you to understand how hard it isn't to not go Hollow. It wants to put you through the ordeals of your character. It creates a magnificently fair, absolutely beautiful combat system, and subjects you to challenges that are difficult, but they're not difficult to be difficult, they're difficult because this is the way the world of Dark Souls is. Dark Souls encourages you to throw yourself at the rocks, and be frustrated, and it wants you to loose hope. It also wants you to persevere, to overcome these hardships, to push forward, to prove that you are human, and that humanity will not be broken by mindless beasts. We have POWER OF WILL, AND HOPE, AND YOU WILL NOT TAKE THIS FROM US. WE WILL PERSEVERE, BECAUSE WE ARE HUMAN, AND HUMANITY PERSEVERES, NO MATTER THE ODDS.

It's also simply enjoyable as hell to play, has an incredible world with phenomenal lore told in a way that puts the onus on the player. But what's important is that it's neither as difficult as it claims to be, nor about its difficulty. It's about the triumph of the will, the ability to persevere in the face of despair. The universe of Dark Souls is one that's dying, with existential dread creeping it, but the actual experience of playing Dark Souls is actually one of the most engrossing uplifting gaming experiences I've ever had. It's a testament to the quality of the games I've treated myself to this year that this is not number one. Dark Souls is easily in my top 10 games of all time.

It's prettyyyyy goooood.

The 3rd Best Thing I Played In 2015

Life is Strange

Life is Strange takes a different approach to episodic adventure games than TellTale does. Instead of constant story beats and at least some form of tension, Life is Strange chooses to focus on creating an atmosphere. This happens to be a very relaxing, very calm, mellow one. This helps you simply soak in the small town of Arcadia Bay and just revel in all the complex relationships between the different characters who subvert stereotypes.

Add to this a story that really goes dark, dark places and handles them surprisingly well for a medium as immature as video games are often seen as, as well as just a fantastic relationship between player character Max and her best friend Chloe. Life is Strange has a lot of flaws: the end is pretty crap, the writing is occasionally stilted, plus a lot of petty little things. That said, Life is Strange has heart. Everything feels heartfelt, and even if it didn't, the sweet little moments, and the relationship with Chloe would definitely be good enough to put Life is Strange on this list.

The 4th Best Thing I Played In 2015

Tales from the Borderlands

When I bought every TellTale games since The Walking Dead that I didn't own this year, the one that I was a bit iffy on was Tales from the Borderlands. It's based on a property whose writing I've always found to be irritating garbage, and appeared to me to be mostly a game born from a weird contract that neither side could possibly have been passionate about, right?

Wrong.

Tales from the Borderlands is funny, it's insightful, and it's got an absolutely terrific cast of characters. Playing Tales from the Borderlands is an absolutely great experience, and it got me everywhere, from genuinely laughing out loud, to sadness to anger. The characters are unforgettable, it looks great, and I'm comfortable in saying this is the best game TellTale has put out yet. 

The 5th Best Thing I Played In 2015

Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies

Ace Attorney is one of me favorite series of all time. It's funny, it's moving, and most importantly, it makes me feel like a damn detective, something that's guaranteed to make something a hit with me. I was worried sick that this new installment wasn't going to be up to par to some of the amazing previous games. Having finally gotten a 3DS, I jumped at the opportunity to play the newest installment in my favorite handheld series. Fortunately, Dual Destinies is not disappointing, with some great new mechanics put in there for variety, a gripping story and fantastic visuals, with the newly introduced character of Athena Cykes quickly grabbing a spot in my heart close to the classics that are Phoenix Wright himself and Apollo Justice. If only the prosecutor, Blackquill, had been less mediocre, this might have easily made top 3.

The 6th Best Thing I Played In 2015

The Banner Saga

The fact that this is at number 6 is a testament to how many fantastic games I've played this year. I absolutely adored The Banner Saga when I played it very, very recently. It's one of the most effective games at creating atmosphere I've ever had the pleasure of playing, thanks to a mixture of some clever mechanical trickery, ridiculously gorgeous visuals, and a phenomenon of a soundtrack and plays well to boot. It's ridiculous that this ended up not even in my top 5, but there were just games and games and games that I kept coming up with that I liked slightly better than this. Any other year, this would have easily made my top 2.