Review of The Seven Deadly Sins: Revival of the Commandments

Here it is folks, the last good season of Nanatsu no Taizai. It's all downhill from here. We get a lot more information about the various Sins backstories and lots of flashbacks revealing information that has only been hinted at up until now. It's neat learning more about the giants and their culture and history, and also seeing what happened to the fairies after King left them to go adventuring. It's funny how they treat Ban as their new king for a bit. It's satisfying finally getting answers to a lot of the questions that were raised in season 1 about some of the character's pastsand some of the most emotional moments in this franchise have always come from those flashback sections.

The introduction of actual DBZ power levels into the narrative is one of the laziest decisions ever made, as they function identically to how they do in Dragon Ball in that they are effectively useless since nobody is ever shown using their true power, one of my biggest gripes with this series and it's power creep. Constantly we think we're seeing a character's "true power" for the first time when actually it's still just a fraction and we get the reveal later on that they were holding back the whole time. It's very Younger Togoru 100% of his 100% full power, very shounen, and very bad writing. I think the only place it's employed well is in a character like Escanor, the best character introduced so far.

The reason Escanor works so well is because of his status as the pure embodiment of Pride. He is one of the most arrogant characters we've seen in a show already full of boasting blowhards talking about how much stronger they are than you. But then he backs it up by actually being the strongest character, with the surprising line from Meliodas confirming "He's stronger than me." In the words of Lord Nuxanor himself, he is the king of Flex and steals every scene he's in with his raw masculine swag energy.

The season has a big climactic set piece where all 7 Sins are finally working together for the first time and they win the day and everything is great. The holes in the logic of the story are starting to show and the season is only just barely saved by the few fight scenes worth watching, but I remember still enjoying it a lot when I was watching it the first time so I'm going to let the score I gave it at the time stand and not let it be tainted by the season that followed. Trust me, we'll get to that.

8/10