THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS Season 2 Is a Weird Mix of Greatness and Disappointment

I loved the first season of The Seven Deadly Sins. You could only imagine my excitement when the dub of season two finally made it to Netflix this year. After watching the season, I have to admit, I’m conflicted. If you haven’t seen the second season yet, be warned there will be spoilers. You can watch both seasons on Netflix.

So, I’m going to start with the problems I had with the season. The first red flag I noticed was when they introduced power levels. Power levels ruin so many good shows. They have a tendency to push character growth on a vertical plane instead of a horizontal plane. Sure enough, the season became clouded with everyone’s power levels and training in an attempt to raise their power levels.

As is commonplace when power levels are involved, we got OP villains designed simply to force our heroes to become physically stronger. The whole first part of the season is getting the heroes to train to fight the Ten Commandments because they were greatly outclassed. However, since we have to keep the Seven Sins stronger than everyone else, heroes like Howser and Gilthunder train, but barely improve. I think they went up about 100 levels which still put them about half the strength of many of the Sins. Because training barely does anything, it means that no one is of use against the Ten Commandments.

This was a big disappointment after the first season. In the first season, we knew that Meliodas was the strongest, but the other Sins could hold their own against some bigger bad guys. This season, no one can do anything except Meliodas, Escanor, and Merlin. Ban tries and tries and repeatedly fails.

Another disappointment was Merlin. We met her at the end of the first season and she seemed cool. Then, this season, we learned almost nothing about her except some weird clues to things (is she the child of an archangel or something? Please no spoilers). I thought we’d get to know her more as we had previously learned about the other Sins. Combine that with the fact that she isn’t near the same power level as the Commandments, but is then able to take one out, and it was a big letdown.

The Commandments themselves were a bit of a letdown too. We’re shown from the start that they’re big trouble, and we learn a bit about some of them, but then there are many we don’t learn anything about and then they’re killed. A little bit more about the Commandments would’ve been great. It was also annoying how Melascula keeps being dead but is really alive. It’s quite annoying and makes no sense. Don’t even get me started about the abilities the Commandments have. They say that they’re bound by their Commandments, but the only one that seems true for is Galand. There’s no way Estarossa didn’t harbor any hate against Meliodas as he killed him. I also do not understand Grayroad as he said no violence can happen when he’s around but then people are fighting all around him. Needless to say, I’m confused about how this works.

There’s more that I didn’t care for (how come Diane never remembers that she can turn her skin to metal?), but I think that’s enough negativity for now. Let’s look at the positive. Escanor is a freaking boss! I loved Escanor’s character. I wish they had gone more into detail about what this curse was that he had where he got stronger with the Sun and useless at night. However, I love his personality, and his crush on Merlin is fantastic. Escanor was hands down the best part of season two.

Another thing I enjoyed was learning more about some of the Sins’ backstories. They helped flesh out the characters, and I wish there was more growth there instead of focusing on power levels. It was genuinely a little sad when Zhivago dies.

So, I’m not the biggest fan of Gowther, but somehow finding out he was a Commandment made a lot of sense to me and I kind of liked it. I hope they flesh that out more in season three.

All in all, there are some things I liked, but there was a lot that was a disappointment to me. I hope that season three helps remedy some of this and makes some side characters useful again. One of the cardinal sins of anime is that side characters are overlooked. Share your thoughts in the comments, but please do not post anything that is from the manga past this point.