The Seven Deadly Sins: Dragon's Judgement

七つの大罪憤怒の審判 (Nanatsu no Taizai: Funnu no Shinpan)

8.8(3)

OtakuDen

6.6(234,161)

MAL Score

Ranked #7500

Popularity #548

Action
Adventure
Fantasy

Episodes: 24
Duration: 24 min per ep
Aired: Jan 13, 2021 to Jun 23, 2021
Status: Finished Airing

Synopsis

A fresh danger rises over the Kingdom of Liones, forcing the Seven Deadly Sins to go their separate ways to confront an enemy presence spreading across Britannia. With the group divided, they take on three formidable opponents, search for a missing part of someone dear to them, and set their sights on rescuing Elizabeth.

As their journey unfolds, hidden truths come to light—especially the real story behind how the Holy War ended 3,000 years ago. Revelations from the past strain bonds in the present, bringing former allies into conflict and setting the stage for the release of an overwhelming power.

Otaku Consensus

Dragon's Judgement is a mixed but serviceable late-series payoff: its 6.57 MAL score and 65/100 AniList score reflect a fandom that appreciated Studio Deen's cleaner action staging after the previous season's backlash, but never fully forgave the uneven plotting. Susumu Nishizawa's direction gives the 3,000-year Holy War material and endgame battles more momentum than the surrounding character drama, while the most consistent criticism is that the season leaves major expectations underdeveloped despite its heavy violence and finale-level stakes.

Why You Should Watch

Watch Dragon's Judgement if you want a full-throttle shounen war arc built around demons, gods, magic, and super-powered grudge matches without the slower training-cycle structure of earlier adventure anime. It scratches a similar itch to Fairy Tail's found-family loyalty and Bleach's supernatural faction warfare, but with more romantic curse mythology and a darker TV-14 edge where characters are routinely maimed, erased, or overwhelmed by god-tier force. This is not the ideal entry point; it is for viewers already invested in the Sins who want late-game answers, old betrayals reframed, and battle scenes backed by Takafumi Wada, Kouta Yamamoto, and Hiroyuki Sawano's orchestral bombast. The appeal is completion, escalation, and seeing the franchise's mythology finally collide onscreen.

Key Characters

M
Meliodas
Meliodas remains the franchise's tonal gamble: a comic, almost boyish captain whose appeal depends on how much the viewer buys the contrast between his casual manner and apocalyptic narrative weight.
E
Elizabeth Liones
Elizabeth is the emotional anchor of the season, valued by fans less as a battlefield spectacle than as the character who turns the endgame mythology into a personal crisis.
B
Ban
Ban stands out as the series' endurance icon, the kind of shounen character whose popularity comes from stubborn loyalty, physical punishment, and a romance-driven sense of purpose.
E
Escanor
Escanor is remembered as the franchise's purest power-fantasy presence, a character whose theatrical arrogance gives the war material its most operatic charge.

What Makes It Stand Out

1
Studio Deen produced this 24-episode season, which aired from January 13 to June 23, 2021, making it a two-cour endgame installment rather than a short epilogue run.
2
The season is widely noted as an animation improvement over the preceding installment, especially in action scenes, though critics often qualify that praise by saying the earlier benchmark was low.
3
Its soundtrack has an unusually stacked credit line: Takafumi Wada, Kouta Yamamoto, and Hiroyuki Sawano are all listed for music, giving the battle material a larger-than-average shounen orchestral profile.
4
The adaptation leans hard into war-fantasy iconography; AniList tags it at 91% War, 90% Demons, 89% Magic, 81% Gods, and 81% Super Power, which accurately signals the season's escalation away from tavern-adventure rhythms.
5
The season's structure divides the ensemble across simultaneous objectives, letting it function more like a battlefield campaign than a single-party quest and allowing multiple antagonistic fronts to develop at once.

Fun Facts & Trivia

Fun fact 1: The original creator is Nakaba Suzuki, while the anime staff for this season includes director Susumu Nishizawa, series composer Rintarou Ikeda, character designer Rie Nishino, and sound director Chikako Yokota.
Fun fact 2: ReoNa performs the ending theme, while Akihito Okano is credited for the first opening theme, placing the season's music identity partly in the hands of artists already familiar to mainstream anime audiences.
Fun fact 3: Despite a modest MAL rank around #7500, Dragon's Judgement remains highly visible with a MAL popularity position of #548 and more than 234,000 recorded votes, showing how large the franchise audience stayed even during a divisive period.
Fun fact 4: AniList lists Shounen at 97% for the title, but also gives Heterosexual 70% and Ensemble Cast 68%, reflecting how strongly the season is coded around paired relationships and a rotating central group rather than a single-hero format.
Fun fact 5: Web review summaries consistently single out violence as the content element that pushes the season into TV-14 territory, with on-screen deaths and explosive destruction treated as recurring battle grammar rather than rare shock moments.