Welcome back to the Arthurian-inspired shounen world of The Seven Deadly Sins. In this adaptation of the Nakaba Suzuki's sequel manga, it's been sixteen years since the Sins' final battle, and the focus shifts to their children – or at least to a random kid named Percival, who has grown up high above Britannia on a mountaintop with his grandfather. Percival's life is upended with his long-lost father shows up to murder him because of a prophecy: apparently, Percival is one of the Four Knights of the Apocalypse, a group of knights who will take down King Arthur and destroy Camelot. More concerned with the fact that his dad is the closest thing to evil he's ever seen (and murdering his grandfather is a very quick way to convince Percival that his father's in the wrong), Percival decides to set out on an adventure to figure things out.

That all makes this show sound much more serious than it actually is. Yes, all of those things happen, but Percival himself is a loveable, amiable goof, and that takes the tension down a notch, which I'd count as a positive, because otherwise the entire plot would be almost unbearably bleak. Down on the ground, Percival teams up with a talking fox named Sin (think about those words and what they represented in the original series), who tells him that he is, in fact, one of those knights his father was looking for. Sin wants to lead Percival to Camelot, or at least Liones, and Percival, determined to find his dad, agrees. Along the way, he's joined by Donny, Nasiens, and Anghalhad, and these first eleven episodes basically function to establish the quest and get the party together. Like its predecessor, each member of Percival's group has a proprietary magic power, and they face off against corrupt holy knights everywhere they go. If it sounds a lot like the first series, it is, but with much more of a traditional shounen feel – Percival is the wide-eyed ingenue hero with more heart than brain, Nasiens is the smart one, Donny's the one who freaks out a lot, and Anghalhad is the girl.

She's also a bit of a disappointment. After a very strong introduction, wherein she openly scoffs at and defies the sexist logic of holy knight Ironsides, who believes that if he shreds her clothes and cuts her hair she'll lose the will to fight, she quickly subsides into much more stereotypical ground. Not only does the original scene do a fantastic job of showing how Arthur's knights all belong to an older, more sexist world, it also happily defies a lot of common manga “logic” about how women act; Anghalhad's emotions and motivation aren't dictated by her appearance; if he's going to cut up her dress, she'll just strip it off and keep fighting, with no purported feminine concerns about her virtue. But once the fight is over and she officially joins Percival's group, she becomes a spoiled rich girl out on an adventure, foolishly spending all of their money, insisting on riding while the boys walk, and generally becoming a much less interesting character. We can still see that she's smart and skilled – she's right, they do need supplies for their journey – but it also feels like she's made a U-turn in the common sense department. Of course, she's also trying to fill the roles played by Elizabeth, Diane, Merlin, and many other female characters in the original, not to mention that she comes in late in this cour, both of which could explain the shift in how she's written.

Fortunately, the story is fun even with that. Although this is clearly just the party-gathering phase of the plot, all of the characters have motivation to join Percival on his journey, and the question of who Sin really is helps to form a throughline. Donny, the first to join Percival, is the last to get his backstory, and that's both an interesting decision and a smart one. Donny's past is much more linked to Percival's goals than the other two's (although Anghalhad's mother was a holy knight herself, which is probably important), and through the exploration of it we get closer to understanding the situation Percival is blithely waltzing into. Donny has been trying to distance himself from that past over perceived failures, and while we've been able to guess that he's more than just the loud comic relief, finding out the precise reason for it goes a long way towards rounding out his character. Nasiens, the final member of Percival's party, has both the most difficult backstory given that he had to watch horrors unfold before his eyes (and the monster associated with him is truly awful to look at), and is the most useful member, despite not physically fighting as much as the others. It's a well-balanced team, and that helps a lot.

As always, the characters and plot derive from British legend, most specifically the King Arthur tales written by a variety of authors throughout the Medieval period. Percival is, of course, a knight of the Round Table associated with the quest for the Holy Grail, called Peredur in Welsh legend, where he plays a larger and more varied role. (The character is replaced by Galahad in later writings.) Anghalhad, spelled Angharad, comes from some of the same Welsh writings; she's the woman Peredur/Percival falls in love with and is occasionally described as Guinevere's sister. Meanwhile, Nasiens, spelled Nascien, can be one of three people in Arthurian lore, with the most likely fit here being a knight of the Round Table who eventually became a hermit. He's also sometimes described as the son of the King of Denmark, so that could be something to watch for going forward. There's no direct parallel for Donny, but it's possible that he's meant to be Dinadan, a knight known for being a bit of a coward.

The Seven Deadly Sins: Four Knights of the Apocalypse's first cour is a bit of a mixed bag. While it's always enjoyable and contains some solid character work, particularly in the way Percival's magic requires other people to believe in him to activate and in the exploration of Donny's past, it also very much feels like the “getting there” portion of the story, with Sin's identity being the only major throughline apart from the journey itself. The art and animation can be a bit awkward at times (and feature a very ugly dragon), while both sub and dub Percival err on the side of shrill, which gets old fast. But it's got a weirdly catchy ending theme and sets up enough story to make it feel worthwhile to keep watching when the next half drops, so while it isn't as good as its parent series thus far, it's worth giving it more time to prove itself.