The Seven Deadly Sins universe is something of a monster, providing fans with buckets of content spanning manga collections, TV series, spin-offs, games and films. Sure, it’s not One Piece or Bleach, but it’s still a substantial mountain to climb if you want to truly understand what’s going on. Adding to the lore's existing complexity is Netmarble’s gacha consolidation, The Seven Deadly Sins: Origin, a time-bending mystery that plays with fan expectations, delivering an original story to unpick one quest at a time. Origin seems like a compelling character-action game at first, backed up by vibrant, series-appropriate visuals. Alas, like many of the lower-tier attempts at this saturated genre, its repetitive gameplay and resource-riddled submenus provide far too much friction as you get into the meat of the dreaded gacha midgame.
Set in a version of the Kingdom of Britannia, The Seven Deadly Sins: Origin centres on Prince Tristan of Liones and Tioreh, the children of key figures from the original show and manga. One day, the duo uncover a dangerous cavern that, in addition to serving as a handy tutorial area, causes the world around them to shift. With extratemporal events popping up all over the place and a strange, nefarious infection sending chills through the world, your job is to tie up as many loose ends as you can to get the realm back on track, a process replete with the usual perspective puzzles and combat encounters. Regardless, as a fan of the anime who has since lost their spark for the series, this clever twist on the lore reminded me of what I loved about The Seven Deadly Sins to begin with: Its loveable range of characters pulling off stylish moves, framed by beautiful fantasy backdrops – though Origin’s nostalgic charm offensive is only effective at maintaining this mirage for so long.
As you crest your first hill in the glorious land of Britannia and feast your eyes on the cel-shaded world ahead, it’s easy to get distracted. Questions like: "Is that a treasure chest behind that rock?” and “What do you think is hiding in that giant bird's nest in the sky?” flood the mind and elicit a kind of excitement only an open-world landscape can provide. It’s a pity, then, that these questions slowly give way to mechanical answers that require sustained investment and optimisation to enjoy. Despite the visual smokescreen, you soon realise how cold the world feels to actually explore.
This is in part due to a lack of technical polish that plagues Origin’s loot-covered terrain. Rabbits shimmy in unison like professional backing dancers, and textures are blurry up close, particularly when you press up against them in search of dodgy objective markers and inventory-bolstering goodies. Moment-to-moment character animations aren’t convincing either — Prince Tristan’s climbing stance is dubious at best, a far cry from the body contortions Link pulls off in Breath of the Wild.
You soon realise how cold the world feels to actually explore.
Further issues with camera positioning forced me to restart the game multiple times, which only added to the overall sense of irritation. While none of these problems are dealbreakers in isolation, they do stack up to put a damper on the adventure, the creaking edges of the game creating disconnection from the overarching story, which is genuinely interesting. It felt like the only way I could feel a sense of achievement was through clearing objectives as fast as I could, and following the golden path whenever it was presented, lest I summon some kind of game-breaking issue. Standout locations like the castle grounds of The Kingdom of Lionel and the pastoral glades that surround it help mitigate this sense of frustration somewhat by providing carefully recreated spaces to wander through. Ultimately, though, I found myself hungry for a more considered, holistic gacha experience like Genshin Impact
Thankfully, you unlock movement abilities early on in The Seven Deadly Sins: Origin, which helps to distract you from your disappointment. I was pleased to see open-world essentials like the ability to climb and swim, as well as a Da Vinci-esque wooden glider I could deploy to whizz through the sky. There is one more addition to your movement toolbelt, too, and that’s a pig-steed that fans of the show will recognise as the loyal garbage-eating scamp, Hawk. Alongside allowing you to speed down roads and across dragon-bone graveyards, the chunky swine’s brand of adorable humour helps to pave your path through the game with light banter as you uncover more of its mysteries.
With the only barrier being a surprisingly generous stamina bar, Origin’s traversal skills allow you to cheese your way across Britannia as soon as you’re cut loose from the tutorial. Don’t get me wrong, there are some particularly egregious progression-shaped roadblocks that require you to complete certain missions and acquire items to progress into new areas, but at the very least, I was glad that Netmarble provided these skills up front, so I could experiment even so.
As you stretch your legs, you’ll uncover glowing Warp Points that reveal the map’s busy topology and allow you to jump between central locations as you please. Initially, these additional goalposts prompted me to get creative, sneaking past fiends or flying across peaks to reveal more of the world. (Shoutout to all the Breath of the Wild sickos out there who opted to unlock every Sheikah Tower before doing the main story…) Still, once you’ve pushed through the limited pool of self-inflicted challenges, Origin seems more concerned with keeping you playing by rewarding you with repetitive busywork rather than providing any kind of meaningful progression. Inevitably, as a result, I found myself losing interest in Prince Tristan’s plight, fueled only by the serotonin boost that comes from seeing the ‘mission complete’ banner when wrapping up another dull task.
Seven Deadly Sins: Origin’s saving grace is its familiar, tried-and-tested combat system, which meets the bar set in the genre. On top of a jump, dash, and dodge, each character has a normal attack, a special attack, and a skill attack, with the latter two dealing more damage but requiring you to wait for them to cool down before triggering them again. On top of that, each hero also wields a unique ultimate move whose heightened damage arrives courtesy of well-animated character-dependent sequences – I’m still not sick of seeing Prince Tristan brandish his sword with volcanic intent. It’s a bright, flashy game in motion, yet remains approachable thanks to a simple control scheme.
It’s a bright, flashy game that remains approachable thanks to simple controls.
Unfortunately, the enemies don’t hold up their end of the depth bargain. They aren't nearly as reactive as you may hope, operating more like sentinels than living, breathing bad guys. Say you’re strolling down a hill and get spotted by a sentient shrub. They’ll do nothing but chase you within their designated zone of operation and wallop away until the screen turns black. I was by no means expecting the intricate back-and-forth of a series like God of War here, but the bar is so low in gacha games that it feels egregious not to try something different. I would have preferred more cohesive fights that took advantage of Origin’s supernatural effects and mechanical additions – something like Monster Hunter’s part-breaking brawls – to really differentiate it from every other character action gacha game out there.
This issue feels particularly flagrant during boss battles, which were rarely complicated enough to make me break a sweat, let alone elicit any kind of heart-pounding emotion. Simply put, you’ll chase and hack away at your target regardless of their imposing stature, navigating a barely perilous arena to unseat their health bar. The enemy designs do much of the heavy lifting here, making reference to the funky creatures you find in the source material, like the towering speckled Albion. Even so, it feels like a huge waste to provide such a gratifying combat system when there’s no reason to actually master it, so long as button-mashing to the next checkpoint gets the job done.
Early on, I faced off against a lumbering beast that smacked the ground like an infant in a tantrum, sending fireballs raining down on me from above. My job was to avoid getting hit by the immolating stones while smacking the baddie's fists until they fell backwards, revealing a glowing orb in their stomach. I’m sure you’re getting Deja Vu while reading this…From here, I needed to scale the monster, Shadow of the Colossus style, and whack the orb on repeat, before it would get up and start losing its temper all over again. The smoking gun was that stamina limitations meant I had to wait patiently before I could climb the beast to smack the orb, leading to idle moments in the middle of the fight that killed the pacing, and my broader sense of enthusiasm towards Origin’s gacha-poisoned architecture.
Many of the game’s most important battles feel highly derivative by default, lacking unique design elements or crafty quandaries to separate them from the established norm. I shouldn’t be sitting there reminiscing about boss battles from Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage due to a comparatively lethargic encounter in 2026. Is it too much to ask for a gacha game to lean into the context of its IP, or find another way around this tried-and-tested formula that could provide a deeper sense of challenge? I can concede that encounters like those in Origin are deliberately simplistic and designed to be moreish, but is that in service of the player or to direct them towards the storefront with greater efficiency and speed? It doesn’t feel like Netmarble is too interested in finding the fun in this regard, and it’s fairly damning when compared to something like Arknights: Endfield, where the factory-building system provides a refreshing and inspired throughline to follow alongside a more conventional structure.
I barely earned enough for more than a handful of gacha pulls over 50 hours.
At first, your team of heroes in Origin consists only of Tristan and Tioreh, though it soon grows to include up to four members thanks to the looming gacha systems that hand you additional characters throughout the odyssey. You’ll earn a currency called Star Memory, which can be forked over to pull randomised gear and new companions. It’s a recognisable loop that, like much of Origin, doesn’t stray from the norm in pricing or style, and despite my own affinity for the genre and a rose-tinted lens on the source material, it still stings to glance at the Shop tab and see so many convoluted systems propagating through the mid to late game, reducing my favourite characters and their journeys into marketing tools.
On the upside, Origin doesn’t require you to spend money to succeed, though notably, it doesn’t provide you with much premium currency through organic gameplay either. Despite spending over 50 hours grinding, I barely earned enough to pull the gacha more than a handful of times, and even then, my pulls were more often than not total duds. That’s the ball game, at the end of the day, but I was at least hoping for some kind of glitzy fanfare to accompany my hard work, or a means to demonstrate how these pulls could enliven my moment-to-moment experience. Instead, all I got was a pop-up menu from the shop prompting me to enter my details so I could roll the dice again.
