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Seven Mortal Sins X-TASY Review: Going Straight to Hell

12K View2022-06-02

Being raised in a strictly Catholic household, I was taught a healthy sense of shame as a child. I don’t think that’s the only reason I didn’t get into anime until a much later age, but it didn’t hurt. After all, while there’s plenty of wholesome, age-appropriate anime out there, a lot of the medium is known for pushing boundaries when it comes to scantily clad women and blush-inducing innuendo. It’s taken me years of therapy and distance from my religious upbringing to get over all that innate guilt at all those dirty little shortcomings that make us human, but I’ll be damned (uh, literally) if it didn’t all come rushing right back as soon as I started playing Seven Mortal Sins X-TASY.

X-TASY is a gacha game, a style that’s already known for using saucy fan service to encourage players to keep rolling for their preferred waifus. Seven Mortal Sins kicks that formula up several notches, though, with a cast of near-naked heaving bosoms and smooth thighs attached to an interchangeable blend of one-note personalities. There may be seven mortal sins at play, but it sure seems like lust is the primary focus here.

Okay, maybe I’m being a little too harsh. I called the personalities “one-note,” but Seven Mortal Sins X-TASY has a lot of fun with its goofy, threadbare concept, at least. Spinning off from a plot developed in a 2016 manga and a 2017 anime series, X-TASY puts players into the shoes of Lucifer, the fallen archangel who you may recognize from starring roles in The Bible and Dante Alighieri’s Inferno. Fresh from being cast out of Heaven, Lucifer soon finds herself embroiled in a series of increasingly over-the-top schemes pitting angels, demons, and a mysterious third faction against each other.

The game’s goofy (and ongoing) plot takes players on a whirlwind adventure to a wide variety of locales, from an extravagant game show set to a steamy bathhouse (of course) to the realm of virtual reality. There’s a sort of manic energy to the pace and tone of the story in Seven Mortal Sins that I found compelling enough to keep logging in, and the dialogue made me laugh aloud much more often than I would have guessed at the outset. But wherever Lucifer goes, she’ll be both joined and opposed by a series of sins and virtues given the form of young women wearing uniformly revealing uniforms.

It may sound like I’m repeating myself at this point, but I really can’t emphasize enough that your ability to get anything out of Seven Mortal Sins X-TASY is going to heavily depend on either your interest in seeing absurdly unrealistic animated takes on the female form or your capacity for ignoring the (sigh) big anime boobies being shoved in your face at every turn. For my part, I find myself in the latter camp—no, really, especially when it comes to how disturbingly young-looking some of these characters are! I know this being is supposed to be the eternal embodiment of the concept of gluttony, but why does it look like twelve-year-old girl wearing a maid outfit that’s a couple sizes too small? These are the moments where that old Catholic shame felt utterly appropriate.

(One interesting tidbit that occurred to me as I was writing this review: Seven Mortal Sins’s cast of angels and demons is made up exclusively of women. There are some male-looking figures in the three-star creatures who are mostly sacrifice fodder, but the actual characters with lines of dialogue and parts to play in the plot are all women. Obviously there’s probably a very simple, very perverted reason for this choice, but in this way it must be said that Seven Mortal Sins X-TASY actually passes the Bechdel test.)

But when moving beyond the plot and setup, I faced a surprise: I...actually sort of...liked playing the game?

The actual gameplay of Seven Mortal Sins X-TASY, outside of party management, involves taking a group of five characters into a stage and defeating waves of enemies using turn-based combat. Each character is assigned one of three elemental types—strength, agility, or technique—which help provide buffs and weaknesses based on a rock-paper-scissors formula. Strength beats technique, technique beats agility, and agility beats strength. This basic setup provides an easy guide to optimizing your party for difficult encounters, and I was always satisfied when I successfully exploited an opposing team’s weak spot with a more balanced group of my own.

Beyond the elemental type, each character has a primary attack that can be used at any time, a power attack that usually hits two enemies at once but has a cooldown between uses, and an ultimate ability that can often demolish a single foe or do serious damage to everyone on the other team but takes multiple turns to charge up before it can be used. Many of these different abilities also have a chance to inflict debuffs, such as freeze (which seals the character in place and does damage over time), seal (which prevents the character from using any abilities besides their basic attack), and enchant (which causes the character to target their own teammates). There are ten debuffs in total, and they provide a lot of additional depth to the combat system, especially as your crew levels up and faces increasingly difficult challenges. It’s no surprise that carefully pairing debuffs has also quickly become the key method to succeed in the game’s player-versus-player Arena mode.

The mechanics of combat are extremely solid and should be enjoyable to anyone with a fondness for classic Japanese RPGs, but I was also very impressed by the aesthetics of combat. Let me explain: When the game switches into combat mode, it reinterprets the full-art anime characters as tiny, chibi character models. Not only does this remove some of the squickiness of the lecherous drawings that pop up during dialogue sequences, but this fresh visual style is also just surprisingly well-developed and high-quality.

In particular, I had a blast watching the complicated, comedic, and lengthy (not to mention, blessedly, skippable) animations that played out for each character’s ultimate. For a game with over fifty four-star and above characters—three-star chumps don’t get ultimates—having a unique animation that’s this exciting and full of personality is a noteworthy accomplishment.

Of course, if you want to enjoy the ultimates, you’ll have to unlock the characters. Seven Mortal Sins X-TASY features a progressive list of seventy-five goals that will mostly help push players along through the story, unlocking a few characters along the way. But the vast majority of your roster will come from regular pulls at the gacha, which comes in a basic version alongside limited time banners that offer increased odds for specific angels and demons. It’s pretty by-the-books gacha stuff, and the best I can say is that there’s nothing too egregious about the game’s monetization. The only annoyance I ran into was purchasing the “Limbo Park Pass” (X-TASY’s very basic version of a monthly battle pass) and discovering that it expired over a week before the end of the month. Still, the game offers up plenty of free pulls each day, and completing daily quests rewards diamonds at a good rate, which can then be fed into more chances at the gacha.

Like any good mobile gacha RPG, Seven Mortal Sins also features an expansive character progression system, allowing you to take even weakling allies into powerful new directions with enough time, effort, and resources. You can level characters up with experience points, increase their level caps by sacrificing goblins into the “transcend” system, and unlock and power up individual skills by consuming repeat pulls of the same characters. Each devilish or heavenly character you control can also be equipped with a number of different relics that boost them even further. Setting aside the cruel whims of fate from the gacha, there’s plenty here to keep devoted players busy for months without needing to spend money, and surely new content will be coming down the road as well.

Between playing as the Dark Lord Lucifer himself and cultivating a harem of buxom anime women, Seven Mortal Sins X-TASY launched me deep into the depths of an indulgent kind of blasphemy I hadn’t really thought about in years. And yet it also shocked me in its ability to rise above its salacious source material and present a truly substantial take on a type of game that is all too easy to screw up. Maybe there’s some irony in the fact that for as exploitative as X-TASY is toward its troupe of women fighters, the game doesn’t feel exploitative of gamers, despite many obvious avenues that could have taken it down that path.

Pridefulness? Yeah, that’s here. Lust? Oh yeah, you better believe it. But greed? Against all odds and assumptions, not so much.

SCORE: 3 STARS OUT OF 5

PLAY IF YOU LIKE:

• Last Cloudia. If you get sucked into gacha games in general, it’s worth giving Seven Mortal Sins X-TASY a shot, but Last Cloudia is a particularly apt point of comparison, since it also employs great aesthetics and classic-feeling JRPG gameplay.

• Shameless harem anime. Listen, I’m not here to judge you. I’ll leave that for the vengeful Old Testament God who still haunts my dreams every night.

• The endless death spiral of giving in to the void of sin and hedonism. If you’ve somehow managed to move past living in a state of constant fear at the prospect of eternal damnation, you’ll find a lot of semi-nudity and unabashed innuendo to enjoy here.

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