Long ago, a manga series known as The Seven Deadly Sins was adapted into an anime that was released on Netflix. It started out strong enough as it told the adventures of pint sized powerhouse Meliodas and his motley crew of giants, fairies, angels, demons, and pigs of both the talking and giant varieties. Then, it continued, and got much worse, followed by a massive downgrade in animation that only compounded the increasingly unhinged story. Things came to a head with the final season, which had not one, not two, not three, but FOUR fake out endings, which required Ass Pull after Ass Pull to stretch the story out long past the point it should have. But thankfully, mercifully, it came to an end…until the announcement of a sequel manga, followed by a couple movies about the main characters’ kids, and eventually an anime of the sequel. So, as you may have pieced together from how I’ve characterized the story thus far, vague as it may be, I did not care for the latter parts of The Seven Deadly Sins anime, so I wasn’t exactly looking forward to The Four Knights of the Apocalypse, aside from maybe being another thing I could rant about for a few bucks.With that in mind, you will hopefully be pleased and relieved to find out that I found these first eleven episodes actually rather decent! The story follows Percival, a young boy disconnected from just about everything from the previous series who is destined to become one of four fearsome knights that will spell doom for the world. The Holy Knights of Camelot pursue him and the friends he makes along the way, but given the nature of this story, he’s probably going to be fine in the long run. This first batch, just shy of a dozen episodes, is mainly just about Percival starting his adventure and forming his party, as well as establishing recurring villains like his father Ironside and Arthur Pendragon, ally turned new Big Bad. Yeah, this is actually not the first time in this franchise that an established ally has suddenly turned into a bad guy, but I’m gonna give that the benefit of the doubt until we have more details. In the meantime, Ironside works well enough as a starter villain, and maybe the other members of Percival’s party, Donny, Nasiens, and Anghalhad, will get their own sometime down the road.Like with all shows that are sequels, comparisons to the early episodes of Seven Deadly Sins were inevitable here. In some ways, it highlights how Four Knights has decided to go with a slower pace with less big fights and more character work, while Seven Deadly Sins went headlong into introducing more Sins members and fighting off any Holy Knight that came in a ten foot radius. Here, we still only know of Percival as one of the titular Knights of the Apocalypse, with the other three still a mystery (if you’re only watching the anime), but that can be seen as a positive since it gives other characters time to be fleshed out and developed before we only focus on the title characters. Another big, and I mean BIG plus this show has over its source is that Percival ISN’T a thousand year old molester of teenage girls like Meliodas was! You’d think that would just be a given, but THAT’S how far low the bar is! In fact, speaking of established characters, this first set is actually pretty restrained with how it utilizes them early on. There’s Arthur, another minor character later on, and a Sin makes a brief appearance at the end, but it’s more or less just these new characters getting a chance to stretch their legs, which shows confidence in this sequel to work on its own.Overall, this is a perfectly fine first batch of episodes for the Four Knights of the Apocalypse. The characters are sufficiently introduced, things feel like they are developing naturally, and legacy character appearances are kept to a minimum so as to not appear so desperate. But there will obviously be more of them later…and the ways they are handled are definitely going to do some massive damage to this series. Basically, if you happened to pick up on any of the author’s barely disguised fetishes from the last show, you will most definitely see them become more pronounced here as we move forward. However, for now, this is a solid start, so I’m just going to appreciate that for as long as I can. Probably not for very long, I’m guessing.