Orphen, Vols. 1-6 (1998)
(aka "Sorcerous Stabber Orphen")
Review by Doc Ezra
Film:
DVD:

Written by Mayori Sekijima and Masashi Kubota, based on an original story by Yoshinobu Akita
English dub written by Steve Foster
Directed by Hiroshi Watanabe
Character Design by Masahiro Aizawa

Features:

• Clean opening and closing animation
  
• Production sketches
  
• Original American teaser and trailer
  
• Original television commercial
  
• Interview with Japanese cast and staff
  
• English and Japanese audio
  
• English subtitles
  
• ADV previews
  

Doc's Anime Warnings:

• Love so blind your eyes will cross
• Angst-o-rama
• Hidden agendas
• Silly super-hero wannabes

Rating: 12+

Anamorphic: N/A

My Advice: Rent it, unless you can deal with neck-deep psychodrama--then you could buy it.

At first glance, Orphen has all the makings of a classic fantasy epic in the tradition of Record of the Lodoss War. A young sorcerer named Orphen, along with his apprentice Majic, is seeking the means to restore his friend Azalie to her true form. Trick is, she's currently in the form of a wicked big dragon named The Bloody August. And the only means of restoring her lies with a magical sword, about which almost nothing is known and even less is understood. Picking up the sword's inheritor, Cleo, for good measure, and dragging about a couple of mischievous trolls for use as pack animals, the group sets out to find the answers they need.

Trouble is, Orphen's basically a dropout of the most prestigious magic academy in the land, the Tower of Fang, and they're not too keen on Orphen poking about trying to save this dragon instead of destroying it before it can cause any more damage. So his old masters and classmates are constantly popping in and trying to blow him to tiny bits, the dragon's rampaging across the landscape being uncooperative, and one of his troll retainers is constantly looking for ways to screw him over. Not the best setup for an aspiring hero.

This series starts off with a bang, leaving the viewer anxious to get the real story behind what's going on. As the motivations of the various factions become clear (and then get murky again), alliances shift and fall, and characters that you thought you had a good bead on suddenly become more complex. The storytelling is deft, and very engaging, and all this is interspersed with enough high-octane magical duels to keep things hopping for our young hero. Unfortunately, the story doesn't maintain its excellent off-the-starting-line pace throughout, or the show would be one for the history books. Instead, all the shifting allegiances serve to generate tedious drawn-out episodes of angst-mongering and irritable protagonists rapidly becoming unlikeable.

It doesn't help that the story starts drawing in completely superfluous subplots in the middle of the fourth disc, more than halfway through the series. The entire subplot involving rivals of Orphen's former teacher, Childman, pops up out of nowhere and serves to accomplish pretty much nothing by the end of the series. And the introduction of the "Black Tiger," a wannabe superhero sorcerer, only seems to serve the function of comic relief, but the pair of mishap-prone trolls was already filling that gap nicely, so he's really a redundant character in all respects. Azalie herself, the woman Orphen has been questing all along to help, isn't nearly worth the effort, in the final analysis, but I won't say anymore about that for the benefit of those that might check this out themselves.

The show looks good, though for something this recent, some of the video is a bit on the grainy side (an unfortunate side-effect of all the darkness and dim palette of the show, perhaps), though I'm not certain if this is a problem with the transfer or the source. The sound is good, and the voice-acting is great, without too many moments where voices get shrill or grating. Extras are a bit minimal, and spread out across all six discs so that each one has only a single feature of note (if it has anything besides trailers for other ADV titles), but what extras are present are good stuff.

If you're jonesing for some fantasy anime, and you've already worn out your Lodoss welcome and your Escaflowne, then Orphen might tide you over, but the story basically comes unravelled towards the end of disc four, and never really recovers--so be prepared for a great beginning, mediocre middle, and weak finish.