English Dub Review: Sorcerous Stabber Orphen; “A Vestige of the Past”

 

 

Overview

Years after a tragic experiment takes the life of his friend, the intrepid sorcerer Orphen lives an unstable life, hunting down criminals to pay his bar tab. But his past eventually comes back to haunt him, as a group of sorcerers heads into town following a dragon. 

Our Take

The first thought that popped into my head as I was watching this first episode was, “Wow, this anime almost looks like it was made in the 90s.” 

So many aspects of the art resound with qualities found in anime of that era. The expressive, wide, angular facial features and the litheness of the limbs on the character designs. The slightly muted and faded colors in the background. The way the characters are dressed; the male protagonist decked out in white-trimmed all-black clothes, the women dressed in plain, single color blouses and dresses. And then there’s the music, which utilizes a healthy amount of competent synth that’s able to weave between both auspicious and tense moments in the story. 

With some suspicions in hand, I hopped on Wikipedia and found out that this anime is indeed a remake of an anime with the same name from 1998. I wonder what compelled them to dig out an old show like this and give it another shot in the spotlight? Either way, I find the execution enjoyable. Remaking older anime and manga is fairly common nowadays, and almost all of them modernize the character designs and visuals to match today’s style. But for Sorcerous Stabber Orphen, they instead chose to pay some respects to the style of the 90s and have retrofitted today’s techniques to accommodate the old ones. 

And so far, at least in this first episode, it works very well. The character designs and colors are clean and modern, but the lines beneath are clearly reminiscent of their slightly thinner 20-year-old predecessors. The magic effects are competently rendered in 3D while their forms are inspired by the flashy bursts of fire and lightning found in old sword-and-sorcery anime. And all of the above are sufficiently supported by some smooth and solid battle animation, moving at a good clip while allowing for some impact.

From an objective perspective, I think this is the successful result of a lot of effort and respect in trying to adapt an older animation style into a new one. And from a subjective perspective, as someone who is a big fan of 90’s anime, I find this show delightful to watch. Hopefully, this standard of quality holds up for the rest of the show. 

Now, as for what actually happened in this episode. 

The first thing you notice (after the 90s aesthetic) is the onslaught of on-screen text naming all of the characters that appear. This is a somewhat rare, but not unheard of, feature of some anime, though this most commonly appears in sci-fi anime that have lots of characters and machines to name. A lot of characters were named that we never saw again after this scene so it felt kind of pointless to do a big roll call like that. 

The cold opening shows a magical experiment gone terribly wrong, resulting in the protagonist’s childhood female friend, Azalie, horribly morphing into a dragon. No details are given here, clearly so that it can be thoroughly revisited later on as the protagonist’s motivation. Azalie thus seems to function as the stereotypical “woman in the fridge” character, though turning into a dragon instead of dying is a unique little twist. 

After a densely packed introduction, we enter our hero, Orphen. After dropping out of sorcery school, he is now using his magical prowess to collect debts that some criminals owe him. Eventually, the fact that he is relying on criminals for supplying his income paints himself as a shady character as well. 

The townsfolk are notably wary of Orphen, denoting an opinion of wariness towards sorcerers and sorcery itself.  Perhaps some event caused sorcerers to fall out of favor some time ago, the general populace growing increasingly suspicious of them, and now the rift has become so big that people nowadays actually doubt the veracity of magic entirely. Even amongst the sorcerers themselves, we see some debate as to what ends magic should be utilized towards. The role of magic seems a centric one, though with how little the protagonist seems to care about flaunting it around as he sees fit, it might not directly affect him until the plot thoroughly congeals around him. 

The criminals that owe Orphen money come to him with the scheme of getting him to marry the daughter of a noble, hoping they can repay him by marrying him into wealth. As dubiously ingenious as this might have been, it is not only quickly debunked by the women of the noble family, it is also immediately discarded as the dragon formerly known as Azalie appears. We’re briefly acquainted with the cheerful, unabashed Claiomh (pronounced like Cleo), and she is obviously an important character as indicated by the opening animation and promotional art, but her introduction is also cut short.

As Azalie arrives, several sorcerers are shown to have followed in her wake and have come to neutralize her. They stage an assault similar to the one they did all those years ago, but to similar results, as Orphen intrudes and handily puts a stop to all of their magic with his own, even taking several of them out with hand-to-hand combat. Then the episode ends on a cliffhanger, as Orphen is just about to confront Azalie. 

With a unique callback style and an explosively fast start, we may be receiving a visually pleasing and dense fantasy anime. No doubt some ancient tropes may rear their heads, but perhaps at least some of them will have been squashed out by the modernization process.