English Dub Review: Sorcerous Stabber Orphen “Sister Istersiva”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

As Orphen and his friends find help infiltrating the city, Azaile continues her own mysterious mission.

OUR TAKE

I’m gonna be straight with you, not a whole lot happens in this episode. The main focus is the antics between Orphen, Majic (can’t believe that’s his name, to be honest), and Claiomh as they meet a mysterious informant from a different country who seems to be on the same track as them. The dynamic between the three is easily described as Orphen being an annoyed babysitter looking after Claiomh the troublemaker and Majic who is just going along with everything around him. I’m not really feeling like I’m learning more about them as characters, though maybe that’s something I need to look for in that first season I still have yet to fully watch. Look, the last Evangelion movie is coming out next month and that takes precedent, alright? But even then, I wish we could feel like we’re on a ride with these people as opposed to just seeing a played out anime comedy routine from the 90’s. We could just as easily be using this time to better understand Majic and Claiomh as people and how maybe their own respective goals overlap with Orphen’s. I highly doubt there’s not something that we could be spending more time on in this situation.

But hey, we do actually get to focus on some of the lore behind this unique fantasy world, though it’s a bit hard to follow by itself. Even more so since the wiki for this show is so under detailed so I don’t have much to refer back to. Anyway, it seems that magic in this world was granted by some form of dragons, who were also human enough that they could breed with humans and spread the ability to use it to even more humans. Okay, sounds simple enough. And because there are people in this world who are very anti-magic, they have their own religions that view those with magic as sort of abominations, hence why we have this city that is so against sorcerers. And it seems Azalie has some business here that we have yet to really elaborate on. But speaking of Azalie, we get some development on her whole “covering up her death by taking over her teacher’s body” deal being found out by colleagues from her old magic school, with her actually admitting to it believe it or not, but I guess there’s no love lost since she was honest. Ah well, here’s hoping for more plot progression next time.