English Dub Season Review: Hortensia SAGA Season One

Overview (Spoilers Below):

The Kingdom of Hortensia has been in a state of peace for 700 years thanks to protection from its two vassal states. But when one of them revolts, things turn chaotic and the king is killed and the princess goes missing. Alfred Ober hears about all this when his uncle Maurice returns home with his father’s sword. Alfred’s father was a knight who gave his life to the protection of the royal family—and now his son vows to do the same.

Luckily, the missing princess is a lot closer than he thinks, as she’s in disguise as his squire. Together, the group keeps training to get stronger and try to retake the kingdom and restore it to its rightful state. But with legions of monsters and enemy knights set against them, it’s going to take all they have to stay alive.

Our Take:

I won’t beat around the bush: Hortensia SAGA is a pretty bad show that falls short in almost every respect. Based on a mobile game from 2015, it’s no surprise that the anime adaptation isn’t a critical darling, but I was not quite prepared for just how bad this show is.

The first five minutes of the series begins with a bloody battle between a magical werewolf and a bunch of generic knights. It’s one thing to give us a brief scene or two to set the stage, but Hortensia SAGA devotes over five minutes of the premiere to throw us into scenes of carnage with characters we don’t give a crap about. (Providing you haven’t played the mobile game, of course.) That sets the tone well for the rest of the show in that it’s really not about the characters, or even the events themselves. This feels purely like a cash grab in order to try and make a game relevant again, and it fails completely.

There’s just nothing worthwhile to see here, no nuance or intrigue. The characters barely get any development because there’s no time devoted to getting to know them. Each episode jumps back and forth like a video game, sending characters on quests and missions that ultimately don’t add up to anything exciting. The battle scenes are boring, the villains are bland, and the only person I got remotely close to caring about was the princess, if only because her plot line at least had the potential to be interesting.

All of this would be more excusable if the show looked good, but it doesn’t. They may be drawings, but there’s no art here. The character designs are forgettable, the backgrounds are blandly boring, and the direction is expressionless. It feels like what would happen if you let an AI make a fantasy series. Not even a good dub could salvage this, and unfortunately this is not a good dub, either. A handful of the main characters sound alright, like Chris Hackney’s performance of Albert, but most of them sound like they don’t want to be there, and a lot of the voices for the younger characters are particularly grating. This is especially notable when characters like the princess are supposed to be sad, but they just sound like they’re trying to sing very off-key. If hearing a lot of nasally, high-pitched screaming sounds like your cup of tea, this may be the show for you.

Hortensia SAGA may have been a good mobile game, but it’s definitely not a good anime. The action is boring, the animation is ‘meh’, and the storyline is pointless. Between the poor production quality and the lack of an engaging storyline and compelling characters, Hortensia SAGA is not a saga worth saving.