The danger of power-hungry mages.
What They Say:
Episode #2: “The Tower of Fangs”
Orphen, Volkan, and Dortin are captured by the authorities after the fiasco with the monster that appeared. Orphen is then summoned by Heartia to go talk to his former master, Childman.
The Review
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
The majority of this second episode of Orphen is a flashback explaining Orphen’s life before leaving the tower. In flashback, we meet the fellow students and classmates, the teacher (who has the very stupid name of Childman, which just makes him sound like a child predator or a Hideo Kojima character) and more importantly, we meet Azalie.
Azalie had the ability to use white magic, which isn’t like the white magic of a final fantasy game. In the world of Orphen it controls the mind and time. She’s shown to be flippant and somewhat dangerous. Krylancelo was one of the few who could counter Azalie’s magic. Despite them telling us that the tower tended to kill its students, we aren’t shown the true dangers of training.
All of these flashbacks occur while Orphen is sitting in a jail cell with the con artist brothers, who are panicking because they’re terrible at crime. He’s released by the sorcerers and questions Childman about what happened way back in the day. It seems to be a coincidence that Orphen ended up in the household that was given the magical sword for safekeeping. Claiomh trusts Orphen enough to show him a magical ring that was left with the sword for safekeeping while he fixes the damage to their household. Orphen realizes it’s the same ring Azalie had shown him in the past, but what it could possibly be is a mystery.
The episode ends with Orphen making nice with his former companions and traveling with them to reach Azalie-dragon because they don’t seem interested in saving her. The two blonds who are overly interested in him are dismissed, for a time since we know they are also leads in this series.
While there’s nothing wrong with this episode and I have no major complaints, I also find that it’s utterly mediocre in the presentation. There’s nothing gripping about the conflict thus far and the side characters are generic enough that I really don’t care. Especially since aside from how dumb their hair is there’s very little difference between them. The costumes don’t help either, with most of the sorcerers wearing very bland dark robes. I wish we had been shown how dangerous the tower is, and how shifty these experiments were.
In Summary:
This episode of Orphen gives us a glimpse of what life was like for the students at the tower. What looked like carefree days expands what we know about the sorcerers and show that Azalie may have been a loose cannon just waiting to explode. It’s a lot of introspection and flashbacks, and the fact the former instructor refuses to explain to anyone what the experiment was that caused Azalie’s transformation is extremely suspect. However, a large majority of this episode just feels forgettable. I long for some action or comedy, and a better-animated dragon.
Episode Grade: C
Streamed by: Funimation
