Majutsushi Orphen Hagure Tabi: Seiiki-hen

it's my 3 time writing a review here on the site, don't expect great things.. well! here we are with Season 4 of Orphen! I've been following this remake since it started, and well, if you've made it this far I imagine you've watched the previous seasons, but even if not, and ask yourself is it worth it? I could sum it up in a single line: well, yes.. Compared to previous seasons! this one is so far the best, is very busy from the beginning, have more action, plots, and the war between factions makes the anime even better! in my opinion the protagonist ... Orphen is, and remains cool to follow, and the story keeps growing and getting more interesting!!
now the negatives points:
his companions are still hard to handle, especially the blonde girl, very annoying and bordering on unbearable some times, the blonde boy his apprentice, name Magic, is not horrible like her (so much so that I remember his name lmao), but the characters of the 2 dwarfs, they are still unbearable as always, even as a comic relief, if these 3 disappeared the story would improve a lot, maybe 80%, the apprentice could stay in fact, he is not that bad like these 3 at last..
Azalie the sister he is obsessed with, is a pain in the ass, and thinking about it now, there haven't been many nice girls in the history, the only girl I thought was nice so far was and still Leticia! the other sister from school days, the blonde mage who appeared this season, seemed to be interesting but soon lost screen time... sad.
Conclusion, the story is interesting, and the secondary characters that appear are always cooler than the characters that are around the MC, who are pretty anything and boring, this affects the anime for me.. but it's a very watchable anime! at least it's much better than a Smartphone Isekai or an Isekai Kizoku out there this season! LMAO

What could have been a breath of fresh air amidst the sea of questionable quality fantasy isekai, turned out to be a generic and forgettable fantasy

A total of 6 novels were crammed into 12 episodes, volumes 16 to 21*, here they are:

16: Dance Across My Battlefield, Visitors! - 145 pages - 2 episodes;
17: Echo Through My Garden, Gunshots! - 174 pages - 2 episodes;
18: Wanter My Mansion, Falsehood! - 186 pages - 2 episodes;
19: Swing Wide In My Sanctuary, Gates! (Act 1) - 170 pages - 2 episodes;
20: Swing Wide In My Sanctuary, Gates! (Act 2) - 212 pages - 3 episodes;
21: The ... End Of Kiesalhima (Unnoficial translation) - 208 pages - 1 episode;

A total of 6 books for 12 episodes. This is the most rushed season of all 4 (or 3 if you count it as a second cour of season 3) and I think this last episode should have been a movie. I thought it would be, because Nanatsu had one and Sasaki to Miyano had one, so I thought Orphen, being a classic in Japan with over 14 million books sold, would have gotten a movie to at least finish the main series with a better material than the episodic anime. How wrong I was.

There's no way you can properly pace an adaptation this long, really. Production-wise I bet this anime was utter chaos, I mean, just look at how many revolving staff, directors and stuff it had. Good names, too, like Takayuki Hamana (Psycho Pass, Kuroko no Basket, Prince of Tennis), Reiko Yoshida (Ke No Katachi, Violet Evergarden, K-On!) but talented staff are no miracle workers if the episode schedule is this tight, if the budget is this low. They did what they could and the end result wasn't objectively bad, but mediocre, lukewarm.

This last season was the weakest of them all, even comparing to the first one, although being slightly better in animation and drawing. Anime adaptation are usually made so it can boost the original story sales and merchandising, as well as dvd/blu-ray discs, but how can an adaptation like this attract people to read the novels if they didn't like the anime? Or even buy the blu-ray (which by the way are only sold in the deluxe format, ranging from 200-300 USD) box?

I am disappointed overall, not 100% disappointed because season 2 was actually good, season 3 was ok-ish I guess and I expected the finale to be groundbreaking. So, as much as this may sound unadvised, given how bitter this review was, read the novels, at least the first volume. I promise it's way better than the anime.


*It's not quite a 21st volume cuz it was written 6 years after the 20th and it was not planned to be the actual closure of it, but it turned out to be nonetheless. It also doesn't have english translation, so the title may vary if it ever gets translated.

Finally, a journey that has been laden through its missteps at trying to celebrate a milestone in the original source material's work, the 25th Anniversary reboot of acclaimed author Yoshinobu Akita's Majutsushi Orphen Hagure Tabi a.k.a Sorcerous Stabber Orphen has concluded after 3.5 years of subpar mediocrity that honestly, no one cares at all, even yours truly.

Under the helm of Studio Deen and the variable "somewhere to go nowhere" director Takayuki Hamana, the series' reboot came at a time where seasonal Isekai shows were at its abundance, both for good and/or bad. And despite it not being an Isekai but a full fantasy of sorts, ... I feel that it still falls under the Isekai umbrella, because there's just no distinction at all.

With the end of the final arc of Seiiki-hen a.k.a Doom of Dragon's Sanctuary (which technically should NOT have been Season 4, but the 2nd Cour a.k.a Part 2 of Season 3) which speedruns through the final stretch of the LN from Volumes 16 to 20, Orphen has been dealt the biggest challenge of his life: to solve what remains of the preceding 1st Cour's Urbanrama-hen a.k.a Chaos in Urbanrama, and into the sanctuary where all of the players collide in the biggest culmination of the series' finale, of Orphen and his namesake of Krylancelo, putting an end to the calamity that has befallen the lands, once and for all. And that journey, through its very low highs and very many lows, has to have an end somehow, and Orphen is the key to the entire ordeal: the Tower of Fangs where his master, Childman Powderfield, had first disappeared all of a sudden.

The same mediocrity follows through season after season, making the adaptation slim and fast in quantity but at the expense of quality, which by this final season...is good riddance. Not even the OST is redeemable as the music aspect is literally the same as Studio Deen's low-budget, subpar adaptation. It just gets worse as time pases, to the point of becoming white noise.

About the only consolation there is left, is that Studio Deen and director Takayuki Hamana's staff team has fully adapted the LN, so thank God that there's no more material left to adapt...or rather, a chunk of material was skipped entirely because we, the audience didn't care, so the staff team reciprocated in the same way.

Overall, a coagulated mess of an anniversary celebration that no one remembers, and if you ask me what good can I find in all of this, is that we need no more of Orphen. Even at its worst, Season 1 was where the series peaked, that I initially give it a harsh credit for back in Winter 2020. And unsurprisingly, I still stand by my feelings that nothing has ever changed my perception since then.

The whole reboot spanning 3.5 years, with 4 (technically 3) seasons and 50 episodes (49 + OVA) in total, it's effort embarrassingly wasted to oblivion.