Orphen: Scion of Sorcery

This one is *baaad*.

As one of the launch games for the PS2, and as a product made by a pretty much unknown company, I guess you can give it some slack. The fact it's an anime game should raise some eyebrows too.

But it's no exaggeration when the only thing going for is the *idea* behind the battle system. See, it's like third person on-rails shooter experience. Orphen can use sorceries and skills, that you can arrange to your liking, from a fixed position. You can charge them up before releasing the button, making them more powerful but handing yourself to the monsters you'll be facing. You use square to protect yourself from attacks. It's a matter of good timing and knowledge of what are your enemies going to do next. But the execution is kind of annoying. The camera travels from one place to the other and I personally was just using the Bite of Lighting attack charged to dispose of almost all foes, and it's too finnicky in some situations - like the second "boss" fight you face, where I just happened to hit the guy when the game wanted to register it.

What I'm puzzled about is, how is this game an action RPG? I mean, you use potions to heal yourself up but it's more akin to a just action adventure title. There's not even a status screen nor a way of managing any kind of statistic. Even the health system is separated one from the other; when battling, you have lives similar to a railgun shooter that you... kinda recover with time?

But that's the good portion of Scion of Sorcery. The map exploration itself? It's... not at all engaging. This release continously strips the player of control for showing character interactions, and we're not talking about Oscar levels of interpretation. Like, these characters are so fucking tiresome. Orphen is an entitled asshole (and it seems it's dub wanted to convey it even further). In fact, everyone is kind of an asshole. The only redeeming character was Rufus, and that's basically because she doesn't talk that much unless the plot needs to do so. At least half the cutscenes could be made as liners while playing and the journey would be a lot more pleasing.

It's a pretty shoddy, bargain bin adventure. Around the time the game got into my nerves, the level design really started to get claustrophobic, in the sense the walls were so close of each other the camera clips through them. You can see how barren the world is without the walls, and for a lackluster title like this, it doesn't feel like an aesthetic choice at all. The objectives feel unengaging as hell too. Stuff just... happens, and there's moments where you're walking around, trying to platform with the terrible jump mechanic, waiting for a scene to happen so you get out of there and actually have some progression.

There's a goddamn stupid moment where Rufus climbs through vines to get inside a tower. It seems she's the only one with "light feet", so she must be the character we'll use to get through obstacles. Well, not really. As the adventure goes on, suddenly Orphen takes the initiative and starts hugging vines and climbing too... what's the point of having Rufus at your side then? Just make the plot advance? That seemed like the developers just made mechanics and player options on-the-fly.

The worst thing about this release it's the fact it does not make a good job at bringing people to know this manga/anime franchise. For real, if this is the actual Orphen character we're meeting, I don't want to even watch an episode of the show. So 2000s, so bland, SO Kingdom Heart-esque in design (look at that jacket), what an asshole of a main character. The battle system itself is admitedly interesting, but I would love to be able to even skip the dialogue portions as they are so... mindnumbingly... dumb.