| Orphen: Scion of Sorcery - Retroview | |
The Legend of the Drunken Sorcerer By: Noj Airk
Review Breakdown |
Battle System |
7 |
Interface |
7 |
Music/Sound |
9 |
Originality |
7 |
Plot |
6 |
Localization |
6 |
Replay Value |
7 |
Visuals |
8 |
Difficulty |
Hard |
Time to Complete |
10-15 hours | | Overall | |
Criteria |
It’s extremely difficult to assess the value of a game
like Orphen: Scion of Sorcery. On one hand, the game
is rather annoying, isn’t all that fun, and often
lacks continuity. On the other hand, it is moderately
entertaining, filled with original puzzle and gameplay
elements, and has some slick technology and style.
It’s almost obvious that the game was a major
disappointment to the developers of the game, for if
all the ingenuity of the game had paid off, this game
would have been nothing short of phenomenal.
You assume the role Orphen, a powerful sorcerer of
black magic, who rather than using his incredible
powers for the good of the people, he decides that his
powers are simply enough to assure him a safe life,
and as such, he’s incredibly lazy and uncaring.
Willfully travelling with you are Cleo and Magnus, two
students; and Vulcan and Dortin, either two kids, or
two trolls. Be they his students or sleazy followers,
they all annoy the living hell out of him, and so he
spends half of his day arguing and bickering that can
really only hold the purpose to boost his ego and
attempt to prove to the others that he really is boss.
Most of the time, a hero like this I cannot stand,
especially in movies, but since Orphen is such a
powerhouse of magic (well, his spells are decently
arranged for destruction, mostly later on), his almost
unbearable ego is quite justified.
Many people already knew about the adventures of
Orphen through his decently well-known anime series.
After playing this game, I got the first DVD in the
collection, and was quite impressed with the storyline
in the three-episode adventure. Tragically, Orphen:
Scion of Sorcery’s plot isn’t up to par with the
series adventures or the greater RPG’s. The storyline
is rather inventive and original, but it’s too short,
and really only mildly interesting. The game takes
place in three stages, in which when you beat one,
Orphen is sent back to the beginning, with only a deja
vu of anything like this happening before, which only
lasts a minute at each beginning anyway. The story
behind the stories is that Orphen, his usual crew, and
some strangers are stuck on Chaos Island, a shady
place to end all shady places, looking as if it’s been
abandoned for centuries. These strangers however get
Orphen and his companion (he’s always with only Magnus
or Cleo at a time) into a search for an artifact
called the Crystal Egg, which has the power to control
time and space. It’s all good fun, but the three
plots go together like trying to make a square shape
out of three circles. You fight your allies from one
adventure in another, Orphen has no recollection by
the third adventure of searching for the egg to begin
with, and at the end of each one, it’s as if, until
the very end, that the previous adventures didn’t
exist. To make matters worse, all of them having
similar plot twists to each other.
| I hope Steven Tyler doesn’t mind if they borrowed his mouth for this part | |
There are really only two reasons that I ranked the
plot so high. One, is the fact that this is a
reviewer that didn’t like games such as Saga Frontier,
Chrono Cross or Legend of Mana very much at all
because of extremely low character interaction. When
compared to some other bigger titles, it’s easy for
one to accuse them of being pointless adventures (I’m
one to make that accusation). It’s just that, in my
opinion, 2000 was a let down overall for plot-based
RPG’s, as the games being released for the most part
were all about the fun, not the epic around the
character-driven story. Orphen: Scion of Sorcery goes
more in line with one of the games that year to be
totally character and plot centered. There is no FMV
in this game after the first twenty minutes or so (I
mean it, none!), and only a few anime cutscenes
altogether. The second thing is that that leaves the
entire plot development to character interaction, and
luckily, this game handles it very well, and is, while
sometimes extremely annoying, quite witty,
entertaining, and clear. What makes this such a
unique title in terms of story is that it has a cliché
plot, and the hero knows it, and hates it more than
any annoyed player ever could.
Orphen, the character isn’t just one for a laid back
life, but also one for loot, and the game design
rewards him with many treasure chests. Now, upon
learning that, a new level of appreciation for this
game hit me, for it’s been a good several years since
I’ve last played a treasure hunting RPG. Treasure
hunting in this game is easily as fun as in any other
game, only here, we have a fully 3-D view, so you can
see the farther off ones in the open. However, the
out of battle interface, outside of treasure hunting,
is usually either advancing in a dangerous place
avoiding death traps, or solving some kind of weird
mechanism-based puzzle. You move using the left
analog stick, and you turn the camera around you with
the first row of shoulder buttons. The control pad
carries out different functions such as activating the
menus, or a map. This map system is very hard to use,
but is wonderful in concept. In this map, you can
zoom, angle, and rotate. It’s basically the entire
area you are in, complete with all the polygons,
skins, and moving objects such as swaying branches and
flowing waterfalls. This map is very good for finding
ways to the areas you’re supposed to go, for many
RPGamers find it hard to navigate fully 3-D areas, and
this game is easily as hard to navigate as any, mostly
with it’s almost constant eye-to-eye level of view.
Luckily, if you fall off a ledge or hit some spikes or
something, you just lose some HP, which can be
restored with an item.
Rightfully, many people have complained about some
annoyances with the interface, for it is rather clunky
and limited. First of all, there is no real ability
to backtrack, there are no random battles or
experience points, or any traditional save points.
Not to mention, being on a deserted island, there are
no shops, and as such, no sense of commerce, so unless
you gain a power outside or after a battle, you don’t
have any way of making yourself more powerful. I can
swear that once while playing through the game, I was
able to make my spells more powerful (when you
highlight them, it tells you a power level of one to
three), but there has never been anyone able to prove
this wild rumor to be true. As you win battles you’ll
occasionally gain a spell and/or watch a scene.
Points of saving the game commonly come right before
big battles, but they’re built into the story. You
usually save after a few scenes, when it asks you if
you want to save up to the present point. However,
for anyone who was upset by the nearly 400K save size
of Summoner, Orphen: Scion of Sorcery only takes up
64K on a memory card (less than 1%!). Subtle things
like that make this game more pleasant. The other
subtle thing I’ll mention is the extremely good use of
the vibration in the PS2 controller, as there are many
areas where the world shakes, where the controller
almost makes it feel like the room is shaking.
| Some of these whether effects look
gorgeous | |
The battle system is extremely unique, and had amazing
potential. In this system, you control Orphen, unless
he’s missing, and you control his every action. The
enemies move around you, and you wipe them out by
targeting them and blasting them away. The four
buttons control four spells that you have equipped,
and that you can re-equip. The spells consist of
three types: particle, field and reflect. The square
button brings up a normal circular shield around you
that is impenetrable, and unless taken away, the X
button is assigned for one of two magical swords.
When you use one of these swords, you run up to the
enemy and slash him, and if you time it well, you can
slash multiple times. The other two buttons are
assigned to spells, usually one particle and one field
spell (which is entirely optional and customizable).
However, what has quite possibly single handedly made
many people hate this game is the fact that using your
sword attack is the only way to move in combat.
Simply making the right analog would have completely
cleared up this problem, but alas, the game feels more
like your in some kind of gun turret than a free-style
RPG. Another limitation is that with the fast pace of
the battles, with each button using a specific
different ability, you are limited to the specific
four powers.
However, there are some serious pluses to the battle
system as well. First off, with the spells being
equipped to specific buttons, all forms of battle
menus, and speeds things up to which a battle can
last, on average, one intense minute. Fighting with
you is up to two other people, who unlike in some
other games, these AI controlled characters are
comparatively as active in the battle as you. When
they strike an enemy with a powerful attack, sometimes
there’ll be some temporarily active magical residue,
which if you strike while still active, can increase
the effect. This isn’t too useful in boss battles
sadly, since for fear of the others, Orphen always
decides to take on the bosses alone. Another positive
aspect to the battles is that the enemies also have
the ability to raise shields to block your attacks,
where you’ll either have to wait for them to approach
(when they move in to attack, they have to jump back
before activating their shield again), or strategize.
Strategy is extremely important in the boss battles,
which can sometimes be very difficult. Holding down
the buttons will increase the powers, such as
increasing the field sizes, the sword length, or
number of particle projectiles. Some battles involve
lots of small and very weak monsters in which charging
up is a necessity, and bosses armed with shields seem
almost impossible to hit unless you shoot only in
quick bursts before they can raise their shields up.
Lastly, and my favorite, the battles are a lot like
fantasy movie action sequences; the camera moves
around you, rarely stopping, and there are no HP
displays except when there’s a hit. It’s no
exaggeration when I say that Orphen: Scion of Sorcery
easily has the most entertaining and cinematic battle
sequence I’ve ever seen.
The soundtrack in this game primarily has two types of
musical styles: mellow surrealism, and layer-based,
melodic techno. Having not a shred of sci-fi mixed
with the fantasy, the ho-hum fantasy style music
really fits the settings well. No music ever tries to
outreach its simplistic purpose with dramatization. I
am a big fan of the music, and soon hope to buy the
soundtrack (which was extremely hard to find).
However, I am a bigger fan of the voice acting. Not
being a very long game, all the dialogue is speech,
and while sometimes incredibly annoying, you soon
realize that annoying is the way it’s supposed to be
with these characters. The voices are often overdone,
but only with an overdone tone like this in the voices
makes one fully understand why Orphen is so rude and
abrasive to the characters. The best example is the
conversations between Orphen and Cleo. Cleo easily
has the most annoyingly squeaky voice, and her lines
back her up; and because of that, Orphen almost always
says mean remarks towards her. The same principle
applies on lower levels to Vulcan, the annoying and
reckless troll, and Magnus, who is almost perfectly
like the type of kid who gets bullied in school. The
voice acting does have its lesser moments, but overall
it’s steady. This game is often like a silly,
medieval soap opera, in which you root for Orphen to
escape Chaos Island less then you root for him to come
up with a witty abrasive remark to shut an annoying
character up.
| If they need a janitor for that room, I’ll apply! | |
The writing in the game, however, isn’t as well done
as the acting. You can tell which parts the English
writers wrote, and which parts were translated. The
translation job is in serious need of re-writing,
while the English written parts, which is mainly the
remarks and character conversations, are quite well
written. One instance comes to mind when they stumble
upon a tree that smells sweet and blooms only once a
thousand years (it’s in bloom when they see it), and
Orphen simply says: “Big deal, smells nice, let’s go,”
proving his character.
It is, sadly, commonly laughable to listen to the
structure of the speech. For instance, there are
several instances in which one character will cut off
another, but the programmers decided to store all the
voices in individual lines, and there is always a
pause, always of the same length, between each line.
Individually well-acted and well-written lines come
off as being extremely tacky in production value.
Knowing that it’s not the actors’ faults, I moved that
penalty from the sound grade to the localization.
However, easily on par with the best aspects of the
game are the game’s graphics. While not on the high
side of polygon count, the game’s textures/skins and
lighting are almost on par with Final Fantasy X, and
has some nice artistic value as well. Some of these
surfaces shine and reflect light, and they do so
beautifully. One of the two types of healing items is
a lantern; if you activate a green lantern, the
weakest of the three, a bright green aura shines all
over the local area. It is quite an impressive sight
for a launch title.
However, while extremely clear, polished and
beautifully colored, there are two severe problems
with its visuals. One is that the characters only
occasionally move their mouths during the talking
scenes. That kind of reminds me of a video series I
made about two armies of stuffed animals fighting each
other, for I can’t make stuffed animals make their
mouths move, can I? The only times their mouths do
indeed move, it’s very sloppy and doesn’t even begin
to match with the speech. The other is the movement;
I’d be understating if I called the character movement
during the scenes “pathetic”. Magnus has the habit of
waving his arms in the air in a flapping motion, and
people falling and getting back up is, in a sense,
someone flopping down, and then reverse-flopping. All
over, the gesturing never gets any better.
“A promising and solid title with many flaws” is in my
opinion the best description for this title. I love
this game a lot, but that doesn’t give me much reason
to really recommend it to someone. It’s a nice, short
little farce, with some nice fun bits, and a few major
annoyances. I’ll still play it for a long time to
come, but, knowing the bad wrap that this game
receives, there’s a good chance that that’s just me.
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