Sorcerous Stabber Orphen: Chaos in Urbanrama - Reviews

I'm a big time fan of Orphen but you may not expect sugar coating here. First things first, the following books were adapted into this season 3, cour 1:

11 - Sink Into My Dreams, Paradise! (Act 1) - 125 pages - 1 episode
12 - Sink Into My Dreams, Paradise! (Act 2) - 145 pages - 1 episode
13 - Guide My Faith, Magic Blade! - 117 pages - 3 episodes
14 - Lay Claim To My Heart, Devil! - 141 pages - 4 episodes
15 - Engulf My Despair, Verdure! - 181 pages - 3 episodes

So yeah, first point: rushed as hell. Deen did a better job with Konosuba, the first volume ran I think around of 170 pages and got 6 episodes. They also did a better job with animation but ever since Orphen season 2, it got way better but still didn't reach Konosuba. That's why this show keeps getting high 5s and low 6s: its rush thru the plot makes the story advance way too fast, looking like it's a confusing mess while it's not how the author wrote it in the novels anyway.

A total of 18 out of 20 books were (are in the course to be) adapted, volumes 2 and 3 were not, which is a shame because volume 2 has important details on the lore (details which were in the OVA, if you check it right, Azalie and Childman were in the ruins of the city Alenhatam, where book 2 is set) and book 3 is some sort of sidequel with little to add to the bigger picture but is a hell of a thriller mixed with magic and nice plot twists if you ask me, with a bittersweet ending that is very remarkable of Akita.

Voice acting: I'm no actor nor I have interest in this so it sounds like every anime ever to me, I can't complain, really.

OST: Most tracks are from season 1 and 2, if not all of them. They mostly sound generic, too.

Animation: Why is it not actually BAD but it's also not GREAT? The first thing to look in an animation right after characters is the background scene. How well detailed is it? How lifeful is it? How much of a character on its own is it? And Orphen's often look like crayon sketches, outlines, drafts, whatever you call it, they look rough and they don't have a wide variety of angles, leading to the same repeated pattern over the scene, making the visuals to look bland, generic. At least the magic effects look good to some extent. As of what changed from season 1 to 2/3: the characters. There's mostly a ton of weird frames, weird angles and background characters with odd shapes, some of them had 3 different head sizes in the span of 10 seconds! So those flaws got corrected in like 80% in both season 2 and 3 but they still happen here and there. Not as often and not as grotesque as season 1, but still not perfect in that regard.

 Rant time: Orphen is one of the most important light novels in Japan, selling over 14 million copies (and that's a crapload for LNs, trust me) and ranking at the 9th place of most sold LNs of all time. This anime is to commemorate the series 25th anniversary in 2019, season 1 aired in early 2020. I still can't fathom why did they choose post Nanatsu Deen to adapt this series but I guess it's doing well enough in Japan to have most books covered, even if it's rushed. I just think Orphen deserved a better adaptation. The 1998 anime by J.C Staff while not being faithful to the source material due to "there is not a lot of story to adapt as of now", did a way better job at turning the concept of "Orphen and his friends' adventures" to an anime. The animation is not perfect by any means but at least they had more passion. They draw the effin' pendant right.

Their background scenes are better, their art and photography direction is better, that's why some anime scenes made into dvd covers, like this one (or you can argue they were lazy to create new art, that's fine): 

An anime is an audiovisual media. So the looks, the art and the OST must be of utmost quality in order to have enough attention to gather a huge fanbase and be popular. This specific part must be more important than story I dare to say, but the story is not to be crappy either. That's the end of my rant and my review. Cheers.