The PS2 Fossil Record - Orphen Scion of Sorcery

Often at console launch you'll get one or two licensed games—if you know anything about either launch games or licensed games you know full well that this is a terrifying crunch to put literally any human being through. I wish I could tell you that Orphen beats the odds, or even that it feels like it could have beaten the odds, but it feels so half-constructed I can't even tell if the ideas in it were decent. The game is overall made in such a fashion that I feel certain it was built essentially from what little happened to be done. I have found no English insights into its development though, and let's be real, I doubt there are many Japanese ones either. Still, let's dissect the tragedy.

If you aren't an anime fan of a certain vintage it might not immediately register that this game is licensed. While I believe the series started as a set of Light Novels, at the time of this game's release not even the anime, Sorcerous Stabber Orphen as it was marketed, had actually seen an official release. This isn't to say that no one had seen it—there's certainly a chance fansubs of it were floating around—but officially this actually seems to be the first piece of Orphen media to actually appear in North America. As to why this was released in English I can only speculate. It's possible the license was in negotiation at the time, as Anime News Network lists the first DVD release in English as having been in November of 2001, and this was meant to either make the license more enticing or advertise the show prior to it being given a western release. I suspect that this game was meant as an anime tie-in though, simply because the game came out not terribly long after the show concluded in Japan. The show ended its run in late March of 2000 and the game found its way out in August of that year in Japan. I'd be interested to know if the game was perhaps originally meant to also be a Japanese launch title, which would have put it out just before the anime concluded. Given how threadbare the game is I can only imagine how unreleasable it would have been at that point. With all that said, I can't actually speak to the game's loyalty to the source material, as I've never seen any Orphen outside this context. The game gives it a pretty typical sounding structure, but it definitely feels like it expects the player to already be at least somewhat familiar with the actual world of the series. That's really the least of its problems however.

Yeah, that's enough beating around the bush. I need to talk a bit about the game rather than snidely remarking that it isn't very good. Orphen is a... well it seems like it was probably intended as an action RPG at some stage of its development. It has a party system, some light platforming mechanics, a pseudo-world map, a very de rigueur for the era sort of "combat dimension" that you'd see in RPGs with random encounters, it even for all the world tries to act like a game with random encounters. Legitimately it's a very odd construction of a game. I've just described about half of a fairly standard, of the era, sort of action RPG. Unfortunately I've sort of just described the entire game. There is absolutely no levelling mechanic to speak of. Very occasionally you will be given new spells and that's it. Combat is not actually random; it happens at very designated points, and while this could have made for something pretty interesting in a game where the developers had time to make carefully crafted encounters, these feel almost random for all the strategy in them. 

Perhaps most perplexingly about the combat though, you can't move. Despite this, spacing and the range on your spells is very important to the combat. You have a melee attack where sometimes Orphen will run up to an enemy and hit them if you press the button, but also sometimes he'll just stand in place and swing at nothing. It's... weird. I don't even have a term for it, it just doesn't feel like it had the time to actually finish the design process. Combat feels on the same level of interaction as an old FMV game. The kind of game where you have a series of pre-arranged video clips and pressing a button at the right time loads a different clip. Obviously it isn't literally like this, there are procedural things happening here; there is a mild randomness, you can cast any spell at any time (albeit on a bad delay due to the controls), but it feels as largely non-interactive as though you were flicking through video clips. Orphen can stand still, change targets, and cast one of about 5ish spells at any given time. That’s it. Getting hurt doesn't really matter as long as you don't die because as far as I could tell Orphen's health just restores between fights. Several fights early on seem to end more on a timer anyway. It's hard to put into words how non-interactive the game ends up feeling because of this.

The rest of the game... also kinda barely exists too. There's some very light platforming but because Orphen doesn't have any persistent health bar as far as I could discern it didn't really matter if you failed because the game just had to deposit you somewhere close by. There’s puzzle solving with very rudimentary environmental interaction, most environments essentially connected by teleporters and little else. Orphen can technically use a sort of energy sword to attack, but almost nothing interacts with this; it solves a few puzzles and that's basically it. There are treasures to be found, but as there's no equipment the treasure is just health items for use in mid-combat. If it seems like I'm struggling for things to describe it's because I absolutely am. There just isn't much to this game at all. This game doesn't even have save points and it doesn't autosave either, it just occasionally prompts the player to save. It gives one of the strongest impressions I've ever had of developers simply stitching content together because that's what's done and they have to release SOMETHING.

I want to speculate a bit about what the game was maybe meant to look like in an ideal world. We're going to have to do a bit of a history lesson though. This game was made by a company called Shade, a company that seems to have originally been founded as a subsidiary of Quintet (a company I'm currently doing a short series on at this very moment). The Game Developer Research Institute claims their subsidiary status ended in around 1998 with the last game they are credited as co-producing with Quintet being the largely forgotten PS1 game, Brightis. Brightis was released in October 1999. If you remember a few paragraphs ago, you'll remember that Orphen was released in August of 2000 in Japan. Realistically these two games must have been worked on at the same time because there's no way they produced this game in 8 months (allowing for time to submit for final approval from Sony) buuuut... it feels like it wasn't in production for much more than 8 months. I suspect that, in an ideal world, this game would have been a more proper action RPG similar to Shade's prior co-productions like The Granstream Saga and Brightis. I suspect that party based combat was meant to be kind of a key innovation for the company. Played in the context of those two games Orphen feels almost like a minimum viable product version of them. A prototype, “combat's kind of working and here's a very basic version of it, we have some test maps you can wander around in and jump around.” It feels like the game basically reached that stage and they were forced to polish and ship it. There are animations floating around this game that are very reminiscent of Brightis and it just gives off the look of bits of that game lingering in the code. It clearly isn't entirely lacking for ambition either; the game splits pathways very early on and the player is expected to play through these paths in succession to piece together a broader narrative. The overall package is quite slight even with this divergence but it shows a desire to do something a bit out there. Without a real game structure to cohere these elements around though it feels like they just took the basic maps and puzzles, very quickly gave them a very hard-coded arrangement with very specific fights, culled down the big set-piece bosses to a similar level of limited interactivity, and shipped it. In an ideal world this game is functionally an action RPG with party based combat, light platforming and puzzle solving elements.

Unlike some of its contemporaries Orphen is at least forward thinking enough to use the analog sticks. It’s not doing anything fancy with them, but you can freely look around with the right analog stick which is a rarity. Due to the vintage of the implementation though I almost didn’t notice this. You can only move the camera with the right analog stick while in first person which only happens when you click the stick in. Otherwise the right stick acts as though it’s unbound and the core camera control is still done with L1 and R1. At the time this was just kind of the accepted standard for how cameras were done, so it’s not that surprising that this choice was made. Doesn’t make it not frustrating in a modern context though.

I always want to touch a bit on what about these early PS2 games feels like an ambitious exploitation of the hardware, and for this game I can only say the sheer amount of voice acting. PS1 games often had voice acting but as a percentage of the game—outside Metal Gear Solid it typically wasn't much. Orphen is full of voiced dialog, voiced dialog with absolutely no subtitles or text boxes. It feels intentional, an attempt to make it feel just that little bit more like an anime. It doesn't really work all too well simply because the cinematography is no great shakes, but it feels once again like the ambition is peeking through despite the general lack of time and budget to capitalize. It's commendable given what was likely a learning experience on the new, famously difficult to work with PS2 hardware and a tight dev cycle to meet publisher demands.

That's Orphen. It's commendable after a fashion but it feels like a team stretched much too thin. They managed it, they made a game that feels like it's miraculous that it happened at all, but if this was your first PS2 game like it was mine, there's a reason you probably don't recall it terribly fondly. I feel like a lot of games involve crushed ambitions. Like any creative work there's always the parts that someone who worked on it can see and just feel frustrated that it didn't work the way they envisioned, the parts that aren't doing what they ought to. Orphen is fascinating because it feels so obviously cut down even from the perspective of an observer. I'm sure the people at Shade did their best, but sometimes when the budget is tight and the time is short anyone's best only goes so far.