What Is Orphen: Revenge?

A second season in search of a story, lighter, looser, and mostly invented for television.

Sorcerous Stabber Orphen 2: Revenge aired on TBS from October 1999 to March 2000, twenty-three episodes from J.C.Staff under a new director, Toru Takahashi, with music by Yasunori Iwasaki replacing Hatake. It exists because the first season was a hit, and it had a problem the first season created: the Azalie story, the spine of the novels, was already told and closed.

So Revenge tells a different one. A new character, Lycoris Nielsen, arrives to recruit Orphen for the Royal Public Order of Knighthood, and the season unfolds as a lighter, largely original journey of weekly monsters and slow revelations about Lycoris herself, with the Azalie matter essentially absent. Contemporary reviewers and returning fans tend to file it the same way: enjoyable company, a shadow of the first season. North America got it from ADV Films on DVD in December 2003, and Sentai's later sets keep both seasons together, which is how most Western fans meet it now.

HOW IT DIFFERS

Season one against season two

A new engine

Season one runs on a single question, can Azalie be saved. Revenge runs on a recruitment, a road trip and a mystery girl, and lets individual episodes wander in a way the first season rarely did.

A new heroine

Lycoris Nielsen is an anime original, built for this season. Her secret carries the back half of the show, which makes Revenge the rare sequel whose plot cannot be found in the novels at all.

A lighter register

The comedy team of Volkan and Dortin gets more room, the monster of the week gets more weeks, and the dread that powered the Bloody August arc is mostly set aside.

The verdict of the record

The season is not lost media or a scandal; it is a competent, inessential sequel. For collectors it matters as the second half of the forty-seven episode vintage run that Sentai's complete sets preserve.

What Is Orphen: Revenge?

HOW IT DIFFERS

THE FIRST WORD