What Orphen Video Games Are There?

Exactly one, and it reached the West before the anime did.

One. Orphen has a single console game, Orphen: Scion of Sorcery, developed by Shade for the PlayStation 2. It tells an original adventure, a treasure run to Chaos Island, rather than adapting a novel, and it opens with anime cutscenes drawn for the game. The remarkable part is the timing: Activision released it in North America on the PlayStation 2's launch day in October 2000, which makes this mixed-review launch title, improbably, the first piece of Orphen media officially released in the West, ahead of ADV's anime DVDs in 2001.

THE WESTERN BOX

Activision's edition, 2000

Orphen: Scion of Sorcery

A PlayStation 2 launch title in the West

Sorcerous Stabber Orphen novel volume 1 cover, the game's source — **The source · 1994**Volume 1 of the novels. The game invents a new adventure rather than adapt this book.

Japan received the game on 3 August 2000 from Kadokawa Shoten and ESP. Activision took it west as a PlayStation 2 launch title: 26 October 2000 in North America, launch day itself, and 24 November 2000 in Europe. A Kadokawa the Best budget reissue followed in Japan on 7 March 2002.

THE VOICE CURIOSITY

Why this game's dub is a time capsule

A cartoon cast, not an anime cast

Activision recorded the English version in Los Angeles with union cartoon actors under voice director Kris Zimmerman-Salter, before ADV's anime dub existed. Quinton Flynn plays Orphen; the anime's English Orphen, from 2001, is David Matranga. Two different Orphens, a year apart.

A Metal Gear reunion, early

Flynn voices Orphen a year before playing Raiden in Metal Gear Solid 2, and Cleao is Jennifer Hale, with Paul Eiding, Earl Boen, Debi Derryberry, Tara Strong and B.J. Ward around them. The cast list reads like the era's cartoon royalty because it is.

Nothing to read

Contemporary reviewers noted the strangest choice of all: the game is fully voiced and carries virtually no text, no dialogue boxes and no subtitles, an attempt to make a game feel like an anime episode that landed as a curiosity.

Fifty-one fights

The back of the box advertised the exact number of battles in the game: fifty-one. Reviews of the time were mixed, and the count has become the game's most quoted statistic, a launch title's honesty about its own size.

What Orphen Video Games Are There?

THE WESTERN BOX

Orphen: Scion of Sorcery

THE VOICE CURIOSITY

THE FIRST WORD