Orphen is about a smart ass sorcerer with a big mouthed blonde, and a weakling apprentice sorcerer on a quest to help out the lives of a pinkhead dancer, a big mercenary, and a young musician who all seem to have some common goal to visit Choas Island. It's your pretty typical RPG huh?

There's so many things that could have been improved in this game that would have made it so much better. For one thing instead of just controlling orphen or one of the other characters only, at certain parts in the game, why couldn't Kadokawa Shoten use the extra time and energy considering IT IS a DVD game to make it possible to use all the characters at any given time? When you're in battle you can only control Orphen or another star when fighting monsters. Why did they have to do that? Another problem is that when you're in battle you have health crystals that display your strength, but only at certain times? That can be tremendously annoying.....If they incorporated a way to use all characters in the game at free will that would have improved the game so much more. Also why didn't they incorporate an on screen menu system? When you pause the game to go into your inventory the battle begins all over again????......do I need to repeat that to let you see how stupid that is???? What exactly where they trying to do with the game? It has so much potential to be a very good game but unfortunately simple things like these can change the whole outlook of a game. The games camera controls are fairly loose but a little annoying to handle. When you zoom in or out of the area you can see black space which doesn't make the look of the game very good. If you don't know what that means imagine a box floating in the air in a completely black room. Stupid, huh?

Orphen has very good anime movie scenes that look excellent and are done in true anime fashion. When you glance at them you'd think you where watching a cartoon show. But guest what? there's a problem. They don't flow into the game good enough. The games appearance doesn't need to be the same as the anime movie cut scenes but the transition between the two fails miserably. There's in game cut scenes but the voice acting is not in sink with the characters moving of there lips, and it's so painfully obvious. The environments in Orphen are very good. The part of the game where Orphen goes back in time to the snow area is my favorite when it comes to locations.

Orphen is not a totally bad game, it just suffers from problems that could have been fixed if the devs had more time on their hands. You should at least rent it if you want some Action/RPG action on your PS2.