Hyper Police has many plusses, including smooth animation by Studio Pierrot, attractive character designs by popular anime artist Keiji Goto, catchy music by Kenji Kawaii, clever dialogue by Sukehiro Tomita & Shigeru Yanagawa, and great Japanese voice acting, especially the voices for naive Natsuki and sultry Sakura. But it really succeeds because of the warm personal relationships among its charismatic cast: hyper-eager newbie Natsuki, cynical Sakura, big-brotherly Batanen, harried chief Mudagami, sympathetic young Mr. & Mrs. Tachibana who run the coffee shop next door, and others. There is action, humor, pathos and social commentary. Two complaints: (1) there is a phony buildup to what looks like a new Earth-shattering climax in the last couple of episodes which wimps out. The overall plot features "slice of life" action (despite the fantasy setting), and like most realistic fiction the story finally ends without any real resolution; just the implication that life will go on as it has been. (2) Image's release does not bother to translate the credits, and the DVD has no extras at all.

© Yoshinobu Akita - Yuuya Kusaka / KADOKAWA SHOTEN - TBS.

Orphen. V.1, Spell of the Dragon. V.2, Super-Natural Powers. V.3, Ruins & Relics. V.4, Mystere. V.5, The Soul Stealers. V.6, The Third Talisman.
TV series (24 episodes), 1998-1999. Executive Director: Hiroshi Watanabe. V.1-V.3, 3 episodes/75 minutes; V.4-V.6, 5 episodes/125 minutes. Price & format: DVD bilingual $29.98. Distributor: A.D.V. Films.

Role playing game-type heroic fantasy has been popular in Japan since the 1980s. Majutsushi Orphen (literally Wizard Orphen, but "Englished" in the Japanese titles as Sorcerous Stabber Orphen) began as a series of humorous serialized novels by Yoshinobu Akita in the gamers' magazines Monthly Dragon Magazine and Monthly Dragon Junior.

The TV serial (24 episodes, Fridays from October 3, 1998 through March 27, 1999) reportedly surprised the novels' fans who expected the anime to be equally slapstick. It does begin that way, but this turns out to be in the tradition of many anime serials, which start light-heartedly but gradually evolve into suspenseful dramas. The continent of Kielsalhima is a stereotypical fantasy world of Medieval European castles, dragons and wizards, with humorous anachronisms designed to appeal to modern teens such as snack shops that serve ice cream parfaits instead of taverns with alcohol. Orphen is a handsome boy about 18 who has been loafing around a quiet village for the past year. He claims to be a former student of the Tower of Fangs wizards' academy, but he lacked ambition and dropped out. Two younger adolescents, Majic and Cleao, are the viewer's P.O.V. surrogates. They discover that Orphen has actually been watching a house whose owner unknowingly has a magic sword. Orphen expects a fearsome dragon to show up to steal it. When the dragon does appear, Orphen tries to capture it magically rather than kill it. He is interrupted by two former comrades from the Tower of Fangs who do try to kill it, and the dragon escapes in the confusion. Orphen begins a quest to find the dragon, with Majic and Cleao as tagalongs. It is not until episode #7 that they begin to learn Orphen's past. He was raised by the wizards from childhood. He idolized an older student, Azalie, as his "big sister" mentor. Five years earlier, Azalie tried to master the power of the sword but it turned her into the dragon. The wizards decide that she has become a menace and must be killed, but Orphen is sure that he can restore her if he can just capture and hold her for long enough. He hotheadily rebels and leaves the Tower to find Azalie on his own before the wizard trying to kill Azalie can do so. What at first seemed to Majic and Cleao like a fun-filled vacation tour across scenic Kielsalhima turns grim. The wizard assigned to destroy Azalie, Childman, was Orphen's best friend. It is not clear whether Childman is callous or realistic; has Azalie become a mindless monster that must be killed for humanity's good? Must Azalie be killed to save Orphen, who left the Tower before his magic training was completed and may not be skillful enough to defeat her? Is Childman secretly trying to save Azalie without openly defying the senior wizards as Orphen did? A complication is Flameheart, Childman's rival among the younger wizards who intends that neither Childman nor Orphen shall return alive. The animation by J.C. Staff is stiff, due to an art design too detailed to animate smoothly on a TV budget, but the story is compelling enough to hold the audience -- indeed, the silly humorous sequences become an annoying distraction.

Fred Patten has written on anime for fan and professional magazines since the late 1970s. He wrote the liner notes for Rhino Entertainment's The Best of Anime music CD (1998), and was a contributor to The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons, 2nd Edition, ed. by Maurice Horn (1999) and Animation in Asia and the Pacific, ed. by John A. Lent (2001).