I can list down some factors:
1- Poor marketing to the west
Orphen is big in Japan, but only in there. It's a classic light novel series, selling over 14 million units. The official twitter page is in Japanese. The trailers and other press material are mostly in japanese. Hell, the second trailer to season 3 is still in japanese only. I don't know why they don't seem to care about bringing the series to the west, the most we'll get is the simulcast and later the american english dub.
2- Poor to average animation
Konosuba is a good show, funny, but overrated. And it has a good animation, you don't see lots of crappy and weird frames like you do in Orphen(hello Orphen's pendant), stuff like that kills the immersion. Of course, animation improved in season 2 and a little bit more in season 3, but still, it's not enough to polish most minor technical mistakes, that should be the basic in animation. With stuff like Chainsaw Man, Attack On Titan, Summertime Render, Spy X Family and etc, how the fuck could Orphen have a good rating? Maybe if this show was broadcast in the middle 2000s with this quality, it would be somewhat acceptable. (I said somewhat).
3- Lack of good art and photography direction
Orphen overall looks generic. They butchered Kusaka's art style, from character design to background, scenario and so on. They look incomplete, unpolished, like it was drawn with pencil and colored with crayon, looks static overall. They overuse backgrounds, probably due to budget, leaving little to no room to get a diverse and well directed scene. The nature of a light novel has something to do too since you have little visual reference, so you have to use your imagination a lot.
4- Poor story adaptation
This is not a manga, so it's harder to adapt some stuff, I get it. But come on, you don't fuck up "Heed My Call, Beast!" like that. They managed not only to cut content but to over extend parts of the plot, leaving the first arc to be both rushed and dragged. The optimal lenght would be 4 to 5 episodes per book (first book should last that much yes, but properly adapted), since the average number of pages is around of 150. Some have more, like books 19 and 20 (around of 200) and others have less, like book 11 with roughly 110 pages. Speaking of it, they put 110 pages in 1 episode. How? RUSHING THRU IT. Rushing like that makes the story feel confusing, the characters not interesting and shallow. Let the story flow properly, let the characters sink in and have depth. The main trio has so much more depth in the books.
5- PG 13
Come on! Orphen is not a shounen series, it is seinen. Violence, nudity and other mature themes were toned down a lot in the anime. I know seinen has more to do with what magazine it is published and Orphen was published in Dragon Magazine, but, it's natural for seinen to have a more adult, bitter and tragic approach, with maybe some critics to society. Let's take Arakawa Under The Bridge as an example. It looks like just a weird wtf comedy anime, but it has more to it, specially how it satirizes japanese society. Orphen satirizes a lot of cliché tv tropes of Sword & Sorcery and JRPG themes. Sorcery students getting cqc training, dragons who look human, machine guns in a "medieval" world like that and the whole Orphen's personality. It may look cliché nowadays, but back in the 90s, this kind of protagonist was usually a hero, the good guy with golden heart, with a mission for the greater good, not a lazy selfish kind of guy. (Take Dragon Quest 8 for instance).
I hope I covered all the bases here, I'm no specialist or anything, it's just my view as a fan. Yes, I'm criticizing the adaptation of something I really like, go figure. |