Hortensia Saga First Impressions

“This is my family’s gravesite. My mom and my sister… and pretty soon my dad will be buried here. Dad always put his life on the line and stuck to his code of chivalry, no matter what he was facing.”

Liden Films… we’ve got to stop meeting like this. For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, this is the fourth anime of the Winter season I’ve written a review for, and it’s also the third anime I’ve reviewed this season that was produced by Liden Films. With so many titles coming out of this studio this season, it’s unsurprising that not all of them are going to be winners. So is Hortensia Saga a title that fails to meet that threshold of being good? Well, yes. There simply isn’t anything of substance to cling to in this first episode. This seems to mainly be a problem with the story, as the production is halfway decent by the standards of the studio. If I were to summarize my issues in a single sentence, I’d say that throughout this first episode I understood what was happening in the show, but I don’t get why anything happens or what the end goals of the characters are.

The story starts off with a failed insurrection by the leader of one of the two principalities that make up the kingdom of Hortensia. This principality, Camellia, attacked the other principality, Oliver, and the capitol, by somehow unleashing powerful monsters to aid them. The leader of Camellia turned into a werewolf and killed the king and a number of high ranking guards. Shortly after the failed coup, one of the knights who was injured in the assault returns to his home to provide his nephew, Alfred Albert, with the sword of his brother, Alfred’s father, who died protecting the princess. He arrives accompanied by a young boy named Marius who sounds suspiciously feminine, looks suspiciously like the missing princess Mariel, and almost has the exact same name as her. I’m very confused by this aspect of the narrative, because we don’t have a clear reason for Marius/Mariel to go into hiding. Yes, her father was killed in the attempted coup, but the narration leads me to believe the insurrection failed. To be fair, I may have missed some of the details, but much of this episode is pretty dull. Maybe this is part of a plan to keep her safe, but if that is the case, what is the long term goal? We actually have a time skip occur where she has been training alongside Alfred for four years! And to top it off, I’m still not sure that Alfred is aware of her true identity. She’s voluntarily going into combat after that time jump, so I don’t see the “Maybe it’s to keep her safe,” reasoning holding true. I just don’t understand why things are happening. Frankly, the revelation that this show is based on a free-to-play game explains a lot, because I’d originally thought this was an anime original, and I couldn’t figure out why it ended up with such a sloppy narrative. However, as an adaptation of a free-to-play RPG, I can see some of the factors that likely contributed to Hortensia Saga’s more uneven elements.

The production for Hortensia Saga is better than it needs to be. Liden Films tends to use CG to supplement traditional animation, and this first episode certainly doesn’t shy away from employing CG. However, it’s mainly implemented in filling out large battles or depicting monsters, and I found it less distracting than I did in Liden Films’ Otherside Picnic. The traditional animation is fine, but it’s nothing to write home about. I was initially viewing it quite favorably, but that’s due to having recently watched the first episode of Liden Films’ other show from this season, Last Dungeon. Compared to that program, Hortensia Saga’s animation looks like pure sakuga, but that’s grading it on a rather skewed scale. The opening shows off a ton of different characters, but the designs don’t feel as distinct as they should be for a cast of this size. I don’t really have any desire to return to this one. To offer a sense of clarity, the biggest hook this show has for me is the desire to find out whether our main character is intelligent enough to realize that the friend he’s spent 4 years with and who showed up at the same time the princess went missing is, in fact, said princess. That’s just not enough to bring me back in for another episode.

Before I wrap up, a few Notes and Nitpicks:

• This was an… awkward episode to review on January 6th 2021, as… things were happening in America. I wrote the word “insurrection” twice during the course of this review, but that doesn’t account for a fraction of the times I’ve heard that word today.
• I’m not clear on why Camellia attacked Oliver or how widespread the issue with the monsters has become. We see some monsters getting summoned in the very beginning of the episode, but after the OP, we don’t see them again.
• Alfred Albert… That was not a good choice of naming. He’s Al Al. Evidently, in the game his name was Alfred Ober, so this was something that was screwed up in the adaptation process.
• I keep referring to the princess as she, simply because I have no idea what her outlook is, whether *he* considers *himself* male now… I know nothing about this character’s outlook or opinions.
• I have a ton of questions about this show and its universe, but just don’t care enough to stick around and see if they get answers.