By Kitsune Tennouji
CMX, 162 pp.
Rating: M (Mature)

Orfina is a fantasy series about two women, Princess Orfina and Fana, who happen to look exactly alike. Fana’s country is under attack from the neighboring country of Granze. Granze’s forces are rolling across the landscape, conquering other countries in incredibly short amounts of time with the aid of a mysterious power that grants them modern weaponry (like firearms) and monsters such as fire dragons. After one battle, Fana washes ashore in Orfina’s country. Orfina rescues her, bringing her to live with the royal family. Fana decides to help and defend Orfina no matter what.

Despite its fairly common-sounding premise, Orfina is surprisingly good. Also, despite being the titular character, Orfina doesn’t really get a whole lot of screen time here. Instead, Fana gets the most fleshing out of the entire cast. She’s a bit of tomboy and is shown to be a completely capable warrior. While her relationship with Orfina comes across as a believable sibling one, it does develop a bit quickly for my tastes. They bond almost immediately and the entire royal family welcomes her with open arms just as quickly. At any rate, Fana is certainly a likeable and capable protagonist and her self-reliance and physical and mental prowess are a nice contrast to the pampered Orfina’s behavior. She’s not exactly spoiled, just really girly. The reason for Granze’s sudden invasion, the source of their technology and dragons, not to mention Granze’s strange connection to a figure from Orfina’s family’s past–these are questions that are left unanswered in the first volume, providing several hooks for folks to come back and see how it’s all playing out.

Tennouji’s art is fairly well detailed. The characters’ clothes, armor, and weaponry all look fantastic. While the backgrounds tend to be a bit sparse, the amount of detail given to each character more than makes up for it. Plus when Tennouji does include a background, it’s elaborate and well done. The action sequences aren’t exactly amazing and sometimes the overly detailed character designs get in the way of the action, but it’s generally fairly easy to follow and a couple are quite neat. The inclusion of modern weaponry allows Tennouji to bounce between close-quarter sword duels to run-and-shoot scenes at will. The massive attack at the end was quite nice as well, as is the heavily armored depiction of the fire dragons. If there’s any complaint with the art, it’s really that most of the female characters look fairly interchangeable. With Orfina and Fana this is to be expected, but the maids and Queen all tend to look fairly similar. Thankfully the armor and clothes that they all wear tend to be so detailed that you can tell them apart.

Tennouji spent a lot of time developing this world and it’s fairly obvious. The back of the book includes several pages of unused designs and settings, including a full map of the castle and various motifs that designate rank and order for some of the knights. Most of this information doesn’t actually appear in the story itself, something that Tennouji laments in the accompanying notes. It’s still nice to see though and it helps give the world a bit more weight, though a map of the area with countries and borders probably would have been helpful as well.

Orfina is a strong series that’s scratching an itch for swords and sorcery fantasy that I’ve had lately. It certainly shows some promise, both in the artwork and the story, and I’ll definitely give the second volume a look if I stumble across it at the store.

Volume 1 of Orfina is available now.