Short Synopsis: Zwei has been trained enough and is about to face his final test.
Episode Rating: 8/10 (Excellent)
Why do all the good shows air on the same days?!
In any case, this was a very strong episode for Phantom, and it’s still one of my favourites for this season. While at first sight a standard bee-train series, with very obvious similarities to Noir, there are definitely parts in which it is different. The biggest one is how much attention it spends to the realism of gun combat, and that’s something I can really appreciate. In this show, it’s in no way a matter of just point-shoot-kill, but it’s much more a matter of using your brains, and it also becomes a matter of a battle of wits. In Noir, the action was much more stylized than what we’ve seen in Phantom so far.
Playing in North America, there are also of course references to El Cazador, but again Bee-Train improves on it compared to the previous work. For once, it indeed feels like we’re in a multicultural setting, rather than the Mexicans of El Cazador that may have felt a bit too Japanese. They’re small things, but still appreciated. Phantom of course misses the experimental nature of Bee-Train’s previous work, Blade of the Immortal, but this show doesn’t necessarily need anything over the top, and I really like what it so far has become.
The next question is of course going to be what the rest of the first half of this show is going to look like. With this, the introduction seems over and we’ll probably be switching to random missions and a sloooow pacing while the characters get the chance to be fleshed out (a formula that Bee-Train have really become infamous for, among others), and so I’m interested to see whether these random missions can retain the same atmosphere of these first three episodes until the real meat of the story begins. And when it does, something tells me we’ll be having an excellent cast of characters.
Not necessarily… with a bit of luck, the “uwaah, crap hits the fan” episode will be 05 already, but 06 at the very latest.
“While at first sight a standard bee-train series, with very obvious similarities to Noir, there are definitely parts in which it is different”
Of course, but the truth is Noir came after the Phantom of Inferno game.
One should honestly say that Noir was “inspired” by Phantom, even if this anime adaptation came later.
“In Noir, the action was much more stylized than what we’ve seen in Phantom so far. ”
That’s one of the reasons I liked the game (less style, more relative realism), so if Bee-Train is trying to do that it’s probably because the source material has already drawn a map for them.
They did get to do, to my previous annoyance, something very stylized during the pre-title sequence in the first episode so I’m not expecting them to avoid that entirely. I just hope they keep it low profile.
As for what happens next…I could actually see the first part of the story lasting until 07-08 though, depending on how the next couple of episodes play out.