Category: Phantom

I think that shows like Valkyria Chronicles at the moment really show how hard it can be to successfully adapt a game into animation. Unlike novels and mangas, where the only thing you have to worry about is how to properly translate the pages into animation, in most cases it just isn’t sufficient to just copy and paste the storyline (since it’s usually too short and overshadowed by the game-play) and especially the game-play. At this point, the creators are going to have to insert their own additions in order to flesh out the cast, and this usually fails so badly, descending the show into a string of uninspired fillers.

And here Bee-Train comes and yet again they pull off a very successful adaptation like it’s nothing. They did the same with .Hack//Sign, which completely dropped all of the fighting and instead went on to focus on its brilliant story, Popolocrois also wouldn’t make you suspect that it’s about an RPG, and instead turned into a fun and charming fantasy adventure and character-study and Wild Arms featured some of the best fillers out there in its second half. These all showed that they knew exactly what to do in order to spice these games up and make them work as an anime, and the same is done in Phantom, with the large emphasis on characterization and atmosphere. I’m not exactly sure how the original game played, but I have a really hard time imagining what the heck the game-play was about.

This episode builds up for the next one, and at the same time we fully get to see what happened with Zwei that made him end up as part of the Phantom. What’s also interesting is that Zwei is beginning to recover his memories, and turning into the guy he was before his mind-wipe. the thing is, though, that even if he were to fully recover his memories, he’s so far in the mafia, he’s already killed so many people that it’s going to be impossible for him to return to Japan and the life he left behind.

And the tension between Ein and Zwei really continues to increase, especially when Ein keeps distancing herself from Zwei since she’s scared of his skills. Before his mind-wipe, he already was able to outrun her for a couple of days, so something tells me that she’s fearing what he can turn into. In the next episode we’re going to see them in different missions, which makes me wonder how that’s going to end.

Rating: ** (Excellent)
Really solid and subtle art, great build-up episode, though lacking in action perhaps.

Six episodes in, and Phantom still is one of my favourites of the current series. Even for a Bee-Train series, this show is magnificent. The characterization is so subtle, and yet it works so well. It’s something Koichi Masahino has always been good at, but with because his source-material this time was already very good, this promises to be among his better work.

And I must say, that despite the increasing fanservice, Ein’s character-designs are what I consider the best of the season. I’m probably one of the few who believes “simplicity = better”, but Ein really looks gorgeous, even though her character-designs are kept simple on purpose (and with this I don’t mean simplicity in the way of Cross Game, but rather not going through huge lengths to make characters look unique. Something that a lot of harem shows need to understand).

This episode was much more about the assassin-part of this series. While the mafia-boss of the previous episode may have lost his wife and son, he still has a couple of powerful allies, and they get taken care of in this episode. Mostly by Phantom, but I also liked how Inferno has a strong support cast to back them up and help them. You can really see that everything was planned carefully ahead to bring the risk to a minimum.

Rating: ** (Excellent)
Very strong episode as usual with the lead characters getting only better and better

Oh, this series is sure shaping up to be an awesome one. I had a few doubts as this episode started that it wouldn’t live up to the other episodes of this show so far, but as the ending credits rolled I really had to this back: this episode knew exactly what it was doing.

I really like the approach when it comes to the random stories of this series: at first, it shows the people from the Mafia from a sympathetic sight. It shows that even though these guys are thugs and don’t hesitate to kill if they want, they are also human beings with a family… only for them to get killed off mercilessly by Phantom in the end. El Cazador in comparison was much more of a travel series, in which the lead characters move around and meet different people, while the early episodes of Noir were more about why the targets were ordered to be killed in the first place, since the two lead characters were freelance assassins, rather than being employed by one particular mafia-gang like the lead characters of Phantom are. I can’t comment on how Madlax did it since I haven’t seen it yet.

Throughout the largest part of the episode, it felt like the parts were swapped, and the mafia boss instead was the lead character of this episode. Eins and Zwei really were portrayed as the bad guys this time, and that‘s something you don’t see very often. And at the same time we also get a pretty good idea of how powerful Inferno actually is: even without Phantom, they have excellent security, and prevent any information about them from being leaked out in order to stay into obscurity.

It’s also interesting how Ein and Zwei are basically mirroring each other at some points. Ein has that strange scientist while Zwei has McCunnen, and with both we see at least some hints that whenever one of them is with them, the other one is waiting for them. Just how they exactly feel about each other still is a mystery, though.

Short Synopsis: Ein and Zwei disguise themselves as a teenaged couple in order to get close to their next target.
Episode Rating: 8,5/10 (Awesome)
Whoa! I must say, that while Phantom may be a blatant Noir rip-off, it’s promising to surpass Noir very quickly if this keeps up. From the outside this episode looks like your average random episode, but the cast got so much depth through it. It’s in episodes like this in which Bee-Train’s real strength lies: not the awesome music (though that does help), but the excellent characterization.

It was very strange to see Ein acting so convincingly like your average teenaged girl on a holiday with her first boyfriend. Especially considering how goofy Zwei looked right next to her with his bad acting as her boyfriend. I like how she even commented to Zwei how he still needs to work on his acting a lot. There was quite a bit of subtle fanservice in this episode, but even that had its purpose: to show the sexual tension between Ein and Zwei.

And that’s another point at which this series rocks: Ein and Zwei are really characters who don’t speak what’s on their mind: they leave their feelings and thoughts exactly out of their jobs, but the thing is that we hardly ever get to hear their thoughts. During those above-mentioned fanservice moments, for example: we can only guess what goes on their head at those points, and this gets especially confusing when the two start acting like their complete opposites and at times it gets really hard to point out which a subtle action of the belongs to: their acted personas, or their own intuitions.

And I’m personally a huge fan of series that manage to leave certain things up to the viewer’s imagination. Phantom knows exactly the difference between simply leaving out an important plot point, and just subtly refraining to say things that most people can figure out on their own. And when we finally get a confirmation (or denial in this case) of Ein’s feelings at the end of this episode, it does make impact. Especially considering how this series has only gone on for four episodes, I’m surprised at how far it has already come.

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.

Short Synopsis: Eins trains Zwei for his upcoming missions.
Episode Rating: 7,5/10 (Good)
Next up: Phantom, the show that turned me into a huge hypocrite (not that I wasn’t already one before, but okay). It was of course obvious that I was going to end up blogging this one, since I really like Bee-Train’s style of storytelling, but yeah: in the end it’s not exactly the most original series out there. Just like Kyoani, Bee-Train sucks because they hardly try to do any series outside of their comfort zone. On the other hand, however, I really like them because of their great sense of characterization and their very slow storytelling, in the same way as how Kyoani rocks because of their huge attention to detail.

This episode like expected was mostly building up. The biggest focus was making Zwei realize in what kind of situation he is: doomed as an assassin who serves to kill people, and a lot of the episode sees him training to make him catch up his skills with Eins (Ein?). I liked how this made the use of a gun difficult, and more than just a point-and-shoot game.

I’m not sure what’s up with all of the different people behind the scenes right now. At the moment they just feel too much like one and the same person, but with a bit of luck they’ll develop through the course of the series, and end up as individuals. But yeah, that’s most likely going to take a long while, considering that this is Bee-Train and all.

In terms of music, this time an interesting composer was chosen: Hikaru Nanase. She has produced a lot of soundtracks, but most of them didn’t really stand out, with two exceptions: she composed Shigofumi and Noein’s OST. The result is quite interesting: for a Bee-Train soundtrack it’s down to earth, and yet still awesome and varied. The ED by the ALI project is a bit disappointing, though. Bee-Train has already shown that they can even get some original music out of a band that just keeps producing the same tune over and over (the soundtrack they produced for .Hack//Roots still remains one of my favourite soundtracks out there, even though the series itself was a disaster), but the ED yet again felt incredibly out of place in this episode. The entire episode built up this somewhat slow and haunting atmosphere, and there the ED blasts out of the screen and nearly ruins this atmosphere.