Review of Phantom: Requiem for the Phantom

So I recently made my account on this site and was reviewing all anime that I use to watch in the past. I rated this as 6 at the begining since I wasn't really remembering how good that anime was but then I decided to rewatch it entirely to have better judgment about this show and oh boy I am glad I did this since this anime IMO is a solid 8. Firstly, I would like to talk about art and sound which I rated as 7 and 6 accordingly. They are not bad by any means but they are not top shelf either. Thesoundtrack was limited to just a few tracks that were repeated over and over again during the course of the show from which I liked the most Gregorian Chant-like which fited the theme of the show perfectly.

When it comes to the storyline it's divided into 3 parts each one ending with climax or plot twist. First is showing origins and development of main protagonist as phantom. Second one is mostly about schemes inside the mafia organisation that he is working for as well as his coping with being an assasin. While the last one focus on the attempt to preserve his live after leaving the organisation.

The tempo of plot progressing is very good. It's neither too fast nor to slow. Not every episode is an action episode but that's good because this helps to calm down a bit while plot is still progressing. The only issue I got was that at one point the whole plot and scheming stuff became too confusing for me. Also the ending or rather very last scene was somewhat dissapointing. All things considered I rated story as 9.

Lastly I would like to briefly praise the characters. They are just great in this show. They are diverse, they are interesting, they feel real, there is a lot of interesting relationship between them that also change over the course of the show. There is also plenty of characters development or downfall...
And all of this doesn't apply just to main but also to secondary characters.
I give it a 9 in that area.

I want to also point out that word "phantom" used in the title and quite a lot in the anime can be understood either as a"artificial corpse" or a"ghost" which I think is inentionall wordplay.
I also liked the fact that at the moment of my publishment of this review this anime was ranked #497 both in popularity and in quality.