Review of Phantom: Requiem for the Phantom

When I first heard of this show I was so happy because I really liked the Phantom movie and wanted to see more. Like the movie, a Japanese guy takes a trip to America and witnesses an assassination. The man who trained the female assassin sees potential in him and kidnaps him, wipes his memories and trains him to become an assassin. Now he's living in a kill or be killed world of mob bosses, syndicates, drug dealers and so on. He takes on the code name Zwei and works with his partner Ein. Usually in these types of anime the female character isalmost always either a ball buster out going girl or a happy go lucky idiot but Ein reminds me a lot of the girls in Gunslinger Girl minus the love for her boss. She simply does what she can and has pretty much accepted her fate. She isn't too happy to do what she does but she doesn't allow herself to be crippled by it and that's what i like about her. Zwei on the other hand did not become as accepting, constantly questioning everything around him and never completely falling victim to their trainer "The Scythe Master" this actually makes him a prime target of Claudia, a woman looking to move up in their blood thirsty world of Inferno. She sees the greater potential in Zwei.

Now the show itself seems to be broken up into two parts parts. episodes 1-10 being the first part I talked about above. Then episode 11 as a recap episode, then 12-26 for the rest. However IMO, the show is better broken down into three parts:

1-10
12-17
18-26

If 1-10 introduces us to Zwei and allows us to see how he progresses through the world of Inferno then episodes 12-17 lets us see him in all his assassin glory. These episodes are by far the most epic of them all, the music is different, the atmosphere the the anime is different, the story matures right before our eyes and it is no longer about some guy becoming an assassin with a trail of doubt behind him but a thriving assassin, the best of the best. I don't want to spoil it too much but certain events take him away from his partner Ein and honestly I think he is better off and so is the show. Now I'm not saying Ein sucked or that episodes 1-10 weren't good, they were, they had to be to keep me watching to the 12th episode, it's just that the show is at its height of awesomeness during these episodes. I even liked the young girl Cal that is introduced. Which btw, I love the character development here and the interactions between them all were top notch.

Episodes 18-26, this is when Ein returns to the story and sadly the story begins to go right into the toilet. Just like in my Gungrave review where I mention how sometimes animes and go overboard on the story simply because they can. Well, this is what we get here. We have this great story about a guy who becomes an assassin against his will, he goes from surviving to thriving in this world, we have mob bosses and in fighting within Inferno, Claudia causing a little trouble as she climbs to the top with Zwei as her lover. But nope, the creators thought "gee, how about we add mind controlled assassin clone girls, make it a high school anime, and rapidly age certain characters, yeah that will work...oh no this sucks so lets add a plot driven no nonsense ending so people will focus on that instead of how bad the show has gotten"

I HATED what they did to this anime. Here we have ADULT characters, in a MATURE setting then thought it was a good idea to turn them into high school students. They try hard to explain that the characters needed to be in high school for their plan to work, but no they didn't, they just wanted the characters in High school for NO REASON other than they wanted some sort of high school element. Here we have Zwei, who is a GROWN A$$ MAN sitting in a freaking high school class. Even when I check out some of the synopsis of the show they list Zwei as a Japanese teenager. *sigh* He was a college student taking a trip to the US not a freaking highschooler. Aside from that we have these clone b*tches and scifi crap added in and obviously a bunch of creators who had no idea what they could do for this story. So they try to make it deep by adding a question mark ending for no reason other than they just wanted people to talk about it and see it as more than what it is based on the ending alone. Well no, the ending was stupid and so was the last leg of the show. I would even advise to stop watching when Ein comes back because nothing good happens afterwards and as much as I liked Ein in the beginning, I just think that she should have been properly killed off and left at that.