End of Financial year Anime runout review- Phantom

With the rapid closure of the Financial Year today, I thought I'd close off on something tha'ts stil fresh on my mind and needs to be covered before you all get tootsie rolled by it, and that is Phantom- Requiem of a Phantom. You need to know several things before we get too deep into phantoms' coils :
1) it's penned by the guy who did Noir and Madlax
2) it's animated by the guys who animated Noir and Madlax
3) there are at LEAST two ALI Project in the soundtrack, one is the ending.If you can't stand ALI project, prepare to press the mute button a few times
with those three parental advisory alerts out of the way, let's delve into the cheesburger candy.

The plot premise is fairly straight forward- The main protoagonist wakes up with amnesia in a warehouse and finds himself in a locked room in a warehouse. The door is mysteriously unlocked, and he has to escape. Along the way he is dogged by a teenager in a detail-free white pantomime mask (who has guns and knives and apparently is trying to kill him) and he must survive the attacks and escape. Ultimately he finds a way to trap his attacker and pulls a knife on her, and slices the mask in half revealing.. a FACE! zomg. It turns out that this was all a test by a guy called Scythe Master to see if his survival skills were real ,and is now trained by his attacker (revealed to be someone called Ein) and purt through another warehouse cage fight, where he must learn to kill. After killing some mafia puke, the plot really begins.
It's revealed that Scythe Master works for a shadowy organisation called "Inferno" and Ein and the protagonist (now named Zwei, see what he did there) are now a two person literal vaguerie called "Phantom".
... maybe less straightforward, more intensely convoluted.
AS expected the show does all sorts of assassin things- taking out more mob guys, doing intel work, killing women and children with no mercy and Juno Reactor-ripoff music. This sounds all fine, but I'd just like to say this is wherre my real objections start coming into play. Coming from the guy who wrote Noir, you expect this this stuff, but where as Noir was well paced and took some nice cues of originality, Phantom does not. It lacks pacing and originality at the least. The background art is fine, the character design is passable enough, but there is so little character in the show it's 100% wasted effort.
QED, the cross-episode story of Inferno's toppling of Madison Square and the mafia roup running that place. It spanned two episodes, had dozens of characters both running and arc-centric. Only three characters out of that entire cast were identifiable (not relatable, nobody could relate to any of them,really) - Bitch number one, Bitch's body guard, and the Madison Square Mafia Boss.Every one else was just a John or Jane Doe, a dozen different faced John and Janes. Not even the main leads are fleshed out much at all (until epsode 8 where it's revealed whats really going on with that, so Phantom gets off the hook for them technically).
at 11 episodes long, you half expect them to keep a reasonable pace consitantly, but they don't. You have 1 epsiode of setting up the main leads, 1 of some more setting them up, 6 episodes of filler, and then the endgame begins. I mean whaaaaaaaaaat. They could have EASILY cut out half the filler and still made it watchable length.
Furthering my issues with this show, the bulllet removing scene... you'll know it when you see it.
Seriously, it was only a short mix and match editing witch choice film cuts away from being a hentai scene by suggestion alone. Sadly I can't find a youtube of someone who actually HAS done a mash up.... so I'll do one later. Anyway yeah, it's a real problem.
Also, there'as a subtly implied thread of pedophilia going on with Scythe Master.... I don't know if that was intended or not, but it was just wrong.

Finally the last episode was horribly paced and almost completely decontextualised. Thankyou very much for not making sense at a...

OH CRAP! Sorry guys, apparently I've only got half the series... I will see this through though, but consider this my initial impressions.

It's cardboard bland and badly paced. if this changes, I'll let you know in part 2 of the review.

EDIT - I just got two more episodes.. and found out that after those two, there's still another 15 coming...

here's my thoughts -


Adieu

A little something I'm working on (note - NOT FINAL)

Original Video - More videos at TinyPic

More stuff coming just around the corner.