Grisaia : Phantom Trigger the Animation | Anime Series Review | Part 01

Grisaia : Phantom Trigger the Animation | Anime Series Review | Part 01

welcome back anime lovers whether you’re here for action romance or just some good old plot twists you’ve come to the right place in today’s episode following the Heath Oslo incident a new organization called Sword has risen from the ashes of what was once Cir members of Sword are constantly going on all sorts of life-threatening missions and they’re trained at none other than Miama Academy i’m unsure whether or not this applies to the visual novels they’re based on but as far as the anime goes Phantom Trigger is something of a black sheep among the various Fruit of Graiah titles phantom Trigger just isn’t as good you’ll often hear Grisiah fans say some version of “And I don’t like the main group of girls as much.” But if you’ve spent enough time in nerdy circles you know that it’s not rare for fan communities to say they don’t like something about a sequel series what they don’t like is change that it’s a new story featuring new characters and so on such could be the case for Phantom Trigger the movies and OVAs weren’t anything special but maybe that could change since it has a TV series and time to do things maybe people are just being too hard on it because it’s not the typical group or story that people are used to in Gryiah that was what I hoped for and I entered the series optimistically despite not having particularly enjoyed the affforementioned Phantom Trigger movies and OVAs by the end there was no denying it even on its own merits wholly divorced from all other things Grisiah phantom Trigger is a slog of a show phantom Trigger while taking place in the same universe as The Fruit of Graiah is pretty disconnected from it and its sequels sure there are some references to it now and again and a few other winks and nods but that’s more or less it if you’ve neither read nor watched Fruit don’t worry too hard if you’re still interested in watching Phantom Trigger despite this because frankly you’re going to get equally as confused about what’s going on regardless of how familiar or not you are with the Grisiah universe it’s almost impressive how simultaneously over and underexplained this series can be how do you even do that was that intentional or a complete accident whether they want to or not most series that fall into either camp are firmly in that camp it’s not often one encounters an anime that against all odds can accomplish doing both at once i’d be in awe if I wasn’t so profoundly bored by Phantom Trigger it’s a bit tricky to talk about what this series is about because even now after watching the entire series I’m still not 100% sure myself i get that it’s about a school of assassin girls going on dangerous missions i can follow that much but the rhyme and reason behind these missions sometimes the series makes efforts to explain it and then other times it doesn’t so even at the end you’re left with an uneven understanding of why things unfolded the way they did this anime has two settings when trying to set up a story line either telling the audience virtually nothing and hoping they just roll with it or giving us every imaginable piece of information short of everyone’s social security number as if that wasn’t frustrating enough little if any of this excess information is generally even relevant so either way you’re left confused about what’s going on it makes this whole show which sounds like it should be so exciting so sleepinducingly boring it feels weird calling an anime that has a hard time going more than 2 minutes without something exploding or some other manner of textbook example fun thing going on but despite everything that’s somehow what this anime has going on it’s this dichotomy of the over and underexplained that many of the rest of Phantom Triggers issues stem from poor writing characters who don’t always feel like they make sense a sense that you have no idea why things are happening the way they are you get the idea i’d say it’s directly responsible for all but one to an even further extent than previous Gasiah entries it’s like this series is aggressively trying too hard to meet an edgginess quota the problem isn’t an abundance of edge the problem is how forced it often comes off as it’s like Phantom Trigger is constantly and arbitrarily trying to pile misery upon excess misery onto its protagonists and crucially doing so without giving the audience a reason to care about those same characters since we barely learn anything else about them more than once it gets to the point where it feels cartoonish how over-the-top tragic these backstories are as though the show found the list of top 10 saddest anime backstories and put them all in a blender and did that for each character the series greatest strength lies in its animation which is mostly pretty good during the final episode some fight scenes look anywhere from mediocre to downright disastrous and there’s a noticeable amount of moments where people are talking but their mouths aren’t moving a shame because while I wouldn’t say there’s any particular standout performances the voice acting is pretty solid but that last stretch notwithstanding this was one of the better read not the best looking shows of winter 2025 i remember when this show first started airing I was hopeful that since Phantom Trigger was getting a TV series hopefully that would give its story some muchneeded dimension or at the bare minimum maybe it would at least make its characters more endearing but 13 episodes later and somehow I still feel just as lost as I did watching the previous entries nor do I think I care particularly more about anyone in the cast i’m honestly pretty befuddled how an anime could accomplish so little in all that time grade overall D story D animation B art B music C the animation generally looks nice i’m still not sure I understand why a lot of the things that happened in this anime happened also I’m still not entirely sure what happened in general production info director Koske Murayyama series composition Tenho script Tekashi music Honoshi Fujima fumori Matsumoto Yusuke Tada original concept Ryuta Fujisaki original creator Ryuta Fujisaki character design Aki Watanab art director Hirohane chief animation director Aki Watanab sound director Takato Shihano cgi director Masato Takahashi director of photography hashi Yonizawa producer Ryuito Yamagawa and that’s a wrap for today’s anime review if you enjoyed this episode don’t forget to leave a like share it with your fellow anime fans and of course subscribe to our channel so you never miss out on our X