Anime review of Myriad Colors Phantom World

First in a long line of anime, video game and movie reviews we start with anime Myriad Colors Phantom world.

So for Myriad Colors Phantom world as with any story we look at the premise, the characters and the story itself and observe both the good and the bad to give you the best objective review.

PREMISE
The premise of Myriad Colors Phantom World is that ten years ago there was an accident at some laboratory that released a virus that changed everyone’s brain chemistry so that they could now perceive these life forms called Phantoms that have been the cause of most superstitions and religious experiences throughout history and…somehow gives some teenagers super powers?

So yeah you need a healthy amount of suspension of disbelief to really get into this show. If that does not sound like something you can do this show probably isn’t for you but if you’re still reading then we can continue onward.

CHARACTERS

The main protagonist is Haruhiko a guy that spends a lot of time reading which is used by the show’s writers to have him give massive exposition and information dumps on the audience whenever deemed necessary. Besides that he doesn’t really a lot of useful things. His super power is sealing Phantoms and summoning them by drawing but its rarely used and often used to comedic failure affect. For the most part he gets in the way more than he helps things. The plot of an entire episode could’ve been avoided had he just minded his own business and let the focus of said episode just do her job.

And the only reason he can summon phantoms is because on the very first episode he goes out of his way to find a teammate that can do his job of sealing Phantoms better than he can thus killing his reason for being on the Phantom Hunting team as pointed out by his teammates.
So not the greatest protagonist so far.

Now the main female character of this show, Mai is in essence Tsundere to the max. Action girl and violent yet hiding a softer side yet beyond that there isn’t much to her. She fills the role she’s clearly meant to play just fine but she never breaks character and reveals any depth to her. There’s an attempt to do so in one episode that revolves around memories where she believes she was a gentle good child and then the reveal is she was anything but she was basically the same then as she is now. We’re told she lives on her own as well in the first episode and hunts phantoms for essential living but besides that…nothing. She doesn’t exhibit any characteristics you’d normally see from someone living in that kind of situation. It's mentioned once and then promptly forgotten about which is a recurring theme for a lot of things in this show.

Then lastly as the third main character we have Reina, she is the more gentle timid girl that can do incredible bad ass feats when she tries. Her power is to eat Phantoms thus sealing them. She is probably the only main character in this show that feels genuine to me. She has strict parents that disapprove of most everything she does and it is reflected in her actions and personality. To the point there’s an entire episode dedicated to her desire to get away from her parents and to better ones. If she were the protagonist of this show rather than Haruhiko the story would be much more compelling, speaking of which…

STORY
The story of Myriad Colors Phantom World is of these three characters and the part they play in a Phantom Hunting club at their high school where they hunt Phantoms for pay. Every episode shoves them into a new situation with a new problem to solve. Normally that would be just fine but the main problem the story as a whole has is it doesn’t go anywhere. You never get the sense that there’s a greater main goal that the main characters are working towards. Every episode is simply them doing stuff or battling the new villain of the week.
With the exception being Reina you never get the sense that the stuff the main characters are doing is actually helping them in some way in their personal lives or helping them achieve some ultimate goal. It more the writers of the show just doing whatever they feel like with these characters with no true goal in sight besides ‘let’s do this because why not?’.

The part where it became clear to me that there was no real story point to the show was during episode 7 that was just blatantly ripped off of Megaman NT Warrior, where everyone starts turning into cats for no adequately explained reason. The reason why it worked in Megaman but not so much for this one was because Megaman NT Warrior actually had a good explanation for it and from the beginning even though you’re not shown much you're given a good idea of what is going on. It was an episode you could logically see happening within the established rules of the show.

Myriad Colors Phantom World’s explanation for why everyone is turning into a cat is a Phantom did it and when they go and find that Phantom they shove a ton of Schrodinger’s cat weirdness in there and even in the context of the show it doesn’t make the slightest amount of sense. Even Haruhiko attempting to explain what happened leaves it making even less sense than it did previously. And even Haruhiko himself admits it’s weird and hard to explain which sounded a lot like the writer’s themselves giving up trying to justify why that episode was there and trying to move on.
When you combine that with how the show tries to make a minor character important by shoving her into the group now and then you get more and more the sense there isn't a big point to this story. The minor character Koito pictured below.

She is not inspiring, she's a loner character, her appearances in the show are negligible to the point you could cut her out of most episodes she appears in entirely and almost no-one would notice and even the episode that she is the star of only happened because Haruhiko interfered in her business for no good reason. The only episode she naturally fits into is the one where everyone begins to turn into cats.

CONCLUSION
So does this mean Myriad Color’s Phantom World gets an awful review? Well not exactly. There is still good to the show despite its numerous flaws and lack of direction. Its animation and color schemes are great to look at. Many of the enemies are well designed with abilities that can help challenge the character’s super powers. This isn’t all enough to completely cover up the flaws of this series but if you go into it not expecting much of a story and just wanting battles and cool animation you will like this a whole lot.

For that the show gets 6.5 out of 10.