Ein is the main female character from the anime Phantom -Requiem for the Phantom- which was based on the game Phantom of Inferno. She’s generally quiet and has a reserved personality due to being trained to be an assassin from a young age. If you’ve watched the anime, you’ll also notice that she shows absolutely no emotion at all; I guess that’s just something you need to do to be the best assassin in the world.

This nendoroid of Ein came with a lot more pieces than I had anticipated. There are at least three different arms for each side and the figure also comes with a bunch of accessories like a stuffed teddy bear, a pistol, and a dagger. Unfotunately, there was only one extra leg, so although there’s a lot of poses that Ein can do with her arms, there’s not much as many choices when it came to her stance.

This is what Ein looks like out of the package. She has a standard pose and coupled with her expressionless face, she looks really plain. Pics from other angles are shown below:

This is Ein’s smiling face, but it still seems a bit expressionless, just like in the anime. What I really liked about this nendoroid is that she can actually hold her teddy bear with one arm. Most of the other nendoroids I have can either only carry small items that you fit through a hole in the hand, or have stuff sitting beside them.

In the anime, Ein actually cut open the poor teddy bear. It looks like GSC decided to include the stuffing for the teddy bear so you can recreate that scene. The only thing missing is a Reiji nendoroid.

My favourite face was the one with the Phantom mask. Although Ein doesn’t look cute anymore, she looks a lot cooler. All of the extra arm pieces also allow you to place both the dagger and pistol in her hands at the same time. A lot of nendoroids only come with one arm or hand piece that you can place items in so I was happy to see that Ein can carry two items at once.

This is probably what most of Ein’s victims saw before they died, and it’s my favourite pose.

The main points that make this nendoroid better than others are all of the extra little items like the weapons and teddy bear. All of the extra arms also make Ein a lot more poseable than your average nendoroid. My only complaint is in the choice of the faces. I know that Ein is usually expressionless, so it makes sense for her nendoroid to be expressionless too, but the two non-mask faces look identical except for the mouth. It would have been nicer if the two faces were a bit more different, perhaps having one with a sad expression. Other than the two really similar faces, I thought this was a nice nendoroid that has a lot of different pieces for you to play around with.

In this episode we see Ein in various forms of clothing, something that’s been lacking since she dressed up as a maid in the first episode. The story in this episode is that Ein and Zwei are scouting out for potential spots in a mall to assassinate a certain mafia boss. In order to scope out their surroundings and not be noticed, they act as a young couple enjoying their day out shopping.

Of course, when anime girls go shopping, they always have to buy swimsuits :)

We also get to see Ein in some more fashionable clothes:

and we finally get to see both Ein and Zwei in action when they go to assassinate their target.

Before the end of the episode, viewers are given one more treat in the form of Ein just stepping out of the shower.

In a serious anime like Phantom, it doesn’t hurt to have a little fanservice as long as it’s not the whole point of the anime. Although this episode did have quite a bit of fanservice, it still progressed the plot a bit with Ein and Zwei’s relationship and a look into what Ein thinks of Zwei. The next episode will probably see some more action as Zwei continues on with Inferno’s tests.

Bang!

The anime focuses on two characters Ein and Zwei who work for an organization called Inferno, and their occupations: assassins. The episode starts off with Zwei infiltrating some building and meeting up with Ein (who’s in a maid uniform), all the while dodging gunfire and headshotting random dudes in suits. In the middle of the fight, the episode does a flashback to before Zwei became an assassin. The flashback goes to when Zwei was first captured by Inferno and wakes up in a locked room with no memory of who he is (since his memories of himself had been erased). All he remembers after seeing his bag on the floor and looking at a mirror is that he’s a Japanses tourist. He then decides to break out of the room, but soon after leaving the room, he is attacked by a woman wearing a mask (Ein a.k.a. Phantom) who tells him to fight her if he doesn’t want to die (this is because Inferno wants to test his abilities to see if they can make him into an assassin). Ein chases Zwei around what appears to be an abandoned factory and shooting at his feet with a gun before throwing him a knife and the two duke it out (which was pretty awesome). Zwei overpowers Ein, but decides not to kill her and leaves the factory only to be shot with a tranquilizer gun.

Ouch

Ein is too pretty to kill

Phantom is being produced by Beetrain and will have 13 episodes in total. What I didn’t know about Phantom before watching it was that it was based off a game from Nitro+. Now, I’m not very familiar with Nitro+ games, but I certainly hope they’re not all like Chaos Head for reasons you can read about here. What I liked about episode 1 of Phantom besides all the cool action scenes was when Zwei woke up with no idea as to who or where he was. There was one time when I bumped my head and woke up in the same situation (minus the locked room) and I can say that Zwei’s actions and train of thought is exactly what it would be in that position (trying to piece together who and were you are by checking out everything around you while still feeling disoriented).

Who am I?

Besides the plot, I thought the animation and music were done really well. Since this is a show about assassins, it needs to be dark and serious, and the animation and music certainly deliver by setting the mood. I really hope that Phantom turns out to be a good anime series, it has so much potential, but I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.