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 Grisaia titles. “Phantom Trigger just isn't as good,” you'll often hear Grisaia 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 Grisaia! That was what I hoped for, and I entered the series optimistically despite not having particularly enjoyed the aforementioned Phantom Trigger movies and OVAs. By the end, there was no denying it: even on its own merits—wholly divorced from all other things Grisaia, Phantom Trigger is a slog of a show.

Phantom Trigger, while taking place in the same universe as The Fruit of Grisaia, 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 Grisaia universe.

It's almost impressive how simultaneously over- and under-explained 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 storyline: 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 sleep-inducingly boring. It feels weird calling an anime that has a hard time going more than two 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 under explained that many of the rest of Phantom Trigger's 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 Grisaia entries, it's like this series is aggressively trying too hard to meet an edginess 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 a 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 much-needed dimension. Or at the bare minimum, maybe it would at least make its characters more endearing. But thirteen 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.