Arcane Reviews: Carnival Phantasm

Carnival Phantasm

Hello ladies, peoples, and animals it is I, the Arcane Reviewer! Here to bring you a new anime review. Well if you haven't guessed it yet I'm kind of a Type-Moon fanboy. What with all of my ranting about poor quality of the Fate/Stay Night anime and all my parsing of the Fate/Zero one too. So now I decided to bring to you probably one of my favorite comedy anime ever. Which is also a Type-Moon based show so yeah. Shut up, I'm a fanboy let me be! I bring to you my review of, Carnival Phantasm. Is it any good? Well let me enlighten you.

Story:

Story here is gonna be a bit tricky to talk about. Mainly because there is no story here to begin with. Carnival Phantasm is pretty much just one big mash up of Type-Moon's most popular visual novels in one anime. The visual novels being Fate/Stay Night and Tsukihime. So with all these characters put together what is that they do? Well they do some of the most hilarious stuff I've ever seen. The episodes usually go from a two to three skit with smaller gags in between. These jokes are pretty well written and if you're really into your Type-Moon lore it makes it even funnier. Also the scenarios they set up are just ridiculous. Like you have an episode where for some unknown reason they make the Holy Grail Wars a Mario Party like game show. You also have another episode where Illya's batteries for her gaming controller dies, so what does she do? She sends Berserker, a giant monster of a man who can't speak any word of English and is prone to destroy everything in his path. She sends him out to buy batteries. Oh my God it was freaking funny to watch this. The show is just insane and fun to watch.

Animation:

On the technical side this show looks nice. Animation quality isn't the biggest thing here but it never looks ugly at any point. You pretty much get what you've come to expect from a comedy anime. Anytime the show requires anything to look over dramatic and over the top it gets the job done. But I will say that there are jokes thrown at the animators a few times in the show and as you'd expect, it's really funny.

Music:

Well now I'm at a bit of a bump here. Once again as you would expect the music here is just okay. Nothing here really had a a lot of  note worthy stuff to mention. Now in the show's defense it did have some tunes that are fun to listen to and some of them did make the jokes funnier. Also the opening song and the ending song are awesome and are just really catchy. But aside from that I can't really say much else about the show's soundtrack so I'll say that it's just okay.

Characters:

Oh man this is gonna be fun. The characters here are just a joy to watch. Now all the characters here are from their respective visual novels. But seeing these characters interact with each other is where the show shines. The show takes their personalities and character traits and just overly exaggerates them. One example here is Caster from Fate/Stay Night. In the visual novel she wants to kidnap Saber so that she can force her to be her servant. Simple right? Well in Carnival Phantasm she's not only obsessed with Saber, she's a full blown fangirl! I mean she has figurines, posters, cosplay outfits, and even pictures of her that she's taken herself. I mean what the hell? That's pretty much how all the characters act in the show, they're all just crazy and they're put into even crazier situations.

Nitpicks: 

Now for as much as I love this show I have to say that it has a pretty big flaw. If you've never played or even read anything Type-Moon related you're not gonna get any of the jokes. It's pretty sad but it's very true, the show is pretty much meant for fans only so any new comer is just gonna be lost and confused as to why people think this is funny. While some joke required no background information you do kinda lose it's charm in the processes.

Overall:

So in the end the best thing I can say is this. If you're like me and you love Type-Moon and everything related to it you're gonna really like this show. But if you have no clue what Type-Moon even is then I'd suggest that you stir clear of this one.

Arcane Reviews gives Carnival Phantasm a 8 out of 10.