The situation isn’t helped by the non-linear structure the show adopts or the lack of distinctive characters. Everyone sort of has the same face which was a problem for me, as I couldn’t tell if I had seen certain characters in another episode or not. What I assume were big plot reveals were ruined because I didn’t know which character from 3 episodes prior was having their story concluded. Usually I’m fairly astute with this type of thing, but I’ll admit this might have occurred because I wasn’t invested enough in the series. But first time viewers can expect some (deliberate?) confusion.
In a way I respect how intentionally opaque Boogiepop is, the way it requires you to dig deeper into supplementary material to understand it. I just think it could have been executed better. It didn’t leave me wanting to hunt down the novels or read fan theories online the way other shows of this nature did. A lot of the time it just bored me.
It does have some good qualities though. Some of the visuals are quite nice; in one scene Boogiepop opens his/her cape and it appears as if a gate to the cosmos is contained within it which I thought was really neat. I liked the memory butterflies and some of the monster designs as well. The animation…fluctuates. The OST and sound design are phenomenal.
Overall I didn’t really enjoy Boogiepop Phantom which is a shame as I had pretty high expectations and liked the first few episodes a lot. It became pretty apparent about halfway through that the series was more interested in being pseudo-deep than being actual scary which disappointed me. It just doesn't stand on it's own as a satisfying story. I would only recommend it to fans of the novels or soundtrack aficionados.
