Grisaia Phantom Trigger: Season 1 Episode 1 – Recap and Review | The Deadliest Girls With The Silliest Personalities Are Back

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Quick Recap

After an almost dizzying 2-minute high-level recap of what has happened in past entries, we’re introduced to a teacher named Arisaka, who works at Mihama Academy. She is one of the handful of civilian employees of the school without a background in weapons and violence, which leaves her sometimes feeling a bit out of place.

Yet, despite being a square and normal compared to the others, it seems her students like and maybe even respect her. However, what helps is that her class is filled with girls who might be eccentric but are also fairly independent. The one focused on the most is Taiga Sengoku, the eldest daughter of the head of the Sengoku family. While placed in Arisaka’s class, since her students aren’t constantly battling each other, Taiga ends up placed under Sakurako Kujirase, aka Chris’, care as a mentor.

This seems like a strange combo to some, as Chris is a combat engineer with some background as a medic and generally seems to stray away from using guns and similar weapons. Yet, being perhaps one of the most maternal girls on campus, she seems to fill the gap of Taiga not having a mother in her life, and while Taiga is against being treated as a child, getting to experience softness and being taken care of seems to become something she grows to accept, like, if not love.

Episode Details

Category	Details
Episode Title	Mother’s Cradle
Originally Aired	January 1, 2025
Network	Crunchyroll
Director(s)	To Be Determined
Writer(s)	Tatsuya Takahashi
Character	ACTOR’S NAME
Arisaka	Mikako Izawa
Taiga Sengoku	Natsumi Takamori
Sakurako Kujirase aka Chris	Kaori Nazuka

New Character Descriptions

Arisaka

Arisaka is a teacher who, unlike many at Mihama Academy, doesn’t have a military background. She is an everyday person placed in an authority position over teenagers who have potentially killed before and could easily take her out.

Taiga

Taiga is the eldest daughter of the Sengoku family and was primarily raised by the head of the family, her father; she tries to be very stern and hard-working and sticks strictly to logic. However, under Chris’ influence, you see Taiga experience what her mother was unable to due to the pressures of trying to be in the Sengoku family, leading to Taiga getting to experience love and a childhood like she never expected.

Chris

Chris is the maternal member of her class, and while she is as capable of violence as anyone else, she is one of the few who don’t use a gun. As a combat engineer, she would rather use explosives than projectile weapons everyone else uses.

Review

Trajectory (81/100): Plateau

Admittedly, between the recap and meeting close to a dozen characters, the start of “Grisaia Phantom Trigger” was initially overwhelming. However, as it honed in on Taiga being the focus and Chris’s mentee, things became a bit easier to process. As Chris allowed Taiga to meet the various girls, all of who had different specialties, and even showed off her expertise in explosives, that initial feeling of there being a huge ensemble to keep track of became less of an issue as it became clear beyond having specific skill sets, the personalities also were divergent.

Now, as for story, with it being established Taiga comes from a powerful family and her father leaned more into being a provider and trained her to be cold, see emotions as weakness, and basically forego her being a child, it is going to be interesting to see how she develops under Chris. It seems to Arisaka’s class, Chris is the one who likes to cook for them, and while she isn’t class mom, for she gets on many of their nerves, each has a certain love for her, which she returns with ease.

With that in mind, and Taiga coming from a place void of allowing her such softness, it should be interesting to see how that relationship develops. Thus far, we’ve seen Chris comfort Taiga after a nightmare and carry her when she scraped her knee. While she originally protested, by the time she injures her knee pushing herself, it seems she has come to realize Chris won’t use her moments of vulnerability as signs of weakness but will let her be a child.

Although we don’t learn how old specifically Taiga is, to really get a grasp on how much she has gone through in a short time, considering it appears we have elementary school to high school-aged kids at the academy, it seems safe to say Taiga is likely either close or at the beginning of her teen years which makes her story thus far all the more heartbreaking.

But, what should make things interesting is, in the episode’s cliffhanger, there is an attack near a seminar Taiga went to. With that, it seems we’ll be switching from these people seeming odd, cheerful, and kind of cool to seeing them do what they are trained for and showing us the duality of what the Grisaia franchise is known for.

Highlights

• Centering things on Chris and Taiga will make expanding into the wider universe a bit easier.
• Starting things with hints of the more darker or violent side of the show but focusing more on the lighthearted side to begin to make the shift all the more notable.

On The Fence

• The two-minute recap being overwhelming to the point you’d likely have to watch multiple times to grasp everything.

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