YMMV / Myriad Colors Phantom World

• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Koito for the duration of the story. A lot of fans were put off by her initially cold personality and found her backstory to be lacking, but others loved her for her interesting powers and her gradual defrosting.
  • Over time, Ruru settled herself into this. While she has many criticisms, some like her for her Stripperiffic design and dynamic with Haruhiko.
• Broken Base: For Kyoani fans, the anime having pretty blatant 'traditional' anime fanservice compared to most of Kyoani's other recent works. The Limbo scene especially. Some fans think Kyoani is becoming worse for wasting their animation prowess on this 'generic ecchi trash' and wish for it to go back to doing more innocent moe stuff they're known for. While others love the fanservice and are happy to see Kyoani going out of their 'clean moe' comfort zone.
• Complete Monster: "Him" is the First Phantom and the supreme deity of the world. Born from the human mind, Him passively watched the world for thousands of years before choosing Touka Kashima, establishing contact with her and making her the first child with special abilities. When Touka's attempt to use the Artificial Phantom Ruppa to destroy the world fails thanks to Haruhiko Ichijou, Him creates a parallel world where Ruppa succeeded and caused the extinction of humanity, which made Him resurrect one third of humanity to keep things interesting. Taking a personal interest in Haruhiko, Him divides Haruhiko's soul to get rid of Haruhiko's optimism and later Him corrupts Haruhiko's partner Marcosias into a violent demon. He does this to screw with Haruhiko's mind and turn him into a being who would eventually attack his own friends and his own counterpart from the original world. Using Touka as his enforcer in the alternate world to keep humanity under constant attack, Him considers humans to be mere actors in his play and causes countless tragedies for his own amusement.
• Fandom Rivalry: With Free! and K-On! or other Moe series made by the same studio. While the former is quite obvious, the latter is due being a blatant ecchi series which Kyoto Animation usually shies away from (fanservice is not new to KyoAni, but is usually not excessive as this anime is), and considering that this is the same studio that made the acclaimed Air and CLANNAD, along with K-On! anime adaptations, which showed that Moe could be well done, this disappointed a lot of KyoAni fans.
• Fan Nickname:
  • "Roach Loli" or "Cockroach" for Kurumi, due to her bunny-like twintails coming off as antennae to some.
  • "Coitus" or "Boito" for Koito.
  • The show itself is known as "Phantom Sales" due to its low Blu-ray revenue.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Mai is the only thing that attracts most viewers to this show, and it seems that the authors themselves understand this perfectly, since the products with her accounted for most of the promotional products of the series.
• Heartwarming Moments: Episode 10 in its entirety, which had Mai take care of a de-aged Haruhiko. Most who had criticisms of the show DID like their dynamic in that episode, since it was heavily older sister/young mother vibes.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • After the episode 13 revelation that Ruru is Haruhiko's suppressed subconscious, her various antics start to make greater sense. For example: when she caused him to see Reina's panties, or when she made comments about Mai's massive boobs. They're things Haruhiko wanted.
  • The fourth episode it's not the first time Saori Hayami plays an innocent girl with Big Brother Worship, moreover, protagonist's love to Techno Babble and her appeal to Mai as Onee-sama makes her role in this show even more amusing.
• Magnificent Bitch (2016 anime): Enigma is an artificial phantom created using human and phantom DNA. Escaping from her abusive creators, Enigma starts to hunt the students of the Hosea high school in order to steal their special abilities by draining their energy. Seemingly defeated by the protagonists, Enigma takes the body and identity of protagonist Haruhiko Ichijou's mother and goes to live with him, successfully faking a motherly personality that bonds with him. After Haruhiko's friends manage to realize her identity, Enigma is able to beat them and steal Haruhiko's summoning powers, intending to use them to control all phantoms to take revenge on humanity. When she is later defeated by Team E, Enigma is impressed by the human potential and admits that she enjoyed her time with Haruhiko, to which he agrees before she dies.
• Narm Charm: This is intentionally silly moe-show from the studio, which specializes in gentle romance and deep dramatic plots, what do you want?
• Memetic Mutation: The entire limbo sequence and Mai's method for getting past the lowest limbo rack.
• Moe:
  • Kurumi is pretty much this, especially with her stuffed animals.
  • Haruhiko, when turned into a little boy in Episode 10.
• One-Scene Wonder: Some of the random Badass Bystander male characters and the Beach Angel girls in the eighth episode can count, on account of their cool-looking magical attacks, to the point where one has to wonder why Haruhiko's abilities can't look as flashy or even why those unnamed guys can't have their own shows.
• So Okay, It's Average: The general consensus on the anime is that while it can't be considered bad (especially since it's as well-animated as other Kyoto Animation productions), it's still nowhere near as strong as KyoAni's other works.
• Ship-to-Ship Combat: As is wont for a series with The One Guy among many beautiful girls, the fans started arguing about whether Haruhiko should get with Mai, Koito, or Reina, though the Mai and Reina boats are the largest. However, he does get into a relationship with Reina in the second light novel.
• Tearjerker: In episode 4, Reina tearfully turning down living in an illusionary world with perfect parents.