By Dustin Cabeal

The vague premise I read for this series paired with the genre, gave me every reason I needed to check out Occultic;Nine. Side note, stop it with the weird shitty punctuation that’s added to these animes. As a reviewer, it’s annoying to write something intentionally wrong. Not that I’m perfect, but at least when I write something wrong I usually don’t know that I am.

Occultic;Nine has some potential, but the first episodes pacing is erratic that you won’t have a clue as to what is happening until the very end. That is sadly my advice, what this on fast forward and then hit play when the kid goes into a dark office by himself.

Because “Nine” is in the title, we have nine main characters or nine characters that will play a role in the story from time to time. This is what absolutely destroys the pacing of the story because we are forced to meet all nine of them and give them time to say something that should give some insight into their character type, but doesn’t.

Between all the jumping around the story cuts to the main character. He talks incredibly fast and has a strange/ditzy sidekick with ridiculously big boobs. This, plus a weird ray gun she has, are the only things that I have to describe her weak character. The kid is annoying and equally stupid. His ambition is to have a blog that receives a lot of money from an affiliate program. Maybe because his goal was an oversimplification of my life or maybe it was the fact that the subtitles could barely keep up with him, but I didn’t care for his character and sighed heavily upon realizing he was the first of nine characters we’ll meet.

There were two characters, which while still incredibly vague, seemed interesting. One was invisible, and the other was a young girl that does death curses. She also receives a scalp in her mailbox which is one of the two interesting things about this episode.

The animation is great. The idea that there’s something dark and dangerous coming and that it’s going to bring together these nine people is pretty intriguing. The way the story is being told and the main character it's following… not so much. The main character feels horribly out of place in this genre. He’s a goof. Even worse he’s the lazy main character that’s thrust into the story and so he’ll be behind the plot always running to save his life.

The animation was great, minus all the title cards that kept popping up every time a character was introduced. You see the character for all of ten seconds before it just cuts away from them and asks you to remember their name but fails to show them while doing this. That’s a simple memory tool, see the name plus the person, you’re more likely to remember the person. I can’t for the life of me tell you a single character name, and I didn’t bother looking it up to highlight how royally this anime failed during its first episode. There’s nine characters; I should be able to remember at least one.

I was sadly looking forward to this anime. I haven’t been able to check out everything from the new season, but the vast majority of things I’ve watched have let me down. This included. I’m willing to give it another episode in the hope that it’ll control itself better, spend real time with the characters and develop a plot that I can follow rather than a midway point shocker and a cliffhanger shocker. If it turns into that, I’ll pass altogether and move on to something else.

Score: 2/5

Occultic;Nine E.01
Official Site