The presentation of Occultic;Nine is starting to remind me of speed Racer, an anime from a bygone era which had a rather infamous dub. Basically due to the literal translation, the way which Japanese can say more with less words and the speed of dialogue it required the dub actors to say a large amount of words as fast as possible. This resulted in a dub to one of the very first anime localized in the US and quite possibly the worst dub ever to grace the medium. You see when you are so focused on spitting out the script at high velocity it’s difficult to truly emote or present said script in a watch that can be engaging. Even Bakemonogatari takes moments to slow down to get the emotion out while Occultic;Nine attempts to have an emotional reconciliation in the span of thirty seconds. This is just abysmal, on all fronts besides animation and art. I don’t blame those guys as purely on animation and art this show has been rather impressive, I even found the point of view shot with Miyu walking down to the boys killing room to be really well done. But direction, editing and dialogue is just a pure trainwreck.
But let us try to piece together just what is going on here. Well first Miyu is a goddamn moron as just from a text message from her old friend she decides to go to a secluded location where she previously met the murderous kid, down into a secret passage that opened out of nowhere and through an incredibly ominous tunnel that screams get the hell out to any sane individual. I understand that grief can have an effect on people but this…this is just nonsense. I would believe it if she was going there for revenge but she truly believes her friend was alive despite seeing the bloody remains first hand. There is overcome with grief and then there is being an utter moron, you have fallen into the second category. But with this we get some insight into who this boy is and the Kotoribako. Basically this boy is a living person who has been killing people because he sees them as rare cards somehow and he makes people into kotoribako because he wants to get rare cards. So to summarize the above, the boy and Kotoribako…are absolutely irrelevant to the main plot. The only thing this whole side plot did was give the main characters some exposition to figure out a bit of the evil organizations plan, exposition which the child knows because…he’s a rich kid? Um…I…bloody hell…just…just what is this? How is this writer getting work? What editor approved this? This development adds nothing to the narrative but more plot-holes! This is what this writer utterly infuriates me as it reminds me of the asinine stories I used to write between classes when i was a teenager. I know this logic, the reason this boy is in the story is because he wanted a psycho boy in the story. For that’s what he thinks is cool, logic be damned.
On the upside Ryo-tas looks to be getting a point. Seems her bouncing about like a preschooler was all just an act and she seems to be the mysterious Zonko which has been communicating with the blogger kid all this time. I would like to say this means she’s no longer pointless but well Zonko hasn’t contributed to the plot much either. She told the kid to pull out a tooth and helped him figure out a puzzle with the ceiling. If anything this brings up the very good question that if she knew everything that was going on then why did she spend the last 9 episodes saying and doing nonsense when everyone else was trying to figure out what’s going on. There’s going to have to be a very good reason as to why she kept all this to herself and considering the answers we got so far I say it’s going to be nonsensical. Also oh god the detective mentions that the ghost guy(Another pointless character up to this point) can time travel.
Oh no! No! Hell no! You can’t just put in a throwaway Steins;Gate reference and expect me to swallow that. There are two things which can turn any story into an utter mess and those are alternate dimensions and time travel. Occultic;Nine is already a clusterfuck so this is really the last thing it needs. But most of all…if this all ends with a time reset I will be goddamn furious. The time reset is the get out of jail free card of every hack writer. It is only acceptable when time travel is an integral part of the narrative. Otherwise it’s a cheap method of avoiding consequence in storytelling which renders the entire plot moot. Other than that we just find that the evil organization plan to end the world it seems with this new world plan which I guess involves killing everyone on the planet so they can live as immortal ghosts? But then what about the mind control plan? Is that still in effect? Well tune in next time and prepare to see none of the occult stuff in the opening as well as any occult in general. Couldn’t even live up to the name…I have a headache now.
