Well, it’s over. It’s finally over. You know, when I finish an anime series it can make me feel a variety of things. Sometimes I feel a gaping hole in my heart after tuning in and looking forward to a episode every week only to know that won’t happen anymore. Sometimes I feel satisfied with how it tied everything up and I want to start from the beginning to experience it all again. Sometimes I feel ambivalent as I thought a series was serviceable and at least wasn’t a waste of time. Sometimes I lament what a anime could have been had they just made different choices. Occultic;Nine made me feel none of these things as the credits rolled one last time. No, as Ryo-tas confirmed with her last words that I had indeed wasted four or five hours on this series I only had one word on my mind. Why?
Why was this anime made? To advertise a game, but even if you give this a full HBO series you couldn’t salvage this trainwreck of a plot. Why did underpaid animators have to work on this? Why is it that someone looked at this script and thought it acceptable? Why does this get an anime adaption when much greater works like Utsuro no hako to Zero no Maria, Lucifer and biscuit hammer, Sharin no Kuni, Rakuin no Monshou and the remainder of the Spice and Wolf novels remain unanimated? Why did the director want to make people throw up with his presentation and think that fast forwarding exposition was appropriate? Why was someone paid to write this? Why does Ryo-Tas have basketballs for a chest? Why? Why? Just why? I guess the only emotion I could call this is despair. Despair that I had indeed finished watching the worst anime I have ever seen.
I would not be surprised if you dismiss that above statement as hyperbolic but I assure you that it is not. There are certainly anime which are objectively worse than Occultic;Nine. Worse animated, presentation, acted and even written. But even something bad can be enjoyed and made fun of. This show can’t, it’s primarily exposition and while the plot is absurd it leaves little room to get any real enjoyment out of it. For me, I genuinely dreaded watching this excuse that dared call itself anime. Any time I finished it I felt drained or annoyed or sick or hateful or all of the above. You name any bad anime you can think of and I would gladly watch that over watching Occultic;Nine again. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex. If the word ‘hate’ was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for this show at this micro-instant. For it. Hate. Hate.
So what happened this episode? Well we had five Deus ex machina’s, that’s what. Maybe even six. Besides the mountain of sped up exposition we have a moment where Aveline says she’s going to sacrifice herself to make the key by God knows how and everyone’s getting all choked up about it because they knew her for like a day. But this is made into a complete waste of time as Gamotans just goddamn teleports the bloody key into his hand straight out of nowhere. Oh and the evil organisation detected the key teleportation because when you build a giant lightning pole designed for ghosts you make sure it can detect teleportation as well. Just right on the standard procedure specifications just right below the Santa Claus tracker. Then we have everyone saying another heartfelt goodbye as Gamotan is the one to sacrifice himself now. Oh how they claim that Gamotan changed their life when I say, what did he even do? All this stuff is just handed to him because he’s the “chosen one”. He has literally done nothing. In fact what did any of you do? Both glasses characters character arcs are a straight goddamn line. You have no arc to conclude! All you guys did was figure out the mystery that Aveline was going to tell you anyway! Glasses here even figured out that they can travel back in time but again the detective kid was coming to tell them that anyway. And yes, they actually went with it, they negated the deaths of most of the cast. Still left the other 251 people to die though. Our heroes everyone.
We soon find out that doujin girl sees the future by out of body experiences and she suddenly disappears proving that Occultic;Nine has yet another completely pointless character. Wow, nine main cast members and only two are actually goddamn relevant. Isn’t that swell. Oh I don’t care, not as if the show cares, so why should I care…Why should..You know what. Sure. Oh evil organisation only sends their leader to go deal with a problem? Sure, why not. Oh Gamotan got revived after a fatal blow because Ryo-Tas kissed him? Sure, why not. Oh he grows angel wings out of goddamn nowhere? Sure, why not. Oh Gamotans dead dad comes back to fix Gamotan arriving too late? Sure, why not. Guess he didn’t give a crap about his mother. And now Gamotan is a ghost blogger and everyone cheers that he blew up Odd Eye by screaming at it. Oh what a happy ending this must be for our heroes right before I assume the evil organisation comes to slaughter them all for ruining their plans. So do they actually still think people are going to buy the blu-rays of this?
Umm, curious as to why on earth you would want a HakoMari adaptation. It’s something that’s nearly impossible to adapt properly since it takes significant advantage of the medium it’s presented in and as a huge fan I would never want to see it turning into an anime and souring newcomers’ impressions of it.
I disagree. It would take skill but I think it’s possible to adapt into anime and potentially have a greater impact and appeal. I find in it’s current format it can be hard to follow as in the first volume I kept getting confused between similarly named characters as well as who was who and the time loop nature of story made it all the harder. It’s only when I hit volume two that I really started to get interested in the series.
But I do see how hard it would be. It’s not something that can just be thrown into an anime as it. Depicting the existential nature of the boxes and the internal workings of the characters would be challenging to say the least. But quite frankly I would prefer to see someone attempt that rather than this atrocity of a show. Even a bad anime of HakoMari can expose the series to a lot more people, such as how the Deen fate/stay night adaption did.
Info : VN means Visual Novel which is a game where you play as one of the characters, and choosing different things will affect the story you get from the game. A bit like Choices or Minecraft story mode, but better, depending on the VNs you play.
I have only liked a few of the things MAGES has made.
I LOVED Steins;Gate so much I became obsessed. I can not explain the plot at all without spoiling it. It’s plot only starts to begin at episode 12 but when it does you will definitely not regret it. I also bought the VN and that was really good too. I’m happy the Steins Gate Elite VN is out because it combines the animation and quality of the anime with the extra dialogue from the VN.
I tried to watch Robotic;Notes but I got bored. Maybe the VN is better. Same thing happened with Chaos;Head. Someone told me that the anime for Chaos;Head is rubbish, and next time I want to try watching it, I should get the VN.
I watched Occultic;Nine and I actually liked the ideas, but they could be explained and expanded on. The ideas are good but how they are presented wasn’t very good. I hope they make a second anime adaptation that has a better plot.
In my opinion, MAGES is very good at making stories, but not good at presenting them.
Steins;Gate was very very good, but anyone who is
1 Not patient
and
2 Finds sceince hard
would probably quit due to the amount of effort it takes to understand the story.
Luckily Steins;Gate elite fixed a lot of that.
I have searched up a lot of anime adaptations of MAGES’ games but nearly all of them have bad reviews. However, when I check the game reviews they seem to be very good.
So, if anyone wants to watch any of the anime adaptations, I desperatly beg them to just either :
1 Save up and the game
or
2 Just watch a play through on youtube