Tag: Steins;Gate

Occultic;Nine Review – 0/100

by AidanAK47, posted in Anime Reviews, Occultic:Nine, Reviews by AidanAK47

I am certain this may seem like an extreme rating for some but the number scale always has been something I only carried over as part of psgels format. But this rating exemplifies my feelings about this show in its entirety. This show is awful, terrible, rage inducing, illogical, nonsensical garbage. Watching this show was one of my most unpleasant experiences watching anything. When I started this show I at least thought it couldn’t be as bad as Robotics;Notes, for that show was truly something else when it came to bad writing. But I was flabbergasted to see that this show was so much worse. To the point where I may swear off watching any colon series from this point forward.

The plot of this show is a complete mess and looking at it in it’s entirely it not only makes no sense but the only points where the story goes anywhere is at the every beginning and the very end. The middle portion of this story is nothing but a giant waste of time as the characters only work to try to figure out a mystery that would eventually be explained to them and side plots which are introduced but have not plot relevance whatsoever. The main middle part of this story involves a murderer who not only has little or nothing to do with the main mystery but is dropped and never mentioned again once his little arc is through. The characters are all either unlikable or stereotypical and it’s important to note that they do mostly nothing besides motormouth exposition. Design wise they are not very interesting and need I mention the girl with a chest so astronomically huge that it is incredibly distracting? I do not mean that this is attractive, I mean that this girl’s anatomy is so utterly ridiculous that it’s like having a giant elephant in the room that no one seems to address. I will say as well that his character does nothing but try to figure out every motion she can make to move her breasts as much as possible and make me question how her back hasn’t snapped into splinters. She plays a stereotypical dumb blond joke until the last two episodes. Where she is pretty much lobotomized and replaced with a completely different character.

What the mystery becomes in it’s final episode is something you could swear was parody but the show itself is clear that it wants you to take it completely seriously. It tries to tug at your heartstrings when the characters are talking at a speed of bullet trains. Out of the nine characters mentioned in the title, only two are actually relevant. The rest are just throwaway side characters whose absence wouldn’t hurt the show, if anything it would shorten the runtime and make it more focused. It becomes impossible to take even an iota of this story seriously when it pulls out deus ex machina like those angel wings you happen to see in the screenshots up there. Isn’t that utterly ridiculous for a story that want wants to be an intelligent mystery series? Well if you find that hard to swallow I assure you that it’s the tip of the iceberg. This story has twists and turns that just make you wish to yell at the top of your lungs “WHAT?!”

The direction is a nightmare. Want to know how bad? You need not take my word for it, just watch the first thirty seconds of the very first episode. I assure you that by the time you get back to this review you will be very confused. I have no idea what the director of this show was thinking as screenshots have no logical cohesion with what is being represented. A large number of times our protagonists will suddenly start talking rapid fire like a bakemonogatari series before reverting back into normal speech. There is an episode filled with so many dutch angles you will feel physically ill just from watching it. There is a scene where the camera spins 360 degrees in place for three straight minutes. There are camera shots flipped upside down or 90 degrees for no apparent reason. Sometimes spacial awareness is just thrown out the window and you have a giant girl speaking to a small boy in a close up shot when they are supposed to be on opposite sides of the room. I must ask if they director went to film school because it was almost as if he wanted to make this show as painful to watch as possible. For that I truly pity the animators who do a stand out job despite what they have to work with.

There are some who say that at least this tried something different but I say no. Magical Girl Raising Project tried something different and while it didn’t succeed, at least the end result doesn’t make me want to claw my eyes out. You can say that someone tried something different by making a coffee mug out of monkey feces but it’s still shit no one wants. This writer has passed the point of being applauded for experimentation so it’s an insult to give him kudos for fan fiction level writing. So without surprise I am sure, I recommend you avoid this anime at all cost. Pay no heed to those claiming it’s good, they are clearly blind. Save your brain cells, don’t even watch it as a joke because I assure you that this series will go out of it’s way to make sure you can’t get any fun out of it. I declare Occultic;Nine to be the worst anime I have ever seen and if you are wise you would heed my words. Don’t waste your life on this flaming trashcan of a show. I have wasted far too much of my time on it already.

Occultic:Nine – 12[We’re Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together]

by AidanAK47, posted in Currently Watching:, Occultic:Nine

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?

Occultic:Nine – 11[We Want the Airwaves]

by AidanAK47, posted in Currently Watching:, Occultic:Nine

My mind is made of mush when watching this episode. I think there should be some rule forbidding such excessive exposition in one episode because I started zoning out five minutes in. Had to pause the episode four times just to let the information sink in. The good news is that watching this didn’t make me want to throw up. The bad news is that the more this plot tries to wrap itself up, the more utterly moronic it becomes. If you are a poor unfortunate soul like myself still watching this show then allow me to break down this jibber jabber into something meant to be understood. The first three minutes essentially are just Gamotan explaining to the others about information Ryo-tas/Aveline told him. A smart show would just skip over the explanation and show only the characters reactions. For the viewers already know all this and going over it again is just useless padding. Something this show definitely does not need seeing how you have to fast forward the exposition so much. What follows is a giant explanation over the nature of ghosts and the spirit realm. Now to the normal watcher they would just take the explanation as is and not think too much about it.

The show certainly wants you to do that because while the explanations are overtly complex, the conclusions are simple and really stupid. You see what this whole thing is, is that this shows logic makes a giant leap and to obscure that it hides it under a large amount of gobbledygook. It’s like this for example: physics have yet to explain how a bee flies, therefore humans can fly without propulsion. Disregarding that the bee thing is a complete myth, the writing puts immense effort into explaining the former so that you don’t take the time to question the latter. I am working with bare minimum science education here so don’t take my word on matters of that but this show is essentially stating that the human world and the spirit world are like separate radio frequencies. Basically while alive you are attuned to the living frequency and when you die it is adjusted to the dead frequency. Now I originally thought this was just a metaphor but it seems the story of Occultic;Nine takes this quite literally as apparently radio towers were used to adjust the individuals dead’s frequency to the living frequency. So essentially it’s saying that human souls are basically sound waves which can be attuned to both living and dead worlds.

That is quite dumb as sound is essentially vibrations in the air and I believe radio waves are essentially electromagnetic radiation. Claiming that human souls are somehow contained in this is like claiming that air is sentient or that water can feel. It’s ridiculous. After this we have the manager enter and reveal that he was the weird masked man going around disappearing spirits. Also he’s the leader of the cult and the murderer of both Gamotans father and the professor. We have foreshadowing for only one of those things Occultic;Nine, not the other two. Hell that foreshadowing was only last episode so in the span of one paragraph of exposition this man turned from being a small background character to one of the main antagonists. He works for the villains, he killed Gamotans father and he killed and scalped the professor…and delivered the scalp to the curse girl. Wait, why did you do that last part again? Actually why did you open up a store that was closed for two years and get Gamotan to come to it and did nothing but feed him crap drinks and why is he the sole person in charge of getting rid of ghosts when he’s in charge of a whole cult and….(BANG!)…Sorry I was overcome with the urge to hit my head off the desk. What was I on about again?

So manager now turned into antagonist is defeated by Gamotan because he has some special power of some sort which boosts his synchronistic with the human world allowing him to been seen and touch…wait can’t all the ghosts interact with the human world?! They have been doing it the entire series and not just Gamotan, the reporter girl opened the moai statue, they pulled out books so why is it being put down that Gamotan can only interact with the world after being shot with the raygun? Also based on the next line of exposition are you really telling me that Gamotan just so happened to coincidentally have this special absorption of electromagnetic energy and coincidentally Nikola Telsa’s descendant was giving the task of monitoring him who coincidentally is taken over by the ghost of Telsa’s daughter who planned for him to coincidentally come across the professor’s murder and take the key to the gun and then using a combination of her raygun and a special power Gamotan can use because his father coincidentally modified his transistor radio with a tesla coil and…(BANG! BANG!)…sorry got that urge again. This show isn’t good for my head.

Lets just wrap this up before a split my skull open. So I mentioned that the direction wasn’t bad as last episode but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still bad. For one, there was a part of this episode where Ryo-tas/Aveline was explaining how it was totally logical that Tesla went to Japan and had a half Japanese daughter that was never mentioned in history. At the point when she mentions Japan it just flashes up the Japanese flag for a second. You know just in case you didn’t know what Japan was while watching a Japanese animation, with a story set in a Japanese city which is currently broadcast in the nation of Japan. We have a conclusion to the curse girl and her demon fellows arc as it turned out he’s not her brother but inherited his memories from a transplant…it’s was pretty stupid when Grisaia did that thing and yep, it’s still stupid. But we have verified that both these characters have no worth to the plot whatsoever making them completely pointless and all their screen time for naught. Must…resist…urge…well I supposed brother demon dearest did give the detective and writer the get out of jail free card by stating that time in out of body experiences moves faster than real time. Meaning that this story is likely going to end with the characters awakening before drowning in the lake and hereby negating the entire plot. Which is just going to be…real super. So we got a villain headquarters and our bunch of misfits are going to assault it despite none of them having any real combat experience. Have fun storming the castle!

Occultic;Nine – 10[Another Girl, Another Planet]

by AidanAK47, posted in Currently Watching:, Occultic:Nine

“As to her purpose, I am going to make a random guess that she’s the descendant of Nikola Tesla or something.”

I wrote this about Ryo-tas in the comments of the 04-06 review and now I say I goddamn called it. So now Ryo-tas has a point, in fact she is now the centerpoint of the entire story. For that all the writer needed to do was transplant another character on top of her and make it that her toy ray gun is…it’s the entire key to the…oh god it’s the entire key to the evil organisation guys plot. Oh for f*cks sake! My brain hurts from the complete stupidity of this show. I mean you go to so much trouble inventing some puzzle that the professor left behind which needed to be solved using Baudot code and whatever bloody stuff you googled for five minutes on the internet, yet when it comes to your main plot it’s just this utter wreck of nonsense. I know it’s likely obvious by now but allow me to be blunt with you. I hate this show. I hate everything about it. I have long stopped caring about anything that happens in it and at this point it has become truly painful to watch.

The plot twists just make me want to shake me head and this show may have the worst direction I have ever seen. Other shows could be faulted for having direction which was dull and uninteresting but the direction of this show makes watching it a arduous task. This entire episode was filled with dutch angles which are normally supposed to instil discomfort on the viewer for a particular scene. But this episode was filled with them regardless of what was even on screen. There are shots where the screen is flipped 90 degrees for no reason. This episode went even further with the utterly outrageous shots were all spatial awareness is thrown out the window and they just put the two characters in the same shot regardless of their positioning in the scene. If I showed this to a film student I am certain he would start hitting his head off a wall at the seer incomprehensible incompetence on display. It’s one thing for a show to be bad but for a show to quite literally make the viewer physically ill from disorientation while watching it is a new low.

So what happened? Well Ryo-tas is now possessed by the spirit of Nikola Tesla’s daughter which he never really was supposed to have. How? We get a big old infodump which essentially says that ghosts can do this because shut up and deal with it. This is found out because the professor’s son happened to open a book that spelled out that Ryo-tas was a descendant of Tesla. That’s good but why is the psychometric girl also landing on the same conclusion despite her having no real reason to look into it? Then we have the curse girl and her “demon” which may actually be her brother now I think. There’s a guy in a creepy mask going around erasing the ghosts made by the mass drowning and it’s being suspected that he is the manager of the restaurant everyone goes to. He also kills two people somehow…moving on.  Apparently professor guy not only listed the names  of the people that drowned but also the medical data from the hospital they went to for various different ailments. This seems to be the reason they were picked out to drown because the hospital was testing if they were compatibility with magic ghost maker pixie dust. Also Doujin girl somehow faked her death and I surely look forward to how the writer is going to crowbar her into this whole mess too.

This show may be well on it’s way to being my worst anime of 2016 but it surprises me that it seems to be still getting a positive reception from some people. I normally would at least take others views on a show into account but if anyone tries to tell me this show is well written I would accuse them of being blind. The plot has long since stopped making any logical sense and the characters either infodump about a ludicrous mystery or throw some token angst. Mister blogger kids reaction to the ghost of Christmas Tesla could very well sum up my reaction to the series as a whole but regardless I still don’t get why he is even involved with all this. In fact why are any of these people involved with this? By my estimate over half the cast has nothing to do with the core mystery but perhaps they are there to remind us that even though no character bonding happened on screen that it did happen off screen. By now I just want this show to end, please just end. The time to stop has come and i don’t care if it means not airing the last episode. Just stop…before I strangle the director.

Occultic;Nine – 09[Future Days]

by AidanAK47, posted in Currently Watching:, Occultic:Nine

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.

Occultic;Nine – 07-08[Happiness is a Warm Gun]

by AidanAK47, posted in Currently Watching:, Occultic:Nine

By episode sevens end it did confirm that indeed, the majority of the cast is dead which brings up a whole host of problems. For you see while this twist may seem like a interesting left turn, it only really works if you consider the time a character is shown on screen the only time in existence that they have. This show demands that you completely disregard the other free time you would assume living beings have in life. For if you take that into account then these people should have figured out something was wrong much much sooner. After all, if they eat then they might wonder why the store attendant is ignoring them while confused at how products were carried to the till by themselves. If they don’t eat then anyone would notice if they went several days without eating. There’s also problems with general rules of how they are perceived. The show already establishes that they have a physical presence and can bump into people. But if they pick something up and put it into their pocket then does that item turn invisible? Or is there a floating tooth key walking around when mister blogger goes out for a stroll? The more you think about it, the less sense it makes. This twist also brings the problem that with our main characters dead that means that they are in no danger. That means no tension. On top of all that when you confirm that death is not permanent than that renders death meaningless which is generally why the “dead” twist is often pulled at the end of a story.

Considering the inconsistency of the sped up dialogue I think we can safely say that it isn’t a stylistic choice. More likely the script hasn’t been planned to the time constraints of each episode and the dialogue is sped up to compensate. A very unwise method of trying to squash it in as it kills the pacing and whatever immersion the viewer had when all the characters start speedrunning their dialogue. I actually wondered if the video was literally sped up as people start vomiting exposition at a rapid rate. Also boy, that exposition. I said before that I doubted this show would have satisfactory answers for any of the questions it poses without resorting to something dumb. Thus I hereby say I called it because good god this is dumb. So the Kotoribako which was given so much attention previously now seems to have no real purpose. Instead this seven gods cult thing has somehow cultivated both a mind control drug and a chemical which can allow you to retain yourself after death. There’s some info dumping nonsense about them doing this by following some notes by Nikola Tesla and perfecting it by analysing a thesis written by the professor who was murdered.

So this is treading the old ground of Chaos;Head in which a scribble written by the protagonist on the back of a homework essay somehow lead to the creation of reality wrapping machines. Not sure why they did this seeing as a second time round this explanation is just as dumb as the first time we went through it. Maybe even more so. But we ain’t done yet as it turns out that the mysterious evil organization was created by Mr Not-neets dad. How this happened was that the dad was a radio show host who used to take questions from viewers and give advice(You know typical radio show stuff) but he was apparently so good at it that he started giving live seminars and then it became a cult. Feel free to read over that sentence and let it sink in that someone wrote this down and didn’t see anything wrong with it. Sure not-neet says it’s far fetched but it’s not even that, it’s downright impossible. It wasn’t even a big radio station, just some small town one and yet it somehow gained such a following that it spawned an evil organisation with plans for world domination?

This writer continues to utterly baffle me with how he fails to see the utter ridiculousness of his own ideas. If this anime was satire or comedy that might be something. But it’s clear that we are supposed to take this 100% seriously.  Personally I find that difficult when the main villain has a plan as ridiculous as a old bond villain. All they really need now is a volcano lair and they got the whole set. Seriously how are these evil organizations even formed? How do you gather a huge group of like minded people to sit in a room all day discussing how they are going to rule the world by injecting mind control drugs into world leaders? Guys, are you sure you planned this out? I mean you think no one is going to notice all the world leaders acting weird? Who decides what, how does it even get done? After all even if you take over the world leader there is still a government that’s not going to approve your slave collar law. What are you even going to do with the world?

Because nobody really thinks about that, considering that running one country’s affairs is a giant pain in itself. Of course maybe they don’t really care about running the world well but then what’s the bloody point? Rule the world just for bragging rights? As for other events Ryo-tas remains a waste of screen time besides being a mannequin with basketballs glued to her chest. The rest spend most of their time discussing if they are dead or not, or being depressed about it. The other antagonists on the other hand seem happy enough to talk enigmatic despite the fact that the audience has long since stopped giving a damn. Admittedly I am skimming over character interactions and just commenting on the mystery of the show but that truly is the only thing carrying it. Which makes it all the more noticeable when you can poke holes in it till it all just falls apart. By now, in this story sense is a sandwich so sure, why not just throw in an inexplicable moai statue contraption whose sole purpose seems to be poor security for a usb stick.

Occultic;Nine – 04-06[She Took a Long Cold Look]

by AidanAK47, posted in Currently Watching:, Occultic:Nine

Forgive me for my recent laziness in covering this series. I would like to give you a proper excuse as to why I have been slacking in my coverage of Occultic;Nine but in truth it really is due to a complete lack of interest in my part. My previous episodic reviews have been heavily negative and when tasked to yet again complain about how this show just isn’t interesting I find my motivation just isn’t there.I mean sure I could complain about how the blogger constantly tries to use the tooth key on every lock he finds when just looking at the lock itself would tell him if the key would fit. Seeing as the key is a lever lock type so using it on a lock clearly intended for a standard Pin tumbler lock key is just pure stupidity. There also isn’t any real need for him to find out what it unlocks in the first place as getting involved gets him closer to being arrested, though quite frankly it’s a miracle he hasn’t been arrested already. Then there is the professor who decided the best way to hide information was to fill in the dots on his ceiling to match baudot code and decided the best way to inform people of this was by writing code with his last breath?

One, isn’t there a much easier method of hiding information? Two, wouldn’t you run out of space on your ceiling if you have to write 256 names and some obscure number? Three, what is the point of writing 256 peoples names on your ceiling in the first place? If you want it found then use it to explain the entire situation to them. There’s no point in being obtuse with those whom you intend to have find the message. Then there’s the point of Ryo-tas being a complete worthless character and the detective kid who seems to only go up to people, talk nonsense for an extended period of time, reveal who he is, what he knows and then walks off having learned nothing. See…just pure complaining. Constant complaining is what these episode reviews would be and despite this I appreciated that the show was at least trying to repair the damage done from episode one and at least on some level trying to set up a coherent interesting mystery. Failing at it of course but at least trying. Then episode six happened and I felt compelled to write about this.

I am flabbergasted at what I have just witnessed as it is a repeat of the failings of episode one on a much grander scale. Sudden spitfire dialogue is back and the pacing is screwed to high heaven as we are overloaded with so much information that I wouldn’t be surprised if viewers were brain dead by episodes end. This episode wasn’t just a trainwreck be story standards but a visual trainwreck as well. The editing was scatterbrained and there are just decisions with have me confused as to why anyone in their right mind would consider it acceptable. We have one certain scene were the detective kid is once again acting coy, then shooting off what he knows only to run off having learned nothing. Yet when he is explaining everything he’s investigating, for a straight minute and ten seconds the camera spins in place.

It’s disorientating, annoying and has nothing to do with what the scene is trying to convey. Most of the episode followed a pattern of slow pans that when on for far too long follow by a sudden influx of jarring shot changes. Episode five had an equally weird moment of when the blogger walked into the professor’s room and for some reason they flipped the camera upside down. To highlight the ceiling? Then why follow that with 90 degree flips and having proceeding shots being slanted. What on earth is that supposed to convey? The director seems to be experimenting with shot style but frankly there are certain rules on how to set a scene for a reason. Breaking the 180 degree rule tends to leave the viewer disoriented and considering how much you are demanding they keep up with here that is a serious fault.

So suddenly we have we have Kotoribako and if you have no idea what that is then don’t expect to know by episode’s end as the first minute and a half proceeds to shove information about it down your throat at the velocity of a rocket. Suddenly this thing which was never mentioned before has become the centerpiece of the plot. This is giving serious deja vu of how the D-Swords hijacked the plot of Chaos;Head.(All that stupid nonsense for what is essentially a crappy Zanpakuto) Anyway we also have a sudden Illuminati that has also never been mentioned appear and start pointing out how the mass drowning was some attempt to create some kind of human Kotoribako and….sorry if I didn’t quite get it as my brain was really genuinely struggling to keep up with the sudden influx of information. Either way I don’t think it makes any sense. The creepy boy also seems to be creating some human Kotoribako while mouthing off the defense of infancy as an excuse as to why he can’t be held accountable for murder.

Thing is that defense only works the murderer in question doesn’t have the emotional maturity to determine the wrongness of the act. Considering that the first thing you do when confronted is mouth of the defense of Infancy that clearly shows you do know what’s wrong about the act therefore rendering your excuse complete moot you idiotic troglodyte. But hey he’s a demon child or whatever so it doesn’t matter either way. Thus we have the final twist of the episode and it’s the big one that it’s apparently been building up to. The twist is that….everyone’s dead! Yes, it appears the majority of the cast has been dead all this time and I just…really can’t care anymore. This is one of those twists which upon reveal seems shocking and interesting but when you sit down and really think about it the less sense it actually makes. I don’t know what this show is trying to accomplish anymore and it just seems folly to even try. I plan to finish it but my episode reviews may be more sporadic in regards to it. As you can see, my enthusiasm is at rock bottom when it comes to this.

Occultic;Nine – 03[She Cracked]

by AidanAK47, posted in Currently Watching:, Occultic:Nine

This week on Occultic;Nine…stuff happens I guess? In watching this i am getting reminders of Chaos;Head in a lot of ways. Now the Chaos;Head anime was a mess but the visual novel actually started really well with a lot of intrigue before D-swords were introduced and the whole narrative just became a giant nonsensical mess.  There are some common elements here as in Chaos;Head there was a murder influenced by a goth punk singers lyrics who was then claimed to be a prophetic. Here we have a murder influenced by a manga doujin where the mangaka claims to see in dreams. In Chaos;Head this whole prophetic singer thing just turned out to be a waste of time because it turned out the singer was batshit insane and the similarity to the murder was just pure coincidence. I feel this thing with the mangaka girl is going along the same vein. Basically  that she sees stuff in her dreams and pretty much has nothing to do with anything. I at least see the Occult part of the title is starting to appear with demon creatures and ghosts and whatnot, though I doubt we’ll be seeing even half the stuff in the opening.

I will be blunt and say I have little interest in what’s happening here. I can follow it though that certainly is a challenge but I find this show is trying to peak my interest by withholding its cards. So this episode we get a bunch of people acting suspiciously and a bunch of questions raised. Thing is I don’t care about these people and I am certain that any of the questions raised here will not have satisfactory answers. You may say I am speaking too soon and that I really could be surprised by what this show does with all this, and frankly you are right. However when looking at what is presented I see no possible way this is going to make any real sense. We already have the Occult involved so any mystery this series presents can pretty much be explained with “A wizard did it”. The idea of someone masterfully planning the suicide of over hundred people sounds like one hell of a feat in a story without the supernatural. However here Demons probably Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Booed them and they went and killed themselves. This series is trying to establish a massive conspiracy with connections everywhere in this mystery but the problem with that is that to make it all sound convincing and not contrived you need to be a damn good writer.

Ryukishi is one of the few who can build a massive intricate mystery without it feeling contrived and even he needs to cheat every now and then. It’s easy to build suspense and intrigue with questions but eventually you need to answer those questions. This is generally the point where everything falls apart. Here we have a murder where the victim had a key hidden as a tooth in his mouth which is connected to both a Doujin artist and a girl who set a curse on the victim using some sort of devil creature(Girl was also sent the victim’s scalp in the mailbox) along with a mass suicide, people who seem to be involved with secret organizations, a self proclaimed NEET who isn’t a NEET getting instructions from a toy doll that seems to know everything, the murder victim researching into Nikola Tesla and some Phantom plane, and a weird boy who abducted the friend of a popular fortune teller girl. Tell me honestly, do you think there is a way to tie all that together without resorting to something dumb? Because I certainly doubt it.

Occultic;Nine – 02 [My Cold Dimension]

by AidanAK47, posted in Currently Watching:, Occultic:Nine

After a disastrous first episode that has likely pushed away a number of viewers, Occultic;Nine decides to slow down it’s pacing to a more acceptable degree which is a good move. This does make the show much more watchable as the dialogue isn’t running off like a machine gun and we can actually take a moment to get invested in the plot and characters. However here comes another problem, namely the plot and characters. The actual story itself has some interesting points being it’s about a large cast of characters who all seem connected to the murder of an occult professor. But the way this show decides to tell this story is akin to a 5 year old on a sugar rush. It seems to be pulling inspiration from Narita’s Durarara and Baccano in that the story involves a large cast which the story switches between. However Narita’s characters were distinct enough to latch on to and he usually had his story in arcs with scenes that transitioned into each other with ease.

Occultic;Nine doesn’t have either of those things, it’s characters are visually distinctive but not personality distinctive. For one I actually confused the occult blogger with the boy detective that appeared at the start of this episode because besides one being a detective and the other not, they are basically the same character. A fast talking Otaku with short hair. Other characters have quirks but lack something to make them really stand out. For one Ryouka just seems like a less ditsy, much higher stacked version of Mayuri and by god if this…thing doesn’t make me question why I am watching this every time I see it. I am hardly a man who values realism in my anime but I have a hard time believing breasts of that size don’t snap this girl’s spine in two when she stands upright, let alone while dancing around the room. To me, too much of anything good or bad can turn something grotesque. However seeing how much fanart she has got already, perhaps my opinion is in the minority.

Generally in a TV episode there are two plots running. An A plot and a B plot. The A plot is generally the main draw and the B plot acts as less important story to give time in between acts. Occultic;Nine on the other hand has an A, B, C, D, E, F, G and H plot running in parallel and never give you time to breath. There’s the blogger who stumbled on a murder and is ordered to put out a tooth which is actually a hidden key.(Look at that screenshot up there, think that can fit in a human gum? Short answer, no. Long answer, HA! Hell no.) There’s a detective who is investigating the murder and is involved with some secret organization.(Good thing he erased the victim’s last dying message where he wrote “CODE” as if the police saw that it would surely give away…something. I mean what code are we talking about here? C++? JAVA? Python?) There’s a girl who has a business of cursing people with some demonic entity she has with her. There’s a girl who tells fortunes on the internet with daddy issues. That same girl and another girl are testing Curse girl’s abilities. There’s a guy with daddy issues. There’s another story about a girl who was so obsessed with her brother that she lived with his corpse. There is just far far too much going on here and none of it is given the time needed to really flesh it out.

It’s just a hailstorm of events thrown at the viewer without cohesion. And if that sounds like a complete narrative mess already then it only gets worse for believe or not, these events are not even thrown at you in order. Much like this series jumps between characters without warning, it also happens to jump to different times and you may not have even realised it. It’s hard enough piecing together just what is happening without having to worry about when it is happening as well and I certainly say this, for the love of god fire the director. Maybe if you hire someone who has an idea of what he is doing this mess can be salvaged but that of course would only be temporary. I know how this writer works and I know that whatever explanation for everything going on here is going to be utterly nonsensical and mind numbingly stupid. But hey, i am in this for the long run so throw whatever you got at me Occultic;Nine, you may even surprise me.

The Versus Show: Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica vs. Steins;Gate

by SuperMario, posted in Other:, Uncategorized

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Time for something completely new for a change. In my opinion, one of the most unique feature here in psgels is always the scoring system, which goes all the way up to 100. This allows much more range in rating a series, compared to the usual 5-star or 10 rating scale. However, the truth is that rating’s highly subjective. We score some shows higher because we think that they are “better” than other shows, and we score them evenly because we believe they have the same quality. But we know that you will always have different opinions than us. Which brings me to this very poll.

Now it’s your turn. The premise of this Versus Show is simple: Take any 2 shows that have the same rating here in psgels, and YOU vote for the one that you think is better. Sounds like fun? Let’s begin.

Here come the first pair, arguably two of the best shows out of 2011, which shared the same score of 87.5. Let’s run them down:

Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica

(AKA: Girls have to save themselves)

Studio: Shaft

Season: Winter 2011

Episodes: 12

MAL Rating: 8.52

Madoka Kaname and Sayaka Miki are regular middle school girls with regular lives, but all that changes when they encounter Kyuubey, a cat-like magical familiar, and Homura Akemi, the new transfer student. Kyuubey offers them a proposition: he will grant one of their wishes and in exchange, they will each become a magical girl, gaining enough power to fulfill their dreams. (from MAL)

Here’s an excerpt from an original review by our truly psgels:

“Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica finally shows us another deconstruction of the Mahou shoujo genre, and it is glorious… The thing that’s especially amazing about this series is how well everything fits together. It’s twelve episodes long, but it makes excellent use of its time, the characters all fit the story perfectly and everyone serves his own purpose to the points that this series is trying to make. The show really makes sure that it doesn’t waste its time and just about every episode adds something to the overall story and characters. This creates quite a bit of nice development for such a short series.”

 

Versus

 
 

Steins;Gate

(AKA: Boy saves girl, by letting another girl die)

Studio: White Fox

Season: Spring 2011

Episodes: 24

MAL Rating: 9.17

The self-proclaimed mad scientist Rintarou Okabe rents out a room in a rickety old building in Akihabara, where he indulges himself in his hobby of inventing prospective “future gadgets” with fellow lab members: Mayuri Shiina, his air-headed childhood friend, and Hashida Itaru, a perverted hacker nicknamed “Daru.” The three pass the time by tinkering with their most promising contraption yet, a machine dubbed the “Phone Microwave,” which the phenomenon doesn’t provide anything concrete in Okabe’s search for a scientific breakthrough; that is, until the lab members are spurred into action by a string of mysterious happenings before stumbling upon an unexpected success—the Phone Microwave can send emails to the past, altering the flow of history. (from MAL)

psgels said:

“There is one thing at which Steins;Gate is unrivaled at compared to anything else that aired this year: its plot. If it’s originality, creative twists and multi layers that you want, then this is a must-watch. This has a bit of a slow start, but as the series goes on its intricately woven plot about time travel shines like no other and this show is masterful at combining seemingly insignificant hooks into gripping plot twist… The lead characters’ monologues in particular are well written, but on top of that this is a series that really did its research into time travel. It may not present the most logical way that time travel might be possible (I mean, there are still parts where you’re going to have to suspend your disbelief), but it’s very well researched.”

 

This poll is no longer accepting votes

What will you be watching this fall?
VoteResults

 

There are some rules, though

RULE #1:  NO MIDDLE GROUND. You can’t vote for both. It has to be either Madoka or Steins;Gate. After all this is an objective of the poll.

RULE #2: NO MULTIPLE VOTE. One vote per person only.

RULE #3: NO INSULTS. It’s perfectly fine that people have different opinions and we respect that. Don’t ruin the fun by berating, harassing or taking it too personally.

Apart from those rules, anything goes. As this is just purely an experiment to see if you viewers find it interesting, there is no time limit for this first boxing match. Please vote and if you like, tell us more about your choice in the comment below. Also, any recommendation how you would prefer us to do, content-wise and format-wise (even if you want to tell us to stop this) would be very welcome as well. If you think of any interesting pairs for the next show-down, drop us a line as well. For now, HAPPY VOTING!