“There is no such thing as the Occult” says the tagline on the show explicitly about investigation of occult (or seemingly occult) phenomena. If that doesn’t let you know you’re in for at least a strange time, I don’t know what would.
In the honorable line of the Science Adventure series (Semicolon series as some prefer, owing their particular stylized titles), Occultic;Nine strikes me as… unique. That is, I will admit, putting it somewhat gently. Occultic;Nine doesn’t quite fit either together or into the anime format the way that even the weaker among its fellows fit. Does that mean it’s the weakest of the series? Not necessarily.
While Occultic;Nine technically has nine major characters (which is one explanation for the title), its primary star is Yuta Gamon, a kind of sleazy and self-interested high school boy who, rather than actually attending class, runs an occult news website, hoping to get rich off of running a blog rather than working. He’s joined in this effort by Ryouka Narusawa, or Ryo-tas, this show’s ultra-busty and extra-energetic riff on Steins;Gate‘s Mayuri.
I say that she’s a riff on Mayuri in that she’s the nice but not particularly perceptive long-term starting friend to a male lead who’s kind of an eccentric grump. I guess you could say that Aki was also like this in Robotics;Notes, but she was more of a lead in her own right. For better or worse, the other roles we’ll be encountering aren’t really similar to other patterns in the Science Adventure Series
Yuta Gamon also kicks us off with one of the show’s biggest problems: pacing. You see, Yuta does a fair amount of narration, and when he does it’s like he’s reading off the fine print in an advert that the maker doesn’t want you to hear, since he’s going a mile a minute. Even with subtitles and a good reading pace it’s kind of hard to follow along with his machine-gun narration. But that’s not really the problem. If a character was talking like he was on fast forward because that was a quirk of the character, that would be one thing, but that’s not what Yuta Gamon is like. Rather, he gives us this high-speed narration because, seemingly, the show has a lot of words worth of exposition and narration to get through and not enough time to do so. And while Yuta is the worst offender, most of the characters seem to be getting through their lines as fast as possible most of the time, making the compression rather conspicuous.
Personally, I’m guessing that Occultic;Nine would have been comfortable at an awkward number of episodes, something like sixteen or eighteen that couldn’t really be produced. Chaos;Head could go fast, but the story was contained enough that it didn’t really feel like it was squeezed into the twelve episode format. Steins;Gate and Robotics;Notes were longer shows, and they used the time they had to really explore the characters and build up atmosphere. Occultic;Nine has a huge cast and too much story for its run time, but maybe not enough to quite make a show literally twice its length. Then again, we’ll never know for sure
In any case, Yuta seeks an interview with a girl who is technically his classmate, Miyu Aikawa, because she does fortune-telling at a level where she’s on TV, and the publicity would be good for his site. She actually ends up joining the site team, which sends Yuta looking for the next score: an interview with Professor Hashigami, a scholar of the occult. Yuta visits the professor’s office only to discover that he’s been murdered, a dying message written in his own blood. A mysterious voice on the radio instructs Yuta to remove the professor’s gold tooth, which he does (finding it to be a key) before fleeing the scene.
All the while, the show cuts to what seem like random events with other characters, just to introduce them and make sure you know they’re in this, like a girl who specializes in curses, a figure who seems to be some kind of ghost or devil that attends her, a very strange detective who looks like a kid, a government agent with psychic powers, a doujin artist who can see the future, the estranged occult-hating son of Professor Hashigami, and a relatively normal reporter.
I do think that all their mysteries are eventually resolved and their individual plots more or less tied in to a web with the main plot, but the early bits of the show try to hard to keep them in focus without, to say it again, the time to actually do so. The professor’s son is probably the most significant and well-connected of the lot, and the detective is at least on the Hashigami murder case (and thus Yuta’s tail, especially given how much stuff he touched at the crime scene) but the rest have a problem being “this other weird thing”
While Occultic;Nine focuses better than Occult Academy did, in a sense they do share something of a weakness. Both shows have “the occult” as a major theme, and the occult is a broad category, where touching on all of it or even a decent selection thereof means grasping for too many disparate parts, at least for a show that wants to have a more linear and meaningful story, rather than an anthology show like Mushi-shi. But, at the same time, the shows set themselves up to have to try. Maybe some day we’ll get a really good show that tells a solid plot while also using a broad selection of occult trappings, and in so doing it will prove me wrong, but right now it seems like something has got to give.
Part of how Occultic;Nine does better is that there actually is a decent backbone that reaches the whole way through. True to this being the Science Adventure series, we get some good psuedo-scientific “rational” explanations for the phenomena we see in this show, and they all pretty much tie back to one big theory and an evil conspiracy working with it.
At the risk of getting ahead of myself, while we do have appearances by other occult entries, ranging from older-than-dirt ideas of black magic to the internet-famous Kotoribako, the phenomenon we are ultimately most interested in is ghosts, and the cluster of related ideas to the theory of ghosts that is actually presented. It’s not obvious at first that this is where Occultic;Nine is going, which I guess is part of the charm.
Where it goes more quickly is to a strange mass-drowning incident, with a staggering number of victims who seemed to have simply walked into the lake to die. At the same time as this is being investigated, Miyu looks for a missing friend, who turns out to have been murdered by a weird and very creepy albino boy to make his version of a Kotoribako. Albino boy isn’t connected to much, but he does seem to be “in the know” and gives us some oblique hints towards the actual goings-on.
Meanwhile, the professor’s son, with Yuta’s grudging assistance, breaks much of his father’s code, revealing a list of names (written before the incident) of the people who drowned in the park. And, troublingly enough, it seems that the names of most of the major characters are on the list. Yuta confirms this, to the tune of a major breakdown, when he visits the temporary morgue and finds his own body among the dead.
This kicks Occultic;Nine into its second phase, where most of the characters would seem to be ghosts and we start to learn about a shadowy evil organization (The Society of the Eight Gods of Fortune, presumably another arm of the global conspiracy that controls SERN in Steins;Gate and presents as the Council of 300 in Robotics;Notes).
We also start to get our scientific explanations. The difference between ghosts that can bee seen and interact with the world and those that don’t exist in a meaningful way? Scandium. Injections of elemental Scandium that deposit in the body of the afflicted before they die and presumably act to imprint their brain waves. The conspiracy wants to use a combination of the quasi-immortality this offers and the vulnerability of Scandium-injected to a crazy Tesla-designed electromagnetic installation in order to both persist eternally and control the minds of the world’s elites, just like they controlled the cast (and hundreds of others) into suiciding in the lake.
At the same time, the ghost/familiar type person reveals (more or less) that he’s more astrally projecting than anything. And, importantly, while his soul is separated from his body, time runs differently. Specifically, he can experience days where only minutes have passed while he returns. This reveals that the cast has a window to escape drowning to death, if they can return to their bodies before nine real minutes have passed that would put them beyond saving.
Thus, the race ends up being on in order to both stop the conspiracy from taking over the world and give causality the finger by getting everyone back to their bodies before they actually expire, with a conspiracy-aligned exorcist hunting down and disappearing ghosts. This is aided by Ryotas, who it turns out is possessed by the ghost of Nikola Tesla’s daughter, here to stop her father’s legacy from being used for evil. She was also the voice on Yuta’s radio who told him to extract the tooth (among other things) and helps him with the whole “beat the conspiracy” side of the plan.
Most of the cast manages to get back to their bodies without much time to spare, but Yuta’s extra mission takes him into what would seem to be overtime, wielding his own Tesla-tech (courtesy of Ryotas/the ghost) to interfere with the central device, called Odd Eye, at a critical moment that will mean the conspiracy’s leader simply dies rather than becoming immortal. With a super-powered radio and the heroic sacrifice of the ghost girl, Yuta takes it out, but does he have enough time to also get back to his body?
Well, the show is kind of ambiguous on that. It’s not clear if he got back to his friends (possibly thanks to someone like Miyu helping resuscitate him), had to take his death by drowning and subsequent existence as a Scandium ghost (hence confirming his body among the deceased), or ascended to some sort of higher plane of existence. I’m oddly comfortable with that ambiguous ending, since frankly going all the way in on one side would have come off as too cloying for the series while the other would probably seem too miserable.
All in all, Occultic;Nine really does have one big, glaring problem, and that’s the pacing I mentioned earlier. It’s supposed to be a twisted atmospheric mystery, and those need to be slower. Maybe it even could have stretched to twenty four episodes – mysteries benefit from having a deliberate pace where the audience can really comprehend each piece we get and start to put them together, racing against the writers (who already know everything) revealing the answer. This is the foundation of “Fair play” style mysteries, but it can also apply to the rest of the genre.
Occultic;Nine is a mystery in a speculative fiction genre and it goes too fast to really process and understand what’s going on in the moment. Rather than being a Holmes-style mystery unraveling before your eyes or an engaging dive through a labyrinth of questions and answers, the show ends up coming off more like a Penn and Teller routine, where they explain the trick while performing it but do it so fast that you still don’t catch where the ball goes from cup to hand. That’s fine for a comedic magic act, but not so good here.
Occultic;Nine is a deeply flawed show… but it’s not really a bad show. When you get down to it, despite the pacing problems, the horror elements do basically work, and while the mystery aspects take their lumps, there are angles from which they function. The “dead all along” deal is a fairly good twist, the general feel does fit in with the Science Adventure series’ usual mix of what’s fun and what’s dark, and it handles the troublesome theme probably better than it could have.
Because of this, for all my complaints against it, Occultic;Nine still earns a C. It’s basically competent, and I don’t regret having watched it. I wouldn’t strongly recommend hunting it out unless you’re going for completion of the Science Adventure series, but there are worse ways to spend your time by far. If this was the old days I’d call it a series worthy of a rent if you’re in the mood, but probably not a buy.