Seikimatsu Occult Gakuin

The story revolves around Maya, the daughter of the former Headmaster of Waldstein Academy, and a time traveling agent Fumiaki Uchida. In the year 2012, the world had been invaded by aliens and time travelers were sent back to the year 1999 in order to find and destroy the Nostradamus Key, which Nostradamus Prophecy foretold as what would bring about the apocalypse. The series then turns to the year 1999, where Maya returns to the Academy with the intention of destroying the Academy by superseding her late father's position as the principal. Her plan was interrupted when she meets Fumiaki and learns of the forthcoming destruction. Despite being distrusting towards Fumiaki, they form a pact to look for the Nostradamus Key.

In order to find the Nostradamus Key, time agents were provided with specially created cell phones. When a user finds an object of interest, by thinking of destroying it and taking a photo, and if the resulting image is that of a peaceful world, then the subject is the Nostradamus Key. Conversely, if the subject is not the Nostradamus Key, then the photo displays destruction. By using the phone, Maya and Fumiaki investigates occult occurrences as they occur in the town.

(Source: Wikipedia)

Kumashiro, Maya Main

Hikasa, Youko Japanese

Uchida, Fumiaki Main

Mizushima, Daichuu Japanese

Kawashima, Chihiro Supporting

Kobayashi, Yuu Japanese

JK Supporting

Koyasu, Takehito Japanese

Naruse, Kozue Supporting

Hanazawa, Kana Japanese

Okamoto, Akari Supporting

Minase, Inori Japanese

Smile Supporting

Takahashi, Hiroki Japanese

Kuroki, Ami Supporting

Takagaki, Ayahi Japanese

Nakagawa, Mikaze Supporting

Chihara, Minori Japanese

Kuroki, Shige Supporting

Shimaka, Yuu Japanese

Iwasaki, Noriko Assistant Producer

Itou, Tomohiko Director, Episode Director, Storyboard

Tanaka, Kazuya Sound Director

Nakamura, Ryousuke Episode Director, Storyboard, Key Animation

Reviews

Apr 15, 2018

SplooshShot

Recommended

As noted in the title of the series, the occult is the main focus here. Slice of life, friendship, and good vs. evil are some of what you'll find with this anime. Love it or hate it, that'll depend upon your personal tastes. Elements of sci-fi, magic, and the occult are what you'll experience.

Story: 7/10
The story starts and ends with a great bang. Everything in the middle may be slow to some, which is quite typical of having slice of life. Given the fact that the series is only 13 episodes, the story would not be very detailed. Certain things may not be answered, certain ... things may simply be answered through implications. If given a bigger budget, perhaps extending the anime to 24 or 26 episodes would enable the series to achieve a more detailed story. Thus, pushing the score to 9/10.

Art: 9/10
Not much need to be said here, you'll see with your eyes. The animation is quite good. Everything is animated pretty well. The facial expressions of the characters are done well. Maya's annoyed and angry faces made towards our male protagonist, Fumiaki. Given the short length of this series, one major focus should be its animation, and it has done well.

Sound: 9/10
First off, the OP/ED songs were great. I especially loved the ED song, "Kimi ga Iru Basho". The seiyuus were great. Emotions were heard. The BGM hits the mark, to give an "occult" feel of eerie and mystery.

Character: 8/10
Similar to story, if given more episodes, characters would have been more fleshed out. But, still job well done. Maya is a strong, independent, young woman. Fumiaki was a coward, but eventually steps up to the plate. Between the two supporting characters Smile and JK, JK stands out more. Smile is your usual tough guy, who has a soft spot. JK is an overweight goth, who seemingly isn't very dependable. But of course, looks can be deceiving. JK is quite dependable as it turns out. He not only helps out his friends in need, but even has his unique skill to "point" them in the right direction. Vice principle, Chihiro is another character that stands out. She is usually serious and professional. But when it comes to her love life, she gets very girly.

Enjoyment: 9/10
Only those that like this anime for what it is, will enjoy it. It's an anime that showcases friendship, magic, time travel, and various problems that people deal with in real life. Many viewers mull over the aspects of time travel used in this anime. Time travel will not be the same in every setting that it's used in. You have to keep an open mind and go along with what the author created in their story.

Overall: 8/10
For an anime with only 13 episodes to work with, it's good. You'll come to like it as well, if the genre appeals to you, if you can keep an open mind, and if you don't question the paradoxes of time traveling. At the end of the day, this anime sends us off with some great messages.

Reviewer’s Rating: 8

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Jun 23, 2019

TevishSzat

Mixed Feelings

Occult Academy is a show that ultimately doesn't work, but at the same time manages to be kind of fascinating in its failure. It's not down to any single factor why Occult Academy doesn't work, and it has its share of strengths, though to be fair there are plenty of weaknesses to pick on. However, the way all the pieces go together makes the show overall one I can't recommend.

With the exceptions of the two leads, the characters are essentially one note each... but they play their notes well enough that I don't really hold it against them. A season of anime ... doesn't have all the time in the world, and the secondary character tier in this one is big enough that trying to give them all independent growth arcs just would have made the whole thing muddy and drowned out the plot. It still would have been nice if we got a little more out of the friends themselves, or especially the Vice Principal character, but of the show's sins, this is really the least.

The leads are another story. Maya is one of the high points of the show. She has a very well-defined character and a strong arc. She's not amazing, though – many shows as have been saved by getting a truly jaw-dropping character or two, but Occult Academy is not among them. I dare say, despite being pretty good, she could have been a lot smarter in a stronger production. More on the vast depths of 'could have been' later. Bunmei, on the other hand, is one of the weakest parts of the show for most of its run. I get that he's kind of like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo, the random dude thrown into mysterious nonsense who is possibly rightly terrified of everything, but Shaggy (in most incarnations at least) may be a coward, but he's not a blowhard or otherwise unpleasant. Bunmei, straight out, doesn't come off as a very good person in the first half of the show. And even later, when he has one or two redeeming scenes to put him in a better place for the climax, he's still not very fun to watch.

I find myself somewhat disappointed as well that the show doesn't really look like anything. It's got a great theme for visual wonder – the Occult! This is begging for a lot of dark shadows and tricks of cinematography to create a pervasive mood in the scenes, and really bring out the mystery and fear. Or if you want to see things clearly, it practically demands some creative design for creatures and effects. Occult Academy never does any of this. The designs aren't utterly uncreative, but they don't have any touches to make them memorable or distinctive in any way. For a subject that should be trivial to make memorable, I think I'm pretty much going to forget all of it, and that's just sad. The overall style, too, isn't very distinct. Most of the scenes, this could be just about any show. Except where the characters slip off-model and end up not looking very good, there's nothing that would make this stand out from any other show with a more every-day sort of setting and theme. It doesn't leave a mark, doesn't make an impression, and a lot of the time doesn't really look good either.

With the sound, there's nothing wrong with it, but there's nothing right either. Everything is either bog standard or easily forgotten. The voice actors didn't fail to sell their characters, but didn't really leave an impression either.

Then we come to the biggest stumbling block, the story line. The plot of this show is all over the place. Few are the shows that can work in Aliens, Time Travelers, Psychic Powers, Ghosts, Cryptids, Demons... yeah, there's a lot of stuff going on, and it's painfully not consistent. And you might ask yourself “Why should it be? The theme here is 'the occult' not a subset of it!”. And you'd be right, but that doesn't mean it's good. And it kind of highlights what I think is behind most of the elements of Occult Academy that don't work.

Put simply, the creators behind Occult Academy had some ideas about what they wanted in their show, and what they wanted their show to be, and they went for all of those without taking a moment to understand what it would all mean for the big picture. For instance, the creators decided they wanted this to include everything and the kitchen sink – an approach that might have worked in an X-Files sort of “monster of the week” setup, but which doesn't pay off when there's a time limit and climax, and an overriding goal that our heroes should be paying attention to. And there's a moment, towards the end of the show, where we get the big “Future refused to change” moment. And it's a good moment, but it's not in a scenario where it really makes sense. The reveal of the villain is in a similar space: I get what they were going for, and why someone would have said in abstract “I want this to happen”, but there wasn't enough care taken to actually have the moment land; it was both too easy to guess because huge amounts of run time would have failed to be germane to anything otherwise, and impossible because there were no in-character hints or clues as to the outcome of the mystery. There's yet another scene in the final sequence, and it's supposed to be a touching scene, but it falls flat because the character involved never got enough earnest development, they were treated as a joke so when they try to get used for heavy drama it doesn't land. The climax as well is a good sequence, probably one of only two action sequences in the show (along with the fake-out climax) to be worth watching even if it still wasn't amazing in the pantheon of anime as a whole, but it happens so quickly that you can't really enjoy it. When a big, climactic fight comes out in a show like Shakugan no Shana, or even a generally weak show that knows a little better about what to do here like Star Driver, the show works to get you excited for the action, building up what's coming before actually delivering. Occult Academy just throws you what it has cold, because someone really wanted that moment, or that scene, or that theme, and didn't care how it went together.

As a result, the pacing of the show is terrible, even if the pacing of scenes or sometimes even episodes is good. How and when major parts of the show are addressed or, more often, not addressed is just plain wrong. Even if all the parts were good (and most are just serviceable, really) the result would still be bad just because of the incompetent assembly.

There is a part of me that wanted to like Occult Academy, and gave it more than a fair chance. I love the subject matter (though it doesn't go into it much after the very start). I like the fact that it's original, when so many shows are adaptions. But none of that saves it from a presentation that really needed a round or two of rewrites, at multiple stages in the creation process, before reaching the viewer at last. With more effort, it could have been a good show. But it needed to either be a kitchen sink affair with no harsh deadline or obvious end, or else it needed to tighten its focus and tie things into the main threat. It needed to either tell a better mystery with clues and suspense as well as an unsurprising surprise, or it needed to drop the forced twist and tell a more straightforward story. No show can be all things to all people, and, as a writer, if a scene or a moment or even a theme doesn't work, you cut it out for the good of the whole. Nobody went back and edited Occult Academy, and that is why it failed.


SCORE BREAKDOWN
Story: 3
Art: 5
Sound: 6
Character: 5
Enjoyment: 3
Total: 5 (4.4)

Final Verdict: Even for a real nut who'll get all the little references to occult phenomena, this show just isn't worth it. The good ideas that are in there needed to be in a production with a lot more polish, down to the basic level, in order to show any strength.

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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Nov 7, 2020

superuber27

Not Recommended

Clumsy is the word I would use to best describe Occult Academy. I'm not going to lie, it hooked me decently well with the first episode. The setup isn't bad, as there's a a good driving force for the plot and already several threads to explore. I took a pretty good liking to some of the setting and character design too. However, it then goes on to fumble the execution at almost every turn.

Character writing, jokes, story beats, and world building are all wonky. I have never before seen a show where it feels so clear as to what they're going for, and yet where ... the execution feels so incomplete. Nothing is so bad as to be obnoxious, as is the case with most bad anime, and yet it feels almost like it's literally missing scenes at many points. It's the oddest thing, the pacing is so jarring when it comes to these areas. Characters are treated as if they've been well established when we've barely met them, and wild concepts are introduced out of left field while characters show almost no reaction to the life-changing implications. Central aspects of the setting and characters are either never set up properly at all, or are set up more than halfway through the show, which ends up leaving a massive black mark throughout the viewing experience.

So what we're left with in practice is a show that sets up a main hook real fast before spending 10 episodes on frivolous bullshit that in hindsight forms a complete picture, but in the moment is terribly bland, poorly directed, and not very entertaining to watch. There's a lot of wasted screen-time with repetitive character moments that advance nothing and are grossly predictable and transparent. I called one of the main twists of the entire show in the second episode, and all the episodic storylines in-between the main plot are no better. The world's mechanics are pretty terrible too, as most of the supernatural aspects of the show display wildly inconsistent behavior and illicit head-scratching non-reactions from the main cast.

It's hard to even structure a sensible explanation for just how much the show is lacking, because every facet of the pacing and directing is tripping over something at every turn. I'm talking fundamental screw-ups, down to even basic failures at establishing the space the characters inhabit or how they enter and exit a scene. There's some pretty lame fight choreography to that effect as well. To convey the disorganization in my thoughts here, I think it's fair to say that the show is just overall poorly directed, and it affects absolutely everything negatively, in ways both big and small.

All that said, the finale is a fairly entertaining watch, at least relative to the rest of the show. It quickly wraps up the main story threads and reincorporates the few character developments that were covered in a fairly standard but at least correct and satisfying way. Mechanical errors notwithstanding, although I had already given up on the show putting any effort into that by this point.

On paper, this show has a decent setup, setting, and story beats, but the pacing and execution is just grueling at times. If not for the positive impression left on me by the ending, I would've landed it closer to a 3 than a 4. As such, I really don't recommend anyone watch this. Most of the runtime is spent waffling around not delivering on the main premises implied by an either an apocalypse prevention scenario or an occult academy, and the things it does spend its time on are done pretty poorly at that. I only kept watching it because the more unconventional and slightly baffling moments in the show intrigued me enough to want to know where else it was going to end up, but most of it came up thoroughly disappointing.

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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