You can still watch the entire series on Crunchyroll at the moment for free. If you've been thinking about watching I'd suggest doing so. I'd highly suggest this if you like a little sci-fi and horror mixed into a school slice of life story about the end of the world and the people set on preventing that. Occult Academy (wiki) does suffer a bit from the lead in episode with a plot followed by several not really important episodic episodes followed at the end with a handful of episodes that actually solve the original plot. Really by episode 10 you're thinking to yourself...uh don't they have to get cracking on their real problem and not chasing after some little girl's ghost.
Thankfully for me the characters and their interactions make up for this and the hinting at something else that keeps you going. During the entire run of the episodes you're pretty much left in the same boat as the characters, you don't get to see everything else and get to be in on the joke so to speak. So while you can see little things here and there you are pretty much left out of the loop until the main characters find something out. This is a big turning point at the end when the world and plot start to unravel before you and you start to understand everything at that point. Once that happened for me I understood where the anime was going and why it played out like it did. If you watch it all the way through there is the big pay off but if you don't you'll probably come away thinking that this was a terrible anime series.
So yeah the story. The series takes place at the Occult Academy. A school set up to study the world of the occult in Japan. The school was started by a nutty professor who dies at the beginning of the series which brings his daughter Maya back to the school. She becomes the new principal of the school in 1999. In 2012 the world has become a waste land invaded by aliens. Humans have developed a way to travel back in time to keep the events of 1999 from happening so they can save the world. They send a young man, Bunmei, back in time to find the Nostradamus Key and save the world. Maya is a occult hating woman who doesn't take shit from anyone while Bunmei is a scaredy-cat who wishes he wasn't the one chosen to find the key. Together they make up a very unlikely team as they look for the key to destroy it.
A lot happens and low and behold Bunmei falls in love with a Porsche driving waitress who oh noes turns out to actually be a black mage and the main villain (although not the key) of the show and the reason for a lot of the side stories. Oddly enough another woman is also in love with Bunmei. She is the vice-principal of the school who seems like a mean person until holy what she is actually turns out to be one of the good guys and is a white mage. That's one of the big turning points in the story. Everyone is fighting and they do destroy the black mage in the end but LOL she's not the key so they still have to find the key.
While all this is going on the original Bunmei is out there running around and hey there's that whole time paradox thing about the same matter can't occupy the same space issue. Turns out that the elder Bunmei is actually the key as sure enough the alien invasion starts off just as it's supposed to. Then we get the second major turning points. Bunmei a pretty hapless and wimpy dude actually grows a pair and destroys the invading alien forces and well gets himself killed in the end destroying the key (he's the key LOL) and saving the world. Leaving Maya a bit sad because some where in there she actually grew fond of the dude and instead meets up with, surprise again, the very much not dead father and also ends up taking care of the young Bunmei.
I really wanted to see the older Maya as in the end they fast forward back to 2012 and look at how the world has changed since they were able to prevent the alien invasion. If you haven't had enough of the series yet, you're in luck as there will be 4 short mini episodes included on the DVD/BD releases and if I remember right an OAD also later in the year that will be released with a manga vol.
You can check out a trailer for Occult Academy here --
