The Outcast Season 1

一人之下 THE OUTCAST (Yi Ren Zhi Xia)

7.0(1)

Otaku Den

6.8(67,401)

MAL Score

Ranked #5953

Popularity #1279

Action
Supernatural
Super Power

Episodes: 12
Duration: 24 min per ep
Aired: Jul 8, 2016 to Sep 24, 2016
Status: Finished Airing

Synopsis

University student Zhang Chulan returns to his rural hometown only to discover his grandfather Zhang Xilin’s grave has been violated. While searching the cemetery for answers, he’s ambushed by a tomb raider posing under a false identity tied to his family, and ends up trapped in a nightmare of summoned zombies after his grandfather’s body is taken. With nowhere else to turn, Zhang Chulan survives by drawing on qi—the power his grandfather once taught him.

Back at school, the same tomb raider, Feng Baobao, reappears and pulls him into a hidden world of qi wielders. Working with a state-backed organization that manages these “outcasts,” she pressures Zhang Chulan into joining a delivery company that serves as a cover for their real operations. As competing factions close in on the mysterious ability he’s rumored to have inherited, Zhang Chulan is forced to navigate shifting loyalties and choose his allies carefully to stay alive.

Otaku Consensus

The Outcast finds its footing when Xin Wang’s direction moves beyond the cemetery-horror opening and commits to qi combat, factional intrigue, and the volatile chemistry between Zhang Chulan and Feng Baobao; its later choreography and increasingly layered plotting receive the strongest praise. The recurring weakness is the first arc, widely criticized as slow, tonally awkward, and misleading, while Mitsuo Mori’s series composition sometimes makes complexity feel like confusion. Its divided standing—6.82 from 67,378 MyAnimeList votes, a #5916 rank against #1278 popularity, and 65/100 on AniList—reflects a rough production with more compelling ideas than consistent execution.

Why You Should Watch

Watch The Outcast if you want Chinese cultivation logic inside a compact TV-anime season, with qi techniques, martial-arts exchanges, and secret-society politics taking priority over tournament formulas. It scratches the urban-supernatural itch of Jujutsu Kaisen and Mob Psycho 100, but its flavor is more wuxia: inherited disciplines, competing lineages, and fighters whose affiliations matter as much as raw power. The 12-episode run is especially suited to viewers who like abrasive comedy, morally opaque handlers, and a female co-lead whose deadpan unpredictability keeps every alliance unstable. Do not choose it for polished zombie horror—the cemetery material is an opening disguise, not the genre contract. Choose it if you can tolerate a clumsy, frequently criticized first arc to reach denser factional plotting and combat choreography that viewers consistently identify as the season’s payoff.

Key Characters

F
Feng Baobao(VA: Saori Hayami)
Baobao’s severe deadpan, missing memories, and unnervingly casual relationship with violence make her the show’s most distinctive source of both comedy and unease.
Z
Zhang Chulan(VA: Atsushi Tamaru)
Chulan stands out as a deliberately unglamorous superpowered lead whose crude, panicky public persona conceals sharper instincts for self-preservation and social maneuvering.

What Makes It Stand Out

1
The opening uses zombies and graveyard horror as a temporary genre frame before shifting toward urban fantasy, cultivation, and competing groups of superpowered martial artists. That structural bait-and-switch is also the season’s most divisive creative choice.
2
Rather than treating Feng Baobao as a supporting enigma, the series gives her main-character billing alongside Zhang Chulan; AniList’s Female Protagonist and Male Protagonist tags reflect that shared focus.
3
Viewers who persist beyond the opening repeatedly single out the later martial-arts choreography and qi-based confrontations as the production’s strongest material, with one IMDb assessment comparing its fight choreography to Jujutsu Kaisen.
4
Pandanium’s visual credits divide responsibilities among character designer Kiriponta, art director Seong-Uk Choi, color designer Arisa Komatsu, and director of photography Masaki Uemura, illustrating the specialized production pipeline behind the season.
5
Crunchyroll lists both Japanese and Mandarin audio, plus subtitles in at least 14 language or regional options, giving this Chinese-Japanese production an unusually broad multilingual presentation.

Fun Facts & Trivia

Fun fact 1: The credits distinguish between Dongman Tang’s Original Plan and Mi Er’s role as Original Creator, while Crunchyroll’s release carries a Tencent copyright notice.
Fun fact 2: Mitsuo Mori served simultaneously as assistant director and series composer. Kazuhiro Toda was also credited as an assistant director under director Xin Wang.
Fun fact 3: The Japanese leads pair Saori Hayami as Feng Baobao with Atsushi Tamaru as Zhang Chulan, giving the two central characters markedly contrasting vocal styles.
Fun fact 4: English-speaking fan communities frequently shorten Hitori no Shita: The Outcast to The Outcast because the romanized title invites an unintended English-language joke; one recommendation page explicitly cites that wordplay as its reason for avoiding the full title.
Fun fact 5: The season aired as 12 episodes from July 8 to September 24, 2016, and later registered 555 AniList favourites despite its comparatively modest 65/100 community score.