Higurashi is at its strongest when it is concerned with trauma, both on a personal and a communal level. When it understands the effects trauma can have on someone, and when it dearly wishes to find some way out of the cycles of violence that can so often cause traumatised individuals, groups and generations to, knowingly or unknowingly, condemn others to trauma also. Whilst these are words that don't always apply to Higurashi on a broader level, in its exploration of these themes Higurashi feels both mature and astute; there are so many moments when someone's reaction to the trauma they've experienced or are experiencing feels painfully, heartbreakingly, incisively on-point.
This element of Higurashi is so successful in part because Ryukishi has a deep empathy for his characters. He has an unwillingness to wholly discard someone for their misdeeds, and a deep desire to look inside people and see what makes them tick, what makes people choose the paths they do, and wants you to understand this also. There's one particular instance where I can't bring myself to be onboard with his hardline approach of "hate the sin and not the sinner", and this approach feels to me incongruous with the fact that there are characters in the story that are just wholly irredeemable (Satoko's uncle, for instance), but it's hard to deny there's something compelling about how much Ryukishi cares, and him asking you to try and care just a little bit more too.
Beyond all of this, Higurashi is concerned with generational divides, small village cultures on the edge of being wiped out by modernisation and a fury at the heartlessness of bureaucracy and how it leaves people to drown, with paranoia and fear and the kind of deep, unrelenting love that would have you tear apart everything for someone, with hope and despair and miracles. Higurashi is also concerned with friendship, and despite "the power of friendship" being one of the most worn out and uninspired themes for anime, manga and (I assume) visual novels it actually manages to make such a deeply impassioned plea towards this that I was just entirely hooked in by Higurashi's beating heart.
These are the highs of Higurashi, but it is also ultimately an often-uneven experience. There is a small amount of content here that is indefensible, and which I'm shocked I don't see more condemnation of. Basically any scene set in Angel Mort is just a lock to star creepy sexualisation of teenage girls played up for humour and treated as just completely acceptable, multiple side-character adults in the story make occasional creepy comments along these lines also, and a key character, Irie, is obsessed with the idea of putting one of the game's youngest characters in a maid outfit and marrying her. This content accounts for maybe 3% of the game if I had to guess, so a very minor amount, but it's all just wretched. It's so bizarre too because elsewhere Higurashi is able to render its women with remarkable depth, taking common character archetypes and ultimately subverting just about every expectation you enter with about them in ways that feel natural and which let you really understand how each character ticks by the end of the story, and yet despite this it just can't consistently Be Normal about them at all and just has to have its creepy moments. A couple of the Angel Mort scenes genuinely made me feel a bit ill to read and I would not blame someone for just refusing to read Higurashi because of this content.
More broadly, Higurashi is also desperately in need of a harsher editor at points. Higurashi's eight chapters combined are over one and a half million words long, or longer than reading the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy three times over, and took me 100 hours to finish (which I gather is faster than most people, even). During my readthrough I had multiple extended breaks, which is partially just that my life has been busy this past year, but partially that Higurashi has a habit of stretching out its slice-of-life scenes, confused metaphor-laden inner-monologues and moments of hopeless despair far beyond their point being effectively made. My final break from Higurashi lasted four months, only for me to discover upon my return that the final chapter, beyond a certain point, starts to descend into what feels at times like third-rate fanfiction, and it left me wishing that Ryukishi knew how to communicate his story a little bit more succinctly rather than stretching things on beyond the point where all the intrigue had been quelled and all the questions answered.
A mixed bag, then, but one with a lot to say and a lot it believes in, with an amazing sense of mystery, and some lovable characters that have a lot more going on that you first suspect. Wildly imperfect, at times exhausting or even just reprehensible, but fascinating and with a lot of heart behind its horror. I can't say that I would ever recommend Higurashi, but I did get a lot from the experience.
This element of Higurashi is so successful in part because Ryukishi has a deep empathy for his characters. He has an unwillingness to wholly discard someone for their misdeeds, and a deep desire to look inside people and see what makes them tick, what makes people choose the paths they do, and wants you to understand this also. There's one particular instance where I can't bring myself to be onboard with his hardline approach of "hate the sin and not the sinner", and this approach feels to me incongruous with the fact that there are characters in the story that are just wholly irredeemable (Satoko's uncle, for instance), but it's hard to deny there's something compelling about how much Ryukishi cares, and him asking you to try and care just a little bit more too.
Beyond all of this, Higurashi is concerned with generational divides, small village cultures on the edge of being wiped out by modernisation and a fury at the heartlessness of bureaucracy and how it leaves people to drown, with paranoia and fear and the kind of deep, unrelenting love that would have you tear apart everything for someone, with hope and despair and miracles. Higurashi is also concerned with friendship, and despite "the power of friendship" being one of the most worn out and uninspired themes for anime, manga and (I assume) visual novels it actually manages to make such a deeply impassioned plea towards this that I was just entirely hooked in by Higurashi's beating heart.
These are the highs of Higurashi, but it is also ultimately an often-uneven experience. There is a small amount of content here that is indefensible, and which I'm shocked I don't see more condemnation of. Basically any scene set in Angel Mort is just a lock to star creepy sexualisation of teenage girls played up for humour and treated as just completely acceptable, multiple side-character adults in the story make occasional creepy comments along these lines also, and a key character, Irie, is obsessed with the idea of putting one of the game's youngest characters in a maid outfit and marrying her. This content accounts for maybe 3% of the game if I had to guess, so a very minor amount, but it's all just wretched. It's so bizarre too because elsewhere Higurashi is able to render its women with remarkable depth, taking common character archetypes and ultimately subverting just about every expectation you enter with about them in ways that feel natural and which let you really understand how each character ticks by the end of the story, and yet despite this it just can't consistently Be Normal about them at all and just has to have its creepy moments. A couple of the Angel Mort scenes genuinely made me feel a bit ill to read and I would not blame someone for just refusing to read Higurashi because of this content.
More broadly, Higurashi is also desperately in need of a harsher editor at points. Higurashi's eight chapters combined are over one and a half million words long, or longer than reading the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy three times over, and took me 100 hours to finish (which I gather is faster than most people, even). During my readthrough I had multiple extended breaks, which is partially just that my life has been busy this past year, but partially that Higurashi has a habit of stretching out its slice-of-life scenes, confused metaphor-laden inner-monologues and moments of hopeless despair far beyond their point being effectively made. My final break from Higurashi lasted four months, only for me to discover upon my return that the final chapter, beyond a certain point, starts to descend into what feels at times like third-rate fanfiction, and it left me wishing that Ryukishi knew how to communicate his story a little bit more succinctly rather than stretching things on beyond the point where all the intrigue had been quelled and all the questions answered.
A mixed bag, then, but one with a lot to say and a lot it believes in, with an amazing sense of mystery, and some lovable characters that have a lot more going on that you first suspect. Wildly imperfect, at times exhausting or even just reprehensible, but fascinating and with a lot of heart behind its horror. I can't say that I would ever recommend Higurashi, but I did get a lot from the experience.