Great set-up, good start! unfortunately, even with a walkthrough at your side, the game quality gets worse as the game goes on.

There being like 1 or 2 major softlock moments per chapter is unacceptable.

If I pick up an item too early or hand in an item too early, boom. Cannot complete the game.
These are bugs that were in the original but they faithfully kept for the remaster, is my understanding.

The most annoying softlock required many game restarts. Every time I'd interact with a story important puzzle, id fall through the map endlessly.

0 idea why or how, as i did the puzzle flawlessly first try, but reloaded a save because i missed an achievement. It was this second attempt to solve the puzzle that slowed everything down to a halt.
Again, this bug is 25 years old.

The most jarring part about the remaster is the load times are practically instant. This makes for pretty uncomfortable pacing. You'll be somewhere completely new, with a new cast of characters, seeing the aftermath of something that was implied to happen off screen. One minute you're black mailing a lawyer to handle a case for you, the next millisecond you're seeing the aftermath of said trial. It's genuinely discombobulating.

Map navigation can be a pain in the ass where you'll click where you want to go, double click to run, and the game is supposed to calculate the best path. Your dude will stop, turn, take weird detours, get stuck- I end up mashing click like an RTS to get around faster. Some rooms are so difficult to find the right area to click on so I switch to walking with arrow keys when close enough.

Inventory is slow to navigate with no indication what item is next in queue. You click inventory, Manny pulls out 1 item from his coat. Click left or right arrow to cycle through. Which should i choose? What will get to the item i want, fastest? Who knows. Hope you picked the right one, else you watch Manny pull out, and put away each trinket you own.

Puzzles and progression are trial and error. Pick up everything you see, hand over every item you have to every NPC to see what they do. This wouldn't be so much of a problem (it sucks) if there weren't so many softlock pitfalls. I'm actively punished for doing things out of order! And not every softlock is obvious, oh no. You could feasibly keep playing a bit longer, not knowing when you'll reach an impasse.

The audio balance is pretty good. Unsure if that's thanks in part of the remaster, but a lot of games like this can struggle with the dialogue being clear or leveled.
The remaster looks nice! The shadows on the main character as I walk around is impressive.

Great set-up, good start! unfortunately, even with a walkthrough at your side, the game quality gets worse as the game goes on.

There being like 1 or 2 major softlock moments per chapter is unacceptable.

If I pick up an item too early or hand in an item too early, boom. Cannot complete the game.
These are bugs that were in the original but they faithfully kept for the remaster, is my understanding.

The most annoying softlock required many game restarts. Every time I'd interact with a story important puzzle, id fall through the map endlessly.

0 idea why or how, as i did the puzzle flawlessly first try, but reloaded a save because i missed an achievement. It was this second attempt to solve the puzzle that slowed everything down to a halt.
Again, this bug is 25 years old.

The most jarring part about the remaster is the load times are practically instant. This makes for pretty uncomfortable pacing. You'll be somewhere completely new, with a new cast of characters, seeing the aftermath of something that was implied to happen off screen. One minute you're black mailing a lawyer to handle a case for you, the next millisecond you're seeing the aftermath of said trial. It's genuinely discombobulating.

Map navigation can be a pain in the ass where you'll click where you want to go, double click to run, and the game is supposed to calculate the best path. Your dude will stop, turn, take weird detours, get stuck- I end up mashing click like an RTS to get around faster. Some rooms are so difficult to find the right area to click on so I switch to walking with arrow keys when close enough.

Inventory is slow to navigate with no indication what item is next in queue. You click inventory, Manny pulls out 1 item from his coat. Click left or right arrow to cycle through. Which should i choose? What will get to the item i want, fastest? Who knows. Hope you picked the right one, else you watch Manny pull out, and put away each trinket you own.

Puzzles and progression are trial and error. Pick up everything you see, hand over every item you have to every NPC to see what they do. This wouldn't be so much of a problem (it sucks) if there weren't so many softlock pitfalls. I'm actively punished for doing things out of order! And not every softlock is obvious, oh no. You could feasibly keep playing a bit longer, not knowing when you'll reach an impasse.

The audio balance is pretty good. Unsure if that's thanks in part of the remaster, but a lot of games like this can struggle with the dialogue being clear or leveled.
The remaster looks nice! The shadows on the main character as I walk around is impressive.

The only redeeming part about this game is the character design and the characters themselves. I have never been so frustrated with a system’s combat mechanics before. If the fights lasted 15 seconds it wouldn’t be a big deal but when I was playing the average fight was about 2-5 minutes. This compounded with having to watch paradigm shift animations every single time and a lot of down time while waiting for ATB gauges to fill just made me pull out my phone and mash square for about 45 seconds until I needed to switch paradigms to heal up. The air ship section is finally what made me drop the game. Going through ~4 hours of battles just made me so disillusioned that I didn’t want to play any more after I beat the boss there. The story is okay as far as I am concerned and the real meat of the game is the characters. I love all of them and I really want to know what happens and that’s the only reason that I may pick the game up again in the future.

Let me preface this review by saying that I read Umineko first. Having said that I absolutely loved Umineko and I 100% had too high of expectations for the first episode and that’s on me. I really liked the slice of life section of the first episode. I didn’t dislike any of the characters and seeing them interact in goofy ways just made me happy. That being said the first twist with Rena was absolutely incredible. The tension was palpable and I was genuinely creeped out and it was awesome. Unfortunately I didn’t feel the same way about the mochi scene, locked door scene, or the final scene with Rena and Mion. The closest I felt to that was when Mion was talking to Keiichi in the schoolyard with that eyes cg. Not having the following scenes be bigger and better than the first one just made me a bit bummed out. I think it stems from how sudden the change is in the first scene and the other ones there’s no sudden shock because you’re expecting and ready for it. The mystery seems interesting and complex right now and I’m excited to dig my teeth into it more. I haven’t really done any theory crafting so far but half my buds say it’s solvable and the other half say it isn’t lol. Overall I think Higurashi episode 1 was a fine start and I hope that I can look back at it and appreciate it more once I’ve started reading more.