This review contains spoilers
It's very rare that a game goes back and retroactively makes everything else in the series worse. Somehow Matsuribayashi does this.
For starters, the backstory for Takano is just weak. I found myself not relating with her story, but instead finding it melodramatic and strangely simple in its psychological description. Overidentification with a caregiver begetting a Nietzschean God complex that lasts several decades, eclipsing all other pieces of personality? I understand that Miyoko is mad at God. I think that the way that we are to believe that this backstory — and her single-minded focus on her grandfather's research, who is essentially just Richard Dawkins trying to pawn off his ideological epidemiology thought exercise as actual biology? — is stronger than God and trapped two thousand people in a time loop lasting a century (seeing as they themselves remember the other timelines) ... just makes all these stories weaker, and makes her less mysterious and sort of less human, too.
"Perhaps that's the point," you say, "Takano is traumatised and never recovers by reaching out to others, instead maintaining a superficial friendliness even to her boyfriend." She holds the idiot ball forgetting her dad's only piece of advice in the sake of his death for months; and then she has an ultimately happy life afterward, except that her grandfather got a little humiliated this one time. I feel like there's so much room for change; while the other characters in this series change over a period of a week, we're to accept that Takano stayed like this her entire life, unrepentant to the end.
Anyway. The game then moves to a fragment section that I can understand but got frustrated by; after a while I had to start guessing which one to do next because the clue provided by the translation didn't line up with the information provided on a few different occasions.
After that, we have a chapter spanning about 3 and a half hours as we have an unbelievably long climax that leans on Ryukishi's weak points as a writer. It took a while for me to grasp why I didn't like the writing of the climax at all; it's that it's in third person omniscient. In it, we are constantly informed as to the current state of mind of a character to then justify why they're about to do the thing they're doing. This is, on one hand, necessary because we are jumping between characters too often; but it also inadvertently reveals how Ryukishi's process works, and why the other stories are so strong: he primes himself as to what a character is feeling, and then writes in first-person, and it works. It works so, so well in that perspective.
Because of this, the curtain falls a little and the magic is yet again just a little less magic in all the other stories...
Finally technically speaking this is the only game in the rereleased series that crashes. And it crashed a few times for me. So that just also frustrated me. I don't know.
Higurashi is a surprise Christian story, so that's nice, but I was hoping something would top Meakashi: the one that is an extremely intense and violent, slow self-destructive orgasm, culminating in a post-nut clarity as to what you should've done...that one can't be taken away, though. We always have Meakashi.
For starters, the backstory for Takano is just weak. I found myself not relating with her story, but instead finding it melodramatic and strangely simple in its psychological description. Overidentification with a caregiver begetting a Nietzschean God complex that lasts several decades, eclipsing all other pieces of personality? I understand that Miyoko is mad at God. I think that the way that we are to believe that this backstory — and her single-minded focus on her grandfather's research, who is essentially just Richard Dawkins trying to pawn off his ideological epidemiology thought exercise as actual biology? — is stronger than God and trapped two thousand people in a time loop lasting a century (seeing as they themselves remember the other timelines) ... just makes all these stories weaker, and makes her less mysterious and sort of less human, too.
"Perhaps that's the point," you say, "Takano is traumatised and never recovers by reaching out to others, instead maintaining a superficial friendliness even to her boyfriend." She holds the idiot ball forgetting her dad's only piece of advice in the sake of his death for months; and then she has an ultimately happy life afterward, except that her grandfather got a little humiliated this one time. I feel like there's so much room for change; while the other characters in this series change over a period of a week, we're to accept that Takano stayed like this her entire life, unrepentant to the end.
Anyway. The game then moves to a fragment section that I can understand but got frustrated by; after a while I had to start guessing which one to do next because the clue provided by the translation didn't line up with the information provided on a few different occasions.
After that, we have a chapter spanning about 3 and a half hours as we have an unbelievably long climax that leans on Ryukishi's weak points as a writer. It took a while for me to grasp why I didn't like the writing of the climax at all; it's that it's in third person omniscient. In it, we are constantly informed as to the current state of mind of a character to then justify why they're about to do the thing they're doing. This is, on one hand, necessary because we are jumping between characters too often; but it also inadvertently reveals how Ryukishi's process works, and why the other stories are so strong: he primes himself as to what a character is feeling, and then writes in first-person, and it works. It works so, so well in that perspective.
Because of this, the curtain falls a little and the magic is yet again just a little less magic in all the other stories...
Finally technically speaking this is the only game in the rereleased series that crashes. And it crashed a few times for me. So that just also frustrated me. I don't know.
Higurashi is a surprise Christian story, so that's nice, but I was hoping something would top Meakashi: the one that is an extremely intense and violent, slow self-destructive orgasm, culminating in a post-nut clarity as to what you should've done...that one can't be taken away, though. We always have Meakashi.