Higurashi: When They Cry impressions

For some context, this is after reading the first sound novel and a getting couple of hours into the second. I may do a proper, full review over at Colony Drop, but I've already said here most of what I would say in a full review.

I felt like some fresh subway reading, and I noticed that the first four arcs of Higurashi were available for iOS devices. The first one is free, even! While the iOS pricing is high by App Store standards, it's well into impulse buy territory by any other measure. Hell, the PC releases are twice as expensive. I won't read Higurashi Kai until it's ported to iOS. So obviously I decided to go for it, and so far the results are very mixed.

If you don't know, Higurashi no Naku Koro ni-- literally "When the Cicadas Cry"-- is a series of sound novels by Ryukishi07 that went big in Japanese otaku circles and were eventually animated, catching the attention of the rest of the otaku world when they did. Its successor Umineko ("When the Seagulls Cry" this time) is ongoing. We call them "sound novels" because they rely almost entirely on audio atmosphere to aid the text, with extremely minimal art assets. It's unusual that original novels like these get translated, but here they are courtesy of MangaGamer (where they are presently awaiting the conclusion of my live-Twittered review of Soul Link).

The recent port to iOS was what really sold me on this: reading the story on a portable device during the donwtime in my life just fits in with my schedule a lot better, as it probably does for most folks. I will mention here that the DS version of Higurashi costs twice as much as the PS2 version. Think about it!

In any case, pacing problems, pacing problems, pacing problems. Higurashi appears divided into two distinct segments: a horror/mystery story wherein teenage transplant Keiichi Maebara learns that all is not as it seems in the tiny rural village of Hinamizawa, and laid-back school-life comedy wherein everything is in fact completely as it seems.

In theory, this isn't a bad thing. I'm very happy to spend some time getting to know the characters, but Higurashi likes to keep us with them for long stretches. It took hours for the plot to start moving at all in the first arc. Once the introductions are through, Keiichi and his all-girl posse simply hang out for long, long stretches. These segments rarely shed any light on the characters' personalities, affect their relationships, or push the story forward. They're just there: "cute girls behaving in exactly the way you already expect them to" fluff. If you don't mind total stasis in your stories, this won't bug you.

It's been years since I watched the first arc of the anime, but I'm pretty sure this was the first material to hit the chopping block in adaptation. The loss of, say, a cooking contest doesn't have me hurting too bad, but if my memory is correct, the anime also leaves out a lot of plot detail and moves around the chronological order of events in an attempt to make the downtime a little less dull. I can't say I completely blame them: it gets really dull around Hinamizawa. It often feels like the author knows this and is putting you through long stretches of nothing on purpose. But then, visual novels in general often feel like the authors are being paid by the word.

When it hits the fan in this story, things start to get good. Without directly spoiling anything, gruesome murders take place Hinamizawa which may or may not have supernatural origins, and we have just as much reason to believe one as the other. Higurashi asks questions and does not supply answers (indeed, these arcs are called the "question" arcs and the "answer" arcs are a long way off). You just sit there and watch as people start to die, circumstances get suspicious, and everybody in the story starts to fall apart from the paranoia of it all. Ryukishi calls it a "game" only in that the player is left in the wreckage to speculate as to what the hell just happened.

As Higurashi was originally a very small, independent product, the production values are not high. For example, the game doesn't have the kind of detailed, full-screen art we see in visual novels, nor any voice acting. Backgrounds are actual photos taken by the creators, and the character art is notoriously simplistic, with hands that look more like mittens, and perhaps three expressions for any given character. This suits me just fine, but when the game was ported to the PS2 and DS by a commercial games company, the whole thing was completely redrawn and rescored to look and sound like a "normal" Japanese VN. In so doing, I believe it loses a bit of its character.

(Except for the music. Higurashi desperately needs more than three pieces of background music.)

There is one other catch: this script is kind of wooden. I'm talking about localization here. The translation just doesn't read very well: the speech is often uncessarily clunky, often making the translation come off as too strictly literal. The characters don't really feel like they have distinct voices. Recently I've been reading some of Viz's Haikasoru line of translated Japanese sci-fi novels, and the first thing that struck me reading Higurashi was how much more natural, say, Mardock Scramble felt.

I can deal with the often-choppy way that anime characters always seem to talk (not that I'm crazy about it) in a more visual medium, but reading full-length prose in fansub English can be a little rough. Editing also gets spotty. According to reviews on the iTunes store, parts of Episode 3 aren't even translated! What the hell is that about?

So, with a free first chapter and the rest priced at $6, is Higurashi worth it? It's a tough sell, and I'm not sure whether or not I'll even continue past this second arc. On the one hand, it's a really interesting story, but only when it wants to be, plus it doesn't read very well. I had a good, long pause when I finished that first free chapter (very long, mind) and deliberated whether or not to get the next one. Ultimately I decided "what the hell, six bucks".

Comments

[SergeDavid]

I've only ever watched the anime to the series and loved it. I don't think I'll read the manga or play any games for it, but if there was any movies or more added to the anime I'd watch it.

Also I did not know there was a sequel, that will be something interesting to look into.

[V8Monkey]

Higurashi is pretty much a Slice of Life/Mystery. So those aren't really pacing problems.

And if you didn't know, Higurashi -should- have more BGMs. Lets just say the localization isn't the only problem MangaGamer brought upon Higurashi.

[David Cabrera]

I just can't agree with this line of thinking. Even if we accept "slice of life" as a genre (I don't), I don't think-- and this is one of the first things that comes up in any discussion about the term-- that calling it a genre somehow puts it beyond criticism.

The Higurashi VN, like many other VNs, is frequently plodding. It spends an inordinate amount of time on scenes that go nowhere, have no impact further down the line, and are more often than not neither funny nor endearing despite attempts at such.

If these parts are supposed to be representative of a genre, then they're a poor example. I continue to read Higurashi (currently in the third arc) and I stand by my criticisms.

[Happy Dude]

I do believe some parts of the Higurashi are slow. But this slowness adds to the creepiness of the game, not detracts from it. It gets to you slowly and becomes absolutely breath taking at the climax.

I never get bored with the club activity segments because they are just the children having fun (the whole story loses its impact if Keiichi is not shown having fun with his friends and how precious his friends are to him), after all, never giving up and the power of friendship are actually the keys to the final victory and these games always go out their ways to show that. Besides, these games are basically red herrings for what to come. They served as speculation-fuel, but of course, they don't have much values anymore when the full set of the games is already out and spoilers are all over the internet.