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Chapter 10 of Oni. The art in this prequel is incredibly inconsistent.
Ryukishi07 megathread / griefing thread - Higurashi, Umineko, Ciconia, etc.
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- Oct 3, 2018
I thought we'd already passed it. Pretty crazy to think about.
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lmao ryukishi gave it his personal praise and shilled this everywhere he could too. Silent hill f will be funny if the precedent gou set still holds.
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For the record, Asahi can draw, but I doubt they ever drew on a strict deadline before. Hence the art inconsistencies.
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skykiii
kiwifarms.net
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- Jun 17, 2018
People recently convinced me to try out Higurashi and Umineko. I went with the anime of Higurashi--the person told me to try out the first two seasons but ignore everything after them--but for Umi I'm going with the VN.
But god damn, did Higurashi turn into a trainwreck. I liked it when it was a slow-burn mystery horror, but then the "Kai" season starts and it immediately just feels all over the place, suddenly becoming this glurgy mess where the main male lead is talked up as being the second coming of Christ, everyone stops every five minutes to make the same damn Power of Friendship speech, and a villain is revealed complete with dictator garb and mwahahaha mannerisms.
The fuck happened? It's like you're playing Danganronpa, but halfway through it gets taken over by the people who made the Danganronpa 3 anime.
Umineko so far (again I'm going with the VN) seems fine, but knowing its by the same guy I'm worried it'll go similarily autistic.
But god damn, did Higurashi turn into a trainwreck. I liked it when it was a slow-burn mystery horror, but then the "Kai" season starts and it immediately just feels all over the place, suddenly becoming this glurgy mess where the main male lead is talked up as being the second coming of Christ, everyone stops every five minutes to make the same damn Power of Friendship speech, and a villain is revealed complete with dictator garb and mwahahaha mannerisms.
The fuck happened? It's like you're playing Danganronpa, but halfway through it gets taken over by the people who made the Danganronpa 3 anime.
Umineko so far (again I'm going with the VN) seems fine, but knowing its by the same guy I'm worried it'll go similarily autistic.
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- Feb 8, 2021
This is where you fucked up.
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- Mar 10, 2017
Oh no, it's an entirely new kind of autism.
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- Sep 28, 2013
Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it does.
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- May 21, 2020
Can confirm but I hope you like listening to EDM while it happens
skykiii
kiwifarms.net
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- Jun 17, 2018
Honestly I did see a little bit of the Higurashi VN before getting too far into the anime, but when the first chapter spent fucking hours just describing all the food they ate, I was like "fuck this."
To be honest this is why I don't get into VNs--a lot of them seem like they have a problem of dragging their feet or constantly retreading the same ground over and over again, often outright repeating the same statement with different wording. I actually almost consider Phoenix Wright's anime better than the games simply because it cuts out a lot of the fat.
Umineko doesn't really give you a choice it seems--apparently the anime isn't even finished. So its either the manga or the VN. And I've heard the soundtrack is a large part of the story.
EDIT:
For what it's worth I am having more fun with Umineko, since I've been told its kind of a murder mystery (though I have been warned it also does Higurashi's time loop thing though I imagine the explanation will be different).
I'm following Umineko via this commentary-less playthru. So at least if it does turn to shit, I didn't waste money on it.
I keep noticing little things, like how a lot of the characters have a cross hidden somewhere on their outfit, and two of the women (Kyrie and Eva) have a strap that is just there and seems to serve no purpose (Kyrie's is on her arm and Eva's is on her shoulder).
Maria I wonder about. She's supposed to be nine but she acts more like she's three. Someone on youtube mentioned she might be developmentally impaired or something.
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- Mar 10, 2017
At least part of that is because Ryu copied heavily from fashion magazines for most of Umineko's cast and just took whatever the image he was working with had. Some of the original sprites are borderline traced. Admittedly Kyrie and Eva are among the ones who haven't been found in some magazine somewhere, but there's so many obvious copies found that it's probably just a matter of time. https://forum.rokkenjima.org/t/ryu0...rigins-full-umineko-spoilers-image-heavy/2150
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- Jan 12, 2017
This is how you know Ryukishi fanboys just suck dick and consoom when no one's calling him out on his plagiarism and reaming him for it. Maybe they waived it off due to striking character designs and fun story elements and interaction, but he should've gotten in some trouble for this.
Maybe if he had released Umineko ten years later, though...
- Joined
- Mar 10, 2017
Honestly I think it's more that this isn't very well-known, and that it isn't actually that closely copied (more due to Ryukishi's lack of art skills than any effort put into making the outfits unique, though there are a couple he did a halfway decent job on). Though I have met some absolutely psychotic Umineko dick-suckers.
skykiii
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jun 17, 2018
While I'm here anyway, I might as well post fuller what all I found retarded in Higurashi.... One, because I've had frustrating convos about it elsewhere (I swear Higurashi stans are as bad as bronies for defending every fucktarded thing this franchise does)....
.... and more importantly TWO: So you guys can warn me if Umineko goes down similar routes or gets retarded in ways equally likely to piss me off.
Once again, I mostly know the anime:
So........ having read all that, do you think I should continue Umineko? Or do you think it would just piss me off too? (Please mark spoilers)
.... and more importantly TWO: So you guys can warn me if Umineko goes down similar routes or gets retarded in ways equally likely to piss me off.
Once again, I mostly know the anime:
.......My big problem once I reached Kai was I felt like it solved the core mystery too early. At that point, the show should be almost over, but for some reason it decides its got like 20 episodes left. Imagine watching Detective Conan and he finds the killer in the first five minutes and then the rest of the episode is other bullshit.
.......Also, this had the typical horror/paranormal mystery issue of the explanations weren't all that satisfying. I'm totally fine with the time loop thing and how Rika has actually been reliving these events alongside Al, a hologram who only she can hear as she hopes the next leap will be the leap home--oh, sorry, thought I was watching a much better show for a second--I mean, I figured Rika was somehow responsible (and it turned out to instead be her invisible friend Loli Jesus).
......But what I really hated was Hinamizawa Syndrome, which might as well be called Magical Crazy Disease. In chats I've had I've compared this to Ambition--that flash series Retsupurae once parodied--and its tendency to have your character get randomly shot or run over by a truck if you didn't make exactly the right choice. Magical Crazy Disease is the same way: if the characters ever don't act exactly the way the writer thinks is "right" they get MCD and go kill crazy. It's lazy, its too easy.
And it's inconsistent. We're told its set off by stress and indeed in many arcs MCD happens just because the characters got a bit stressed. But then the final arcs have them fighting an army and that's perfectly fine, because suddenly you only get MCD if you kill.
.......The Kai season suddenly becomes just... stupidly glurgy. Like I swear, past a certain point there's a once-every-five-minutes thing where Rika or someone will turn to the camera, make a big speech about how she's not gonna give up, then her friends (always standing in a circle so they can also face the camera) all nod and made that affirmative "Hm!" noise anime characters make. This kind of thing is fine once or during tense moments, but I swear Higurashi Kai started doing it just whenever it fucking felt like, and it quickly became almost unintentionally funny.
.......I hated the whole thing with Satoko's uncle. I understood the drama but it felt like the show was making this out to be way harder to solve than it was, and then turning around and saying the only possible solution was to RALLY THE ENTIRE TOWN to her cause.... which it turned out was not even the problem: the problem was she wouldn't admit to abuse. All the support in the world doesn't matter if they legally can't act.
If I may rant, this is one of those cases where I really hated Higurashi stans. It reminds me of how Bronies think that the anti-bullying episode is a "good message" but anyone not retarded realizes its terrible and actually backhanded: apparently (according to an in-game creator's note someone showed me) its supposed to show people in dire straights that there's always hope, but in practice it instead tells such people that they're fucked if they're not friends with the Yakuza and don't have older male friends who are great charismatic types.
It's also a case where I thought of several alternative solutions that would've been much more effective and required less effort, only to be told I'm the one "treating child abuse as if its easily solved."
....... On that note the show really milked the "child abuse" angle, not just for Satoko but also for Takano as well. The episodes where she's in Evil Abusive Orphanage literally add nothing to the plot and are literally just there so we can go "Awww that poor abused widdle girl is getting her shit wrecked!" in an act of pure Stephen King-esque hackery. And it ends up being literally forgotten as her whole motivation turns into "I wanna prove daddy was right!"
...... And like I said earlier, I hate how suddenly Takano is this mwahahaha-ing supervillain who couldn't be more obvious if she dressed like a dictator (which she literally starts doing) and openly says evil shit around Dr. Irie and other people and yet nobody puts it together that this woman is bad news.
..... I hated how Keiichi was suddenly put on this pedestal, to the point where Rika even says that in timelines where he doesn't show up, there's no hope... and then in the final arc, everyone's even basically saying "Oh I hope some boy who looks like an off-brand version of Sora moves to town and changes hearts and minds!"
(Which incidentally undermines all his accomplishments. I mean one of his biggest ones was getting Old Mafia Woman to budge and forgive the Hojos.... but then in the next arc she reveals she wants to do that anyway but for some reason can't until Sora-lookalike moves to town).
But seriously, I got so tired of hearing about how Keiichi was so great. At that point it was obvious he was some sort of author injection fantasy or something.
...... Rika has gone through this time loop hundreds of times but NEVER thought to try changing things or influencing the sequence of events.. How retarded is she? In fact that's a thing with this show: everyone is fucking stupid, and not all of it can be blamed on Magical Crazy Disease.
...... On the final arc a lot of things felt like they were just way too magically convenient, feeling less like Rika got her happy ending because of any effort and more like this time, a lot of things just went her way,
....... I had very mixed feelings about Loli Jesus. Her giving Takano that speech about how because she's a goddess, she can forgive human sins... that feels wrong coming from this character. Another problem I had was I felt a sense of "having your cake and eating it too." Like at one point she claims she's getting weaker and won't be able to reset time more than a week the next time Rika dies... then in the next loop she's able to send Rika back YEARS and also make herself a real person.
Also, Loli Jesus had always been a thing and can act independent of Rika--as shown by several points where Rika outright asks Hanyuu to watch people for her... which means Rika should know a lot more than she does, including what really happened to Photograph Guy and Takano on the nights they supposedly died/who killed them. But Rika is too retarded to ask for this and Hanyuu never does this on her own initiative (indeed Hanyuu starts out being all sadbrains when we finally see her).
...... Finally, the second season has tone issues all over the place, like it just can't decide what kind of story it is anymore.
.......Also, this had the typical horror/paranormal mystery issue of the explanations weren't all that satisfying. I'm totally fine with the time loop thing and how Rika has actually been reliving these events alongside Al, a hologram who only she can hear as she hopes the next leap will be the leap home--oh, sorry, thought I was watching a much better show for a second--I mean, I figured Rika was somehow responsible (and it turned out to instead be her invisible friend Loli Jesus).
......But what I really hated was Hinamizawa Syndrome, which might as well be called Magical Crazy Disease. In chats I've had I've compared this to Ambition--that flash series Retsupurae once parodied--and its tendency to have your character get randomly shot or run over by a truck if you didn't make exactly the right choice. Magical Crazy Disease is the same way: if the characters ever don't act exactly the way the writer thinks is "right" they get MCD and go kill crazy. It's lazy, its too easy.
And it's inconsistent. We're told its set off by stress and indeed in many arcs MCD happens just because the characters got a bit stressed. But then the final arcs have them fighting an army and that's perfectly fine, because suddenly you only get MCD if you kill.
.......The Kai season suddenly becomes just... stupidly glurgy. Like I swear, past a certain point there's a once-every-five-minutes thing where Rika or someone will turn to the camera, make a big speech about how she's not gonna give up, then her friends (always standing in a circle so they can also face the camera) all nod and made that affirmative "Hm!" noise anime characters make. This kind of thing is fine once or during tense moments, but I swear Higurashi Kai started doing it just whenever it fucking felt like, and it quickly became almost unintentionally funny.
.......I hated the whole thing with Satoko's uncle. I understood the drama but it felt like the show was making this out to be way harder to solve than it was, and then turning around and saying the only possible solution was to RALLY THE ENTIRE TOWN to her cause.... which it turned out was not even the problem: the problem was she wouldn't admit to abuse. All the support in the world doesn't matter if they legally can't act.
If I may rant, this is one of those cases where I really hated Higurashi stans. It reminds me of how Bronies think that the anti-bullying episode is a "good message" but anyone not retarded realizes its terrible and actually backhanded: apparently (according to an in-game creator's note someone showed me) its supposed to show people in dire straights that there's always hope, but in practice it instead tells such people that they're fucked if they're not friends with the Yakuza and don't have older male friends who are great charismatic types.
It's also a case where I thought of several alternative solutions that would've been much more effective and required less effort, only to be told I'm the one "treating child abuse as if its easily solved."
....... On that note the show really milked the "child abuse" angle, not just for Satoko but also for Takano as well. The episodes where she's in Evil Abusive Orphanage literally add nothing to the plot and are literally just there so we can go "Awww that poor abused widdle girl is getting her shit wrecked!" in an act of pure Stephen King-esque hackery. And it ends up being literally forgotten as her whole motivation turns into "I wanna prove daddy was right!"
...... And like I said earlier, I hate how suddenly Takano is this mwahahaha-ing supervillain who couldn't be more obvious if she dressed like a dictator (which she literally starts doing) and openly says evil shit around Dr. Irie and other people and yet nobody puts it together that this woman is bad news.
..... I hated how Keiichi was suddenly put on this pedestal, to the point where Rika even says that in timelines where he doesn't show up, there's no hope... and then in the final arc, everyone's even basically saying "Oh I hope some boy who looks like an off-brand version of Sora moves to town and changes hearts and minds!"
(Which incidentally undermines all his accomplishments. I mean one of his biggest ones was getting Old Mafia Woman to budge and forgive the Hojos.... but then in the next arc she reveals she wants to do that anyway but for some reason can't until Sora-lookalike moves to town).
But seriously, I got so tired of hearing about how Keiichi was so great. At that point it was obvious he was some sort of author injection fantasy or something.
...... Rika has gone through this time loop hundreds of times but NEVER thought to try changing things or influencing the sequence of events.. How retarded is she? In fact that's a thing with this show: everyone is fucking stupid, and not all of it can be blamed on Magical Crazy Disease.
...... On the final arc a lot of things felt like they were just way too magically convenient, feeling less like Rika got her happy ending because of any effort and more like this time, a lot of things just went her way,
....... I had very mixed feelings about Loli Jesus. Her giving Takano that speech about how because she's a goddess, she can forgive human sins... that feels wrong coming from this character. Another problem I had was I felt a sense of "having your cake and eating it too." Like at one point she claims she's getting weaker and won't be able to reset time more than a week the next time Rika dies... then in the next loop she's able to send Rika back YEARS and also make herself a real person.
Also, Loli Jesus had always been a thing and can act independent of Rika--as shown by several points where Rika outright asks Hanyuu to watch people for her... which means Rika should know a lot more than she does, including what really happened to Photograph Guy and Takano on the nights they supposedly died/who killed them. But Rika is too retarded to ask for this and Hanyuu never does this on her own initiative (indeed Hanyuu starts out being all sadbrains when we finally see her).
...... Finally, the second season has tone issues all over the place, like it just can't decide what kind of story it is anymore.
So........ having read all that, do you think I should continue Umineko? Or do you think it would just piss me off too? (Please mark spoilers)
- Joined
- Mar 10, 2017
I'm not reading all that (I liked Higurashi) but it'll piss you off because it's shit and you should keep reading so we can complain together
skykiii
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jun 17, 2018
Fair enough.
This is the playlist I've been going thru BTW. I'm like five parts in now.
And I do have one complaint..... god damn is this padded. I'm literally five hours in and NOTHING has happened except a bunch of vague allusions and setup.
Now, to be fair, to some extent I get this. I was told elsewhere that part of the appeal of Visual Novels (and sometimes even Real Novels--as in Dickens or whoever) is getting caught up and immersed in the world and the slower pace helps with that sometimes....
.... But then there's a lot of times where it feels like a scene is just being dragged out. The Dining Hall video where we see the grandfather call out for Genji (who I'm sure is a womanizer) several times before Genji actually goes in. I almost thought about switching to the manga several times but something always prevents me and makes me not feel right doing that.
One autistic joke I feel like making: with a name like "Battler" I feel like this is gonna be more a legend of a golden axe rather than a golden witch.
BTW, what's up with the pronounciation of the name "Beatrice?" I've seen videos say (and it seems supported by the voice acting here) that its pronounce "be-a-tri-chay".... I've always heard the name pronounced "Be-a-triss."
wtfNeedSignUp
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
Umineko goes retarded in a different way: Rather than an explanation marred with inconsistencies to make the plot move forward, it just throws different explanations and says "it might be those", it isnt glurgy in its ending but its more of a downer. It is still a blast to read but be ready for no real defined answers.
I think the VN I liked the most from 07 is Rose Gun Days. It had a definite ending and better emotional tone and events.
skykiii
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jun 17, 2018
To be honest.... I sorta wish Higurashi had done something similar to what you described--presenting several solutions, or even just ending at a point where a bunch of things were implied but not much was stated definitely, sorta like a lot of Cthulhu Mythos stories did before August Derleth went and codified everything.
- Joined
- Jan 12, 2017
The sound novel was like that, mate. The anime had to condense things into 24 episodes, which was better than when it condensed six arcs into 26 episodes, but Massacre and Festival-Accompanying are pretty heavy in info and the anime had to cut stuff out. I've been having to fill in blanks for my friend as we watch it since he doesn't have the time/patience to check out the sound novel like he does watching a couple episodes at a time. He might check out the manga on his own time one day, he said, he just needs to be pointed in the right direction for it.
Satoko was set up to be someone who suffered in silence because she felt she had to/was being punished and therefore had to go through with it. Given that domestic abuse is hard to aid with in general, but especially in Japan because it's considered a "private family affair", and Satoko felt this was her way of trying to "be strong" for Satoshi, she needed coaxing, and to be convinced from a close friend (Rika, once she gained the will to fight back) that yes, everyone is on her side, and she doesn't have to live like that anymore. It's a slog, but it had to be done.
(Of course, this only happened in one world, so that kind of conviction Satoko gains doesn't exactly carry over into the final world, but it's whatever. Honestly think Ryukishi might've lost track of what he was doing by the time he was writing Festival-Accompanying, so a lot of story problems come to a head with that one, but it was considered "The Definitive End" at the time before the franchise started getting milked, so people were more forgiving of it back then.)
It's... kinda questionable, since Ryukishi says he was a social worker before he formed the doujin circle and yet he throws in loli-bait and child abuse to ridiculous levels. Though I dunno, the "evil orphanage" trope has been a thing for a long time, and given that was post-war Japan and the sound novel kinda explained why it was the folks running it were as strict and harsh as they were (their brains practically were broken by the war), there might be some legitimacy to it, it was just exaggerated for drama.
This was obvious in the sound novel to the point it was leaning against the fourth wall. The anime at least tried to hide that at first.
The anime had to cut stuff out, but she mentioned in the sound novel she made multiple attempts in the past to fight her fate, but it always happened at the end of it all, so she eventually became jaded and succumbed to it. It got to the point where in the TIPS, a journal entry from her mother mentioned she had no idea who her little girl was anymore because she was always so disinterested in stuff while also having learned things like cooking and sewing that she had never been taught before. The only reason Rika kept going was because the club games and punishment games were always different.
No, she wasn't being sent back years, those were legit flashbacks that were consistent to every world. If you continue into Rei, you can see Rika question her identity and if every time she kept being sent back in the time loop it was because the "previous" Rika had died and she "replaced" her. Supposedly that was how the looping worked, which is a dark implication any way you slice it.
I get where you're coming from with your concerns and points, but it makes a lot more sense when you get the story as-is through the sound novel or the manga. The anime is a good starting point imo, you just have to go through other supplemental material to get the fuller picture if you choose that route. Yes, there's still some issues with the plot here and there despite that, it just does make more sense when you delve further into it.
Don't rely on Umineko to answer stuff for you in that regard, either. It's its own thing that does meta-commentary on the When They Cry series that might help in learning more about Rika's (and to a lesser extent Hanyuu's) story, but that was what Rei was for.