A Seasoned Veteran and a Sherlock-in-Training Try to Make Sense of Umineko No Naku Koro Ni

I’ve been really enjoying this series you two have been doing, and it’s been a great way to reread the episodes I’ve already finished myself. As of now I only just started Chiru so the videos will probably get uploaded faster than I go through the novel, but I appreciate the content thus far.

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Glad to have you watching :smiley: @Exdeath

Also in today’s news, I just put up this post for the Episode 6 podcast discussion. Hope you enjoy reading it, and enjoy your friendly reminder that we still have a heap of content to look forward to! :ryukishi:

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Great episode as always! I am enjoying this series a lot.
It may be too early for asking this, but do you guys plan making a let’s play of Higurashi or Higanbana after you finish Sea Cats?

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Thanks for watching! Glad you’re enjoying it :ryukishi:
Short answer is no, we won’t be doing them immediately.
The way we actually do the recordings is a lot of work for both of us and involves a lot of travel for @MagusVerborum. If the circumstance ever gets easier it’s totally on the cards so don’t lose hope :open_mouth: If you want to see it; let us know! Either way it definitely won’t be the last thing you’ll see from us.

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I hope the circumstances will get easier in the future, I would love to watch a Higurashi LP of you guys.

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@Chaos_Alfa it’d probably be decent fun, here’s hoping it happens :ryukishi:

In other news; Episode 3 Part 12!

The best second twilight Beato ever came up with. It was really weird seeing a crime that was so easily possible compared to the utter insanity that was the first twilight this episode. Part of me almost expected Rosa and Maria’s bodies not to be found at all because it almost seemed too easy. We’ll see how that plays out!

You folks here on the forum know what’s up next too, so you can finally actually see the next video in sequence :pukuku:

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We happen to have an entire thread devoted to this, and here’s the public release of the Epitaph theory. I did ask the man to hurry up and make a theory, I have only myself to blame. :pukuku:

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That’s some impressively solid theorycrafting.

I do wonder if @Jokrono has any thoughts on why Kinzo would be angry about Maria’s name being what it is, to the point of demanding Rosa to change it. The kanji 里 in Maria’s name inspired you to look for stuff related to specific kanji, but I don’t think you ended up using the kanji in Maria’s name for anything in particular. Do you think Kinzo’s reaction to Maria’s name is just a random coincidental detail meant to nudge people towards looking at this as wordplay with kanji, or if the kanji in Maria’s name actually have something to do with solving the epitaph?

There also seems to be a bit of a disconnect between how Eva found the solution and how you found yours. Eva used some unspecified book to look up stuff, but then she was confused - she was certain she found the answer, but it wasn’t six letters. Then her younger self suggested that if she was sure she was right, she just had to force the answer to fit somehow, which resulted in her realizing the true answer. Any ideas on what that was about? Your thought process never encountered such a hurdle, I believe.

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I think clearly the character for village does actually factor in to the intended solution for the epitaph. Even in my own solution, the name for Qilian station (in Kanji?) is 唭哩岸, which does actually contain 里, but I didn’t notice that until way more recently because of the extra box shape attached to it (and also because my stellar understanding of Japanese made me think they were different for a while even after I noticed the visual similarity :ryukishi:)

I honestly don’t know why Kinzo would become so upset over this. Sure; it contains the same character, but I don’t know what part of that is so misleading that Kinzo wouldn’t be happy with it. Would he have gone and removed all associated characters from everywhere else around the mansion? It seems like a stretch. Perhaps the implication that Maria was involved with the key was a bit much for him, but I’m genuinely rather confused. Is it because it distracted from the purpose of the epitaph? Is it because Kinzo did not want additional factors to change the difficulty of his epitaph? Is it because he was upset that he thought Rosa was the one coming to an answer? I don’t know, I guess I can only hope we’ll find out.

I think the reason Ryukishi draws attention to it when he does (and Kinzo’s anger over it) probably has something to do with poking readers towards the solution, but I’m sure the connection is intended to be a bit more deep than that. Maybe that connection would be a bit more apparent to someone who understands Japanese, but I don’t even know how 哩 is different to 里 in terms of its use or meaning.

As for the unknown book I’m now certain Eva actually does state (in our E3P10 video) ‘I need to check an atlas’ but somehow we both completely glazed over that fact. Perhaps having read that was what compelled me to not give up on the journey through Wikipedia pages on Taiwan at the time, but it definitely didn’t factor in to the solution consciously. I think part of how those clues are intended to work was worked out by @mimsy during ep5 here, but because of my methodology they weren’t necessary.

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Hmm, to clarify some kanji things a little, 唭哩岸 doesn’t really contain 里 - you could say that 哩 “contains” both 口 and 里, which individually are kanji that have their own meanings (“mouth” and “village / hometown”, in this case), but it is fairly common for a single kanji to consist of multiple shapes that might have individual meanings, but for it have little to nothing to do with those individual meanings. For example the kanji for “black”, 黒, has the aforementioned village kanji shape and four little lines below it, but doesn’t really have anything to do with 里. It merely happens to contain the same shape, but it doesn’t contain the meaning of 里. There are probably numerous other kanji that contain the shape of 里 somewhere, so the connection between Maria’s name and Qilian (唭哩岸) seems pretty insignificant and coincidental, hardly something worth getting agitated over for Kinzo.

哩 and 里 are two completely different kanji, two completely different characters. It’s kinda like how 1524 “contains” 52, but the numbers 1524 and 52 don’t really have much to do with each other.

In any case, your work with the epitaph - and the playthrough in general - has been impressive beyond all expectations. I look forward to seeing you reach the golden land at the end of your long journey.

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@midsummer That’s really good to know! Thanks :ryukishi:

Today’s video; Hideyoshi gets a gun.

Here’s the timecode for Hideyoshi getting a gun.

I really think that Hideyoshi getting a gun is important for the mystery here, I hope we will see how significant Hideyoshi’s gun is in short order.

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THE BEST SPRITE

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This is going downhill very quickly. Rabbit soldier girls? More fight math? 18 years of envy? What is this all supposed to mean?
This was definitely one of the most interesting (and kind of humiliating) chapters to rewatch. There’s a whole bunch of information and allusion that took me ages to figure out that is just outright told to you here if you keep an eye out. To an extent I feel like this is a theme at this point, and really plays nicely in to the idea that things should be staring you in the face on a reread.

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Nyeh see, what an exciting episode for the people! I’m sure nothing could go wrong in this chapter nihihi~

…I don’t know how important these damn rabbits are but they sure are entertaining to watch. And they really are cold and merciless, like a gun. It is a pleasure to voice such noble well-polished beings. :wahaha:

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Next video is UP
We get to see the result of EVA’s next twilight, things get emotional, and then George takes ‘soul-searching’ too literally. How strange that none of these locked room murders seem to involve locks or rooms.
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Ah yes, this is when things get really weird. A totally and completely non-magic character who we know and love… learns how to use magic? Very strange i would say. I do hope our detective is able to puzzle things out~

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Another video! Today we see George go visit Shannon and absolutely nothing goes wrong.

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Oh look we’ve upped our schedule! That’s fun~ I’m also quite happy to see some Beatrice VS Beatrice action, we’ve been waiting on this for a while! :wahaha:

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The big finale for episode 3! I hope you’re all prepared for this nonsense. I certainly wasn’t.

The web of red is certainly really fun to look back on now that we’re so far through the story. As we’ve discussed recently in our recording sessions, Ryukishi’s riddles are, in essence, the answer. As impossible as a puzzle as this might seem, things like this narrow down the list of possibilities so far that if you can figure them out, they should provide what you need. We’ll have to see how that goes for me :ryukishi:

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Jokrono’s new favourite girl has arrived :annoyed:

This chapter is incredibly long, and has some of the best scenes in the entire episode. The Web of Red is obviously a terrifying prospect, but I’d also like to shout out literally everything Beatrice does in this big finale. Protecting Jessica and Kanon with her floating beating Golden heart, denying magic itself in order to thwart Eva-Beatrice, and finally the reveal at the end that it was all a cunning ruse! THIS CHAPTER is why Beatrice is best girl, and of course contains the moment that revealed her true nature for me.

(Episode… 5 spoilers?) The moment when Beatrice struggles internally with keeping up her ‘act’ of for Battler at 2:29:00 was particularly telling for me, if we can accept that Beatrice is capable of ‘acting’ kindly, as the Sun, then we can also accept that Beatrice can ‘act’ coldly, as the moon wind. Even though I wasn’t so up to date as to say Beatrice had the same identity as the culprit, I felt that the game was challenging me not to doubt the previous scenes in Ep3, where we saw a certain side of Beatrice that is true and faithful to her own intentions.

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