This is a very personal opinion of mine so I am just going to go ahead and say it without care of the consequences; yes, I disliked Chiru, and I thought it was bad progression from the excitement of the first 4 chapters. I disliked the introduction of the meta world, of Erika Furude, Willard Wright, Dlanor, and pretty much all the characters whose main purpose was to give a characterization to the mystery aspects of the novel.
See, what I liked the most about the first four episodes was the character interaction between the members of the Ushiromiya family. The numerous different cases of the first 4 chapters was able to show an extremely diverse set of relationships between the characters, and how they can easily change in a heartbeat depending on the situation. However, while I won’t say that totally disappeared in Chiru, I would say that it took a backseat from the metaworld. Instead, I felt Chiru struggled more on, well, answering the story and using an immensely deep metaworld to do that.
And, to be honest, I did not appreciate that. Even if the goal was to answer all the questions from the first four episodes, using a metaworld of witches and furniture, of character representations of a list of rules that are decades old and limits authors in their storytelling, was in bad taste. It tries to tell the readers that “this is a mystery and these are the tools you should use to solve this mystery” instead of allowing the reader to take his own interpretation and keeping it at heart. It makes the readers more involved in a world away from Rokkenjima; a world I thought was less engaging and more fantastical. And most of all, it brings you into a world which I feel is just impossible to relate to; the metaworld of Umineko is a metaworld of the mystery genre, and is no longer a world where character goals can be put into a human perspective. I don’t care about characters, who represent a specific point-of-view of mystery solving, duke it out in flashy battles as a representation of people duking it out when solving mysteries; I care about the stories of humans, life, and what a story does to humans and how they react to it.
Oh hey, I just realized that I ended up laying bare all of my gripes with Umineko. Honestly, I am quite afraid that this sort of thing is going to happen once I reach the answers arc of Higurashi, and it may just leave a bad taste in my mouth again.