Hello, some of you may know me from Kazumatsuri, I just finished episode 1 of Umineko and have a lot of thoughts about it so I created an account here to make this post. I’m going to make a lot of comparisons to Higurashi but I won’t have any spoilers beyond really surface level stuff, however if you’ve read Higurashi it will certainly help understand my perspective and where I’m coming from.
I tweeted a few things as I was going along but I want to get all my thoughts together in one place. I don’t remember exactly when I started, it was before the steam release, although I’m now playing the steam release, I would guess it’s about a year ago and it took me until now to finish the first episode. Part of that comes down to me having less time to read VNs recently but a big part of it is just how intense it it.
First of all, Higurashi is my second favorite VN only after Rewrite, but Umineko has felt completely different so far and I’m not as into it yet as I was with Higurashi. Also as a quick aside, the soundtrack and the environmental sounds are so amazing, miles ahead of Higurashi which was my gold standard before, however part of the reason why it took me so long to finish is that compared to Higurashi is it’s way more intense right from the start. The early episodes of Higurashi, from what I remember, was like 70% SoL followed by 30% horror mystery all at the end. I really don’t like horror for the most part but Higurashi drew me in with the interesting character and world which allowed me to get through the horror and made me care enough about the mystery to get to the end and want to keep going. Umineko on the other hand, at least in episode 1, was like 10% character introduction and SoL and then went straight into intense mystery/horror and never let up for the remaining 90%. I slowly worked through it in small chunks because I heard people say it’s even better than Higurashi which I loved but it’s was way too much for me to take at once.
As for the actual story, I found it interesting that it set up the supernatural elements started early and were basically explicitly confirmed from very early on. Early on I was leaning towards Battler’s side that the witches don’t exist but by around the midpoint it was clearly obvious that they do which made Battler’s actions in the second half and especially in the tea party particularly interesting. I’m interested to see where the story will go in the second episode and how the overarching meta-narrative will continue and eventually resolve. I’m really curious to just start the second episode to see whether it will be like Higurashi and tell the same story concept with different actions or whether it will do something completely different. With Higurashi I was interested for the first episodes what the answer to the mystery was and how it could possibly wrap itself up, which how it did it why I love Higurashi so much, with Umineko so far I’m more interested in how the nature of the characters and how the interaction between Battler and Beatrice will continue, rather than how the actual events of the story will be explained or not explained. Also because totally not Rika showed up in the second epilogue I’m interested to see if any more connection between the two stories will happen as I complete more episodes.
Wow, when I actually finished it I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to keep going right now but after writing all of this I’m actually super excited to keep going. Anyways, that was my sort of stream of consciousness thoughts, so far it has been good but hasn’t drawn me in in the way Higurashi did yet, the epilogues certainly helped, if it weren’t for being the same developers as Higurashi I probably wouldn’t have finished the first episode but I’m going to hopefully eventually make it though and see if the subsequent episode can draw me in more. I’m interested in talking about this with people here and hopefully I’ll eventually do something like this for episode 2.