Hey, why don’t we have some fun speculating about what Land of the Golden Witch might have been like?
This topic is intended for people who have finished the entirety of Umineko and wish to discuss this topic using knowledge from the whole series. For those who have yet to finish Umineko in its entirety, please tread carefully, because there will be untagged spoilers! Please tag references to outside works with the [spoiler] tag, with adequate context provided in parenthesis. Stuff from Umineko, Confession of the Golden Witch, the various Umineko TIPS, Our Confession and Answer to the Golden Witch are all fair game. Anything else ought to be tagged, mkay?
#Translations for all of these are from the Umineko Wiki
From Forgery no.XXX (context is Black Battler and Ronove talking)
“…Battler-sama, welcome back.“
“Ronove. …you seem well. How long has it been since we last met?“
“After Land of the golden witch, I had the privilege to be at your side during Trinity of the golden witch. …No, if we consider that Lady Bernkastel’s gameboard is supposed to be the last…“
“…well. No matter how long it has been, we still just met, haven’t we?!“
[details=From Answer to the Golden Witch (Discussing Land in General)]R: We already discussed that Umineko consists of two different narratives, but if you put it plainly, for the general consumer there is only one. Especially during EP 2 and 3 there seemed to be especially many people who read it like any other story while playing and only saw it as one narrative. If I said it vulgarly, back then there were many who just gave up. I had the impression that there were many people who just said “Stuff like that isn’t mystery!” or “I gave up after Kanon drew his blade!”. That’s why I felt the need to make the story more appealing from that point on.
K: That would be the part at the beginning of EP3, the lecture by Virgilia. It’s true that after the release of EP2 it seemed a little bit like you could bury the idea to regard it as detective fiction laugh. When I looked at some of the message boards back then, I was feeling like, “Eh, they are giving up already?!” about most of the fans.
R: Because of that situation I cancelled the production of what was planned to be EP3, Land of the Golden Witch. Right after we released EP I thought “So, after the proper greeting by the witch, let’s create a real evil, orthodox mystery incident.” but because so many people abandoned reasoning all together I hurriedly changed the whole script. Because it felt necessary to give the player a character who would lecture him about how to think, Virgilia was born. There were plans for a character similar to Virgilia to appear in the story before, but it was to be a more agressive character who later became the basis for Erika.
K: At that time there were already plans for something like Erika?
R: It was a character who would argue with the main characters about reasoning, and become an antagonist, approaching everything from a different point than Battler. It was actually planned to introduce that character at the stage of EP3. At that time it was a man called Vergilius.
K: The name is taken from the character Vergilius in Dante’s ’’Divina Commedia’’, right?!
R: That is correct. But because a lecture like this became severely necessary, I changed the character Vergilius into the woman Virgilia. And because he changed into Virgilia, the connection to Kumasawa was created. At that point I stopped thinking about the character Vergilius at all, but now when I think about it, with a little struggling, you could call him the male version of Erika. Though a little bit more impertinent in her knowledge.
K: At the time of EP2, Battler had a pretty hard time reasoning himself. If Vergilius had appeared then, the plot would have become an even fiercer battle?
R: It became a fierce battle either way, didn’t it? In my head EP1 was supposed to be nothing more than an opening, during which you get to remember the structure of the characters and the mansion. EP2 was to be the beginning of the fight. And EP3 was to mark the beginning of the truly orthodox incidents. I really thought about putting many difficult riddles into Umineko from start to finish, but… I don’t think I would be able to make you enjoy Land, now that all of you have learned about the truth. If the answer is already out, it’s laughable to try and hide it with difficult riddles. At best it would be funny. Maybe you’d think “Hey, that makes up for some of it”. Well that might happen, but almost all of the tricks planned for Land have been divided up and mixed into what became EP4~6. I really hear you asking for a release of Land, but I’m afraid I’m just not able to do that anymore.
K: Among some of the fans there is the idea that you could put it into Umineko Rei (an Umineko fandisc), which was mentioned on the blog on the official page, what about that?
R: I have thought about that as well, even though I have my hands full with my new work, but because it would only be ideas that fans of Umineko would know from somewhere else, I don’t think that my hard work or the enjoyment of the readers would make up for it…
K: So you are returning it to the shelf?
R: Not really returning it, it’s more like it’s an EP which departed on the way. By the way it was supposed to feature a really hard difficulty. Because Virgilia and Ronove had almost no following at all, I thought about making the riddles for EP4~6 an attack on one straight level.
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[details=From Answer to the Golden Witch (Further Details about Land)]K: So it seems that my deduction of solving EP4 with a single culprit is wrong. However you think about the crime being accomplished, an accomplice is always necessary. So I thought a lot about who would conspire with whom. It is central that Kanon was the 9th victim, so I thought up several patterns that would include that point.
R: The point of “very many accomplicees” was one of the original gimmicks in Land. And I wanted the deception to be that “very many” laugh.[/details]
[details=From Answer to the Golden Witch (Last Mention of Land)]R: I really wanted to write even more difficult parts to be honest. If almost nobody hat succumbed at the time of EP2, I was prepared to show you a really mean scenario with an even worse difficulty.
K: And Land was among those?
R: One of them, yes. It was supposed to be just the vanguard.
K: You told me about this in an earlier discussion, but there was something like “Battler arrives at the island and decides to imprison them all into one room…” if I remember correctly.
R: Did I really say that? Yes, that was one of my ideas. Even though it was a different one than Land.[/details]
Another interesting thing to think about is how the series might have diverged from here if Ryukishi hadn’t changed EP 3 and gone along with his original plans.
My speculations will be below, but I’d love to see what you guys can come up with!
EDIT:
I found something else that I didn’t think of earlier from Episode 8. It’s the dialogue just before the above screenshot, and whether it’s relevant or not depends on your interpretation…
[details=From Episode 8]A: Shut up. I didn’t ask you…! And what the hell do you think you’re doing…?! Didn’t the Golden Witch come here to perform her resurrection ceremony?! Didn’t you appear on the island with a crash of thunder and try to offer up 13 people as sacrifices?! Why are you acting so happy and casual?! It doesn’t make sense!
B: You’re the one that doesn’t make sense. What are you thinking? Do you want me to be a murderer?
A: You wrote a tale about it, sealed it in a message bottle, and threw it into the sea! Two of those were discovered later on…! Both of them were stories of cruel serial murders!
B: What a shame that only two of them made it to shore…! How sad that ‘Land’, my best masterpiece, was never seen by human eyes.
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Why yes the spoiler warning was just a modified copy paste from Aspi’s threads, why do you ask?
) into believing Battler actually was the culprit (I mean isn’t it weird that he’s always among the few people who survive until the end?). I personally would not have focused on piece battler in this episode too much (as Vergilius takes the role of the detective) and showed plenty of fantasy murder scenes with B. Battler as the culprit. The twist with Battler not actually being Asumu’s son but instead Kyrie’s might’ve also worked a lot better in Land than in Alliance and would have further confused the readers about Battler’s identity and thus made him even more suspicious. 
