And it's over... (mostly) I'll get to Rei & Hou and the animes that is a sequel? somehow? I don't get that yet and I guess I'll wait till I watch it, but then that will also be after I finish Umineko since it's also a sequel to that?? I guess I'll see, but now is time to talk about Ch8 not the rest of the series.

I will write a review for all of Kei at a later date but I want to think a bit more so here's a semi full review of this chapter.

In a weird way this chapter reminded me most of MGS4, there's alot of fanservice and also theres a few scenes in the ending that are very similar which is more of a coincidence with how well the rest of the game feels like it. Now it may be odd to start the review like this but Ch8 is a very messy chapter, it has alot it needs to do in order to tie up all the loose ends, and as a whole I'd say it does a good job but when you examine it closely there's defintley flaws that start to shine.

I'll start with the fragments becuase I'm very mixed on them, on one hand I thought they were all written really well, and didn't always reveal everything but regardless it still is the big answer moment for alot of questions and in some ways I kind of wish they could've come about in a better actualyl paced out section, but then at the same time I realise that would be impossible in the constraints of this chapter, so this method works quite well. The kinda semi puzzle thing that it's got going on is neat as well and I enjoyed figuring out which fragment I could read next. I also like that it doesn't answer every question with it leading a few still up in the air.

My main issue with this chapter, is that it kinda feels fanservicey, I usaully don't mind if I'm being honest, but stuff like the fight in the mountain just kinda felt like... a bit too much. I'm not super annoyed by it and I did enjoy it, but it just feels a bit like going too far if I'm being honest. and I know that the whole miricale and belief and it makes sense and I don't really hate it, yet at the same time my brain protests... If I'm being honest, in future rereads of Higurashi I almost defintley won't have as much of a issue with these type of scenes but for now this is just how I feel.

The chapter does have some great scenes, especially those that focus on the adults, which in a way are the main focus here, like the club just kinda gets sidelined here and honestly, I'm all for it, becuase I love the adult cast. You go through the rest of the chapters unsure if you should trust any of them and finally getting to acutally trust them and watch them help is really great. Akasaka becoming crazy powerful is also in the realm of maybe going a bit too far... but he's great and I'm happy with it.

Having to wrap everything up defintley makes this chapter harder to focus on specific characters, so in the time that it does have it focuses very much on Takano, which again makes alot of sense because we know very little about her before this chapter yet she's the main villain and focus of the story, which in a way meant that this chapters fate was kinda unavoidable, because her position as a character up to this point was great and the slow reveal of the truth is done excelentlly, but then that also means that in this chapter we have to rush out everything about her rather than slowly do it, which again makes this chapter have such a disproportiante focus, which I suppose having 7 other chapters focus on the club members in one way or the other is fine, but I guess I just wanted to see them in the focus a bit more.

Another thing to note, is the slow transition away from horror is very interesting, and it does reflect the story, and the horror really couldn't be kept up as we get more answers, because ch1 in the context I have now wouldn't be as scary because I know what's happening, so if they tried to do something like that here it just wouldn't work, nor is it realyl suitable to the story. The game still has some horrible imagery it describes, especially with the finger at the start and Renas fragment with ripping her leg open with the razor and all that entails, just really made me feel sick.

I feel I'll never be satsifed with what I write here, because I expected it to be a disjointed mess (and it is) but I still feel I have more to say, yet I feel it'll be very hard to truly write my feelings out, because in many ways I love this chapter because it does alot super well, but on the other hand I feel it goes too far sometimes and kinda is too happy, which is such a odd complaint, especially when I like the ending quite alot. I guess I'll try and sort my mind out when I write my Kei review....

One of my last thoughts now, is that this story kinda feels not complete, it feels like theres more to read, and I know that there is but that's all spinoff stuff and doesn't truly count, it just kinda feels like some things were left out in the open, but more minor things I suppose just like character relationships, memory of the past fragments, Satoshi etc etc which in all honestly feel like they're meant to be left open, especially stuff like character relationships because you know without a doubt there will never be a canon couple with Keiichi (even though Rena makes the most sense in terms of chemistry and just the characters in general, but the insistence with Keiichi Mion stuff, because I guess there needs to be endless shipping wars) or with Satoko and Rika because like come on you're very clearly implying that game... oh well that's perhaps expecting too much, I just like more defintive ends though that doesn't mean I hate open ends. (My main wish is that the anime sequel isn't like some form of other incident that happens like a few months later becuase I'll be pissed if it is, the end was great.

uhh other final thing to say, is damm the game kinda hates Mion she didn't get a single chapter focused on her, which kinda sucks because sure Ch2 techincally focused on her... but not really, we just got 2 Shion chapters (which I like Shion, but also these are the 2 worst chapters)
Also I might as well throw in My chapter ranking, (with top being best):
6, 7, 3, 1, 8, 4, 5, 2
And I guess my character ranking would be:
Rena, Rika / Keiichi (share a spot because they are both so good), Satoko, Shion, Mion
I love all the characters though especially in the main cast (sorry Hanyuu i wasn't sure where to put you) and that's also only in the club (and Shion I guess) butehhhhhh.

I should stop now because I've clearly got alot of messy thoughts here and prob no fun to read through, but I loved Higurashi and really enjoyed my time reading it. I'll start Hou (or Kei? or Rei?) I don't know the name but I'll do the one bonus game before starting Umineko, but I've got more Higurashi to get to and that's nice to know honestly, I want to read more about them so I hope the sequel stuff is up to the same writing quality as the main games.

Oh and actuall final final thing, is in the secret end, what??? I was very confused, but not at the same time, like I get it but who is that women that very clearly isn't Rika yet is? and that poet as well, is someone from Umineko (internet spoiled it....) but and huh? and who is the person with the fragments if not Hanyuu, but it doesn't seem to be?. The game has so many mysterys and I don't think I'm clever enough to truly be able to put together the answers but I'll think about it all the same, and I'll soon be reading Umineko too but Rei first.

Overall Really good chapter that leans a bit too towards the fanservicey route for me, which again is the point in this perfect world where we all work towards a mircale so I'm not actually that annoyed with it, and big conclusions like this are very rarely pulled off well, and here I'd say it was done pretty well overall. A happy ending that feels deserved after everything. Yet it still left me wanting to read more about the characters, so not a complete conclusion you could say (if I continue the MGS4 compariosn, that game made me happy with where the characters left off while here I just want to read more about them and see what happens, though in this scenario there is no War Economy or more danger to affect them, but I mean... I'd be happy reading anything with this cast if it's written to this quality.)

(Also big spoilers for MGS4 after this point but I did want to mention one more massive unintential similarity between them)

At the end when Okanogi (hope I spel that right) gives Takano the gun to kill her self, it's very similar to MGS4, like the gun one bullet in the chamber, he tells her to put it in her mouth, and that the problem would be solved if she was to die, and then the game does a fakeout scene of a gun being shot but her not killing herself... and MGS4 does basically all of that at the end as well, with snake being told that killing himself would put a stop to the foxdie and then also being told by a deity like person that they don't need to killthemself and that they'll die for them, though in Higurashis cases Hanyuu lives, but still Hanyuu = Big Boss. Anyway I'm a MGS4 lover and the game reminded me of it in many ways, and this came out before MGS4, so I guess Kojima copied from Higurashi huh.... and ALSO Keiichi last chapter mentions the PS3 and Metal Gear by name, it's all connected!! I'm not crazy!

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO FINALLY I MADE IT THROUGH MY BRAINROT OF A SERIES LETS FUCKING GOOOOOOOOOOOO WHAT A STORYYYYYY

What can I say? This really is the perfect finale to the series. I will admit, the prologue dragged on a bit too long for me. It wasn't bad, but I admit I really wasn't in the mood to sympathize with Takano after her causing Rika so much trouble.

But MAN does everything pick up with Connecting Fragments and the gameplay actually branches out for once!! Getting the last of the answers was so cool in the way it was presented. There's still a few questions that I'd like answered but they're honestly not important. God knows maybe the answers to them will be somewhere in the console arcs.

And the finale omgggggg this must have been what Jesus felt like when he wrote Revelations (/j). Nothing has gotten me so hype to see all the characters finally get the endings deserve. And yes, I do mean ALL the characters.

The secret ending to Matsuribayashi is interesting for sure. Making the tragic events never happen in the first place by saving Miyoko's parents as an ending really opens Higurashi up to this concept of a never-ending narrative in the form of collecting various fragments is a neat interpretation of the parallel-universes form of storytelling. I guess that's what allows works like Rei and Hou+ and the console arcs to fit in more neatly. In a way it's also respecting its roots as a doujin soft work, by letting the reader continue to add on their own scenarios to the universe. Hey, we love a creator that encourages fan works.

But ummmm yeah that's about it as of writing this I have finished Rei as well and that was good but I'm actually starting to get a bit tired of the series. I want to say now though that I will forever cherish my time that I've had with this visual novel series and the ride it's taken me through, and I hope more of my friends go through it with me, too.

Thank you, Leah.

It's very rare that a game goes back and retroactively makes everything else in the series worse. Somehow Matsuribayashi does this.

For starters, the backstory for Takano is just weak. I found myself not relating with her story, but instead finding it melodramatic and strangely simple in its psychological description. Overidentification with a caregiver begetting a Nietzschean God complex that lasts several decades, eclipsing all other pieces of personality? I understand that Miyoko is mad at God. I think that the way that we are to believe that this backstory — and her single-minded focus on her grandfather's research, who is essentially just Richard Dawkins trying to pawn off his ideological epidemiology thought exercise as actual biology? — is stronger than God and trapped two thousand people in a time loop lasting a century (seeing as they themselves remember the other timelines) ... just makes all these stories weaker, and makes her less mysterious and sort of less human, too.

"Perhaps that's the point," you say, "Takano is traumatised and never recovers by reaching out to others, instead maintaining a superficial friendliness even to her boyfriend." She holds the idiot ball forgetting her dad's only piece of advice in the sake of his death for months; and then she has an ultimately happy life afterward, except that her grandfather got a little humiliated this one time. I feel like there's so much room for change; while the other characters in this series change over a period of a week, we're to accept that Takano stayed like this her entire life, unrepentant to the end.

Anyway. The game then moves to a fragment section that I can understand but got frustrated by; after a while I had to start guessing which one to do next because the clue provided by the translation didn't line up with the information provided on a few different occasions.

After that, we have a chapter spanning about 3 and a half hours as we have an unbelievably long climax that leans on Ryukishi's weak points as a writer. It took a while for me to grasp why I didn't like the writing of the climax at all; it's that it's in third person omniscient. In it, we are constantly informed as to the current state of mind of a character to then justify why they're about to do the thing they're doing. This is, on one hand, necessary because we are jumping between characters too often; but it also inadvertently reveals how Ryukishi's process works, and why the other stories are so strong: he primes himself as to what a character is feeling, and then writes in first-person, and it works. It works so, so well in that perspective.

Because of this, the curtain falls a little and the magic is yet again just a little less magic in all the other stories...

Finally technically speaking this is the only game in the rereleased series that crashes. And it crashed a few times for me. So that just also frustrated me. I don't know.

Higurashi is a surprise Christian story, so that's nice, but I was hoping something would top Meakashi: the one that is an extremely intense and violent, slow self-destructive orgasm, culminating in a post-nut clarity as to what you should've done...that one can't be taken away, though. We always have Meakashi.

i'm not entirely sure how i feel about matsuribayashi. it's ok. i think it's telling that it took me the second longest out of any higurashi chapter to actually finish (about a month and a half), after onikakushi (5 months), which I almost but not quite outright disliked.

It was a Slog. I have a big aversion to stories that are just way too long for their own good, but the thing is up until now I genuinely felt that Higurashi managed to keep things fresh and interesting enough this massive sprawling length never became a detriment. That's not to say Ryukishi isnt way too verbose and repetitive for his own good, but on the whole every instalment felt like a cool and interesting twist on the Higurashi formula with its own distinct atmosphere, without needing to pull crazy genre shifts or resort to gimmicks. Even the unnerving creeping sense of doom of Watanagashi is very different to the tragic descent into madness of Meakashi, for instance.

Matsuribayashi... to be honest, I did not feel accomplished this. For sure, it's a new type of story for Higurashi, more of an actiony conspiracy theory with a dash of politics. But while perhaps new for Higurashi it feels like a fairly generic story in general. Stuff like 'the games club manage to successfully wage guerilla warfare against hardened mercenaries' is easy to criticise on the basis of unrealism - I don't personally think unrealism or being shonen-esque an inherently bad thing, but it feels weird and off for the kind of story Higurashi has been up til now, and especially by comparison seems like a cheap resolution.

Now, I get that this is a deliberate bait and switch in a sense. Ryukishi offers you a psychological horror where you can trust nobody full of the threat of monsters at every turn, and then gradually takes it apart to promote trusting your friends, working together with your community, extending grace even to the monsters. I get the reasons why it's being done, I get there's a thematic point to Scooby Doo-ing it all. But the sticking point for me is that I feel like the story Higurashi turns into is a lot less interesting than the one it began as.

I'm certainly not against these kinds of bait and switches (ask me why Hell Bent from Doctor Who is one of my favourite pieces of fiction ever). But the crucial thing for me is that the story it ends up as should be just as, if not more interesting than what was promised, or at least more satisfying (even if the initial story has more of an allure of deep lore and shocking reveals). But I don't know, I... just don't feel like creepy rural horror mystery descending into action thriller is an interesting turn of events. And ironically even though Ryukishi justifies the switch by saying that Higurashi's worldview is a nonviolent one, it still turns into the kind of story where the primary means of solving problems IS through action (if not actually killing): breaking into the bad guys' base with guns.

Now, with all that said, it's not a bad ending. None of the narrative decisions it makes are bad. It's no Rise of Skywalker, making such actively ridiculous choices the promise of the previous entries is ruined. It has good moments, and Takano is such a fascinatingly sketched character. But I can't help but feel like it's largely an exercise in ticking plot boxes.

And maybe that's just an inevitable result of a finale to a mystery where the mystery has already been revealed, but part of me feels like the entire government conspiracy angle just pushes the stakes too high where the story has no choice but to shift into an action thriller to solve it. Teenagers in a horror story might be able to fight a monster, but how can they fight hardened mercenaries? There's no choice but to shift genres.

But at the end of the day the above is largely a personal gripe. Obviously I feel strongly about this and it diminished my enjoyment, but I get where Ryukishi is coming from enough I hesitate to say This Is A Flaw, and I don't want my criticms to basically just be 'you should have written a fundamentally different story'.

One thing I did think was actively bad tho and tbh has probably seriously hurt my opinion of Matusribayashi is Fragment Connecting. It felt like 90% painstakingly spoonfeeding you plot points you should already know or have been able to piece together. We often hear 'show don't tell' but I genuinely think Fragment Connecting was an example of this gone way too far; some things can be left to casual exposition. Ironically it felt like the anti-Onikakushi; it's even more useless filler but at least this time it's plot relevant! Admittedly I'd imagine this would have been a helpful refresher if you were actually reading the Higurashi instalments as they came out.

The rest of Matsuribayashi is better, although it still feels like it doesn't really pick up til Irie escapes the clinic, and even then the action scenes are kind've annoying (I did like infiltrating the clinic though). But it's fine and servicable.

Aside from that, Hanyuu still feels like a bit of a weak link characterisation wise, especially since Matsuribayashi brings a lot in to weigh on her. She's not bad or unlikeable, but I just... don't feel the same attachment to her I do the others. I think Higurashi's strength on the whole is generally the characters, and I think Matsuribayashi did a great job with fleshing ouit Takano last minute tremendously, but Hanyuu is just... I don't know.

On the whole I would say I enjoyed Higurashi, and I wouldn't say my tepid feelings for Matsuribayashi are enough to drag the rest of it down, but I also don't think I especially love it (tho I still need to read Saikoroshi). Keeping me engrossed enough to sit through one million words and eight arcs is an impressive feat in itself, and I'll always have a soft spot for the characters, but I don't know that this will be something that stays with me. But my feelings about Matsuribayashi are in flux even now so I guess we will see.

As with Minagoroshi, I find Matsuribayashi to be a mixed bag, though a mixed bag by Higurashi's standards is still very good. These last two chapters are parrt of what prevent Higurashi from being a masterpiece for me, but ultimately I still love Higurashi just as much as I would if it were a masterpiece. I doubt even the most ardent of Ryukishi's fans would consider his writing perfect, and enjoying his work requires some acceptance of his imperfections. There are few writers who craft their works with this much love for their characters and this much thought in portraying the messiness of human experience, but there is a lot to accept in order to get to the highpoints. Some things will frustrate you, some things might come off unintentionally goofy, sometimes he overexplains and you want him to just move on already, sometimes he kinda cheats the rules of the mystery genre, etc. But while there are some things that genuinely frustrate me, I kinda love all the weird goofy stuff, all the parts where you feel he might not have been completely sure of what he was doing. The epic final chapter of Matsuribayashi is a point where the flaws and qualities have this weird kind of co-existence. On one hand, we could look at Higurashi's climax as a fantasy, a childish solution to a story that can often feel all too real. This is something Ryukishi concedes to in the Staff Room after the chapter:
"In other words, can you see that in the worlds of Higurashi, anything can be overcome when people talk to each other and help one another? Unfortunately that doesn't happen in reality. Helping each other creates friction, and often times, working alone is a lot simpler. However, we always hope that we can connect with other people and understand each other, so that we can face any difficulty. In that sense, this world is a fantasy."
He goes on to talk about his choice to make Takano the 'enemy' of this chapter, and how it suggests that he failed this worldview. He asks "What kind of ending would be the best outcome following the worldview of Higurashi? Perhaps it's something better than the Matsuribayashi chapter...."

From this perspective, the final chapter of Matsuribayashi is a failure because it fails to resolve the incredibly complex character and thematic conflicts in a believable way. It creates a fantasy of friendship and working together as a kind of spiritual power, a literal rule of the universe. It overcomes the highest of stakes and a vicious enemy. These kids are able to defeat a massive government conspiracy through tricks and traps. It feels much closer to reading a Shonen series than anything else up to this point. As Ryukishi himself admits, it partially comes from him not quite knowing how to resolve the story in a way that truly gives justice to its worldview. I think the other flaw here is residue from Chapter 7, which is that Higurashi just gets a lot BIGGER than it needs to be. Again, the draw of the series is really the character writing, and the conflicts are a lot stronger when they're contained between the characters. Tsumihoroboshi's climax is far fetched as well, but it's EMOTIONALLY believable because the conflict between Keiichi and Rena has been developed so perfectly. The whole chapter feels very true to the actual experience of trying to help a friend that's spiralling. The scenario is undoubtably a little silly, but the feelings are real. That feeling isn't really present here, and that's because the stakes of the conflict have sprawled into this massive conspiracy that exists way beyond the characters.

The other issue is Takano as a villain. This is also an issue in Minagoroshi but it's one which is more relevant here. I think Ryukishi writes himself into a corner with Takano's cartoonish levels of evil. The problem is that he ends Minagoroshi on a scene where Takano massacres an entire village while laughing maniacally, and then spends the opening hours of Matsuribayashi begging for our sympathy. My flaw is not with Ryukishi's worldview that even people who appear 'evil' become that way through trauma, and that there is always a possibility for redemption. The problem is that he writes a villain who is not a bad person in a realistic way. She is a bad person on an epic scale. It would be less of an issue if the final scene of Minagoroshi was cut down, or perhaps not even there at all. The opening hours of Masturibayashi overcompensate by aggressively piling on the tragedy. Unfortunately, it feels nowhere near as earned as the tragedy in previous chapters, and part of that is how it feels like Ryukishi is trying to MAKE us sympathise with her. Obviously all stories utilise some kind of emotional manipulation, but it's very different here to how Shion is written in Meakashi. At the end of that chapter, Ryukishi clearly wants us to cry for Shion. He's obviously directing us to feel that sympathy. For some people it didn't work, and Ryukishi acknowledges in the staff room that some readers won't accept it. For me it worked because we spend that entire chapter locked in Shion's head. It's not just that terrible things happened to her, but that those events took an incredible toll on her mindset and mental health, and that toll is really what we see in that chapter. And even though she suffers plenty in Meakashi, we still see what her day to day life is like - it isn't just an endless parade of suffering. Before asking us to cry for her, Ryukishi carefully builds up that mindset and that experience of overwhelming emotional pain. While Takano is given a psychological motive, the opening hours are more about the exposition - we get an explanation of how Takano became Like This, rather than actually feeling what it would be like to be Takano. It definitely feels a lot more forced in that regard, and it's where I find Ryukishi's portrayal of suffering to be overly indulgent (though I've heard the manga is much worse with this). A lot of these issues wouldn't be as bad if the story just had a smaller scale - if Takano were the culprit, but not someone in charge of a conspiracy to massacre an entire village, if her backstory was given more space to breathe instead of being a series of traumatic bullet points.

So with these issues outlined, we could describe Matsuribayashi as something of a failure. It doesn't quite give justice to the worldview and the emotional struggle that we saw in previous chapters. But if Matsuribayashi is a failure, it is a very enjoyable one. Perhaps a high stakes and action packed climax wasn't the right way to end Higurashi, but for what it is I think Ryukishi does it very well. He manages to keep an impressive balancing act of maintaining nonstop tension for around 5 hours, and while the climax is arguably bloated I found it never got tiring to read. And while there is a kind of childishness in its execution, there's also kind of a delight in the silliness of it all. Part of the point of Higurashi is that these are characters who have had their childhoods robbed from them, and the club games are a form of reclaiming that childhood. As I wrote in my Tsumihoroboshi review, this idea is best executed in the climax of that chapter. Matsuribayashi takes things even further, where the club game techniques are part of why these kids manage to win. It's like the story itself becomes akin to a child's imagination. The characters are often having so much fun that it sometimes feels like the stakes aren't even there, that the win is already sealed. At times, it makes the fight feel less like a fight and more like a victory lap. This is arguably worthy of criticism but I do find it really fun, and it adds to the borderline utopian vision of friendship that Ryukishi presents in this chapter. I can't believe entirely in what he presents here, and part of that is that I don't think he does either, but I still like the fantasy.

Much of what Higurashi's fans value about the series is this feeling that it breaks through being a story and becomes way too fucking real. It's not necessarily that the plotline itself is realistic, but that there are moments where Ryukishi captures something that feels so true to traumatic experience that it becomes overwhelming to read. Matsuribayashi has none of that 'realness'. It's pure story, pure fantasy. But what Ryukishi does maintain is a love for the characters, and a joy in just seeing them interact, to find beauty in the silly things that supposedly 'don't matter'. And so even though Ryukishi ultimately failed in some ways, I don't mind. He maintained his love, and I maintained mine.

It took me 2 years to finally get around to this and I did really enjoy it. I was pretty satisfied with all the answers we got and entertained throughout butttttttttt some things can’t be forgiven. Chapter 7: Minagoroshi has an incredible tragic but beautiful ending where despite the battle being lost Rika realises how much she can rely on her friends and watches her killer mutilate her to remember her face. Crazy good stuff but then when we finally get to Rika in this chapter….she simply forgot the entire chapter happened??? It’s not even like this is even relevant to the plot because Hanyu says oh it was her btw and Rikas like aight bet and questions her friends. Previous chapters have also spent a lot of time talking about how vital Keiichi is for break free but in this chapter he’s kinda sidelined and clueless. As far as I’m concerned however my problems get fixed in the alternate ending so I can’t complain that much. Chapter good but dumb