“Without love, it cannot be seen”

Without love, the truth can’t be reached. Without love, an understanding of the motives can’t be reached. Without love, the game can’t be played. So Umineko asks you to trust in its story and characters, time and time again. But…

“You can't trust anything, you can't trust any words that aren't red...!!”

You are tasked with 2 contradictory things: To trust the story, and to doubt it. Which puts you into the exact same position as Battler in the early episodes, not wanting to doubt anything, but being unable to trust anything either.



"Without love, it cannot be seen?... Hah. It's backwards. Because of love, you end up seeing things that don't even exist..."

And I foolishly trusted the people of the Ushiromiya family, being sidetracked and pulled in many different directions, trying to latch onto whatever red truth that allowed for the characters I loved to be innocent, while also trying to deny the witch.

“No more than 17 humans exist on this island! That excludes any 18th person.”

And so I finished the questions arc with no answer, no good way to solve the games, only theories piled on top of theories. And the final question “...who am I?”

Let me backup a bit. I am not a mystery fan. I enjoy mysteries, but I don’t try to actively solve them. Usually, that is not required. So I do what I do for any other story, and focus on the characters. And Umineko, very smartly, opens on a very, very, very long sequence, introducing its characters.

At the start, I gotta admit, I was pretty fucking fed up with the characters. Why is Battler so horny? Why is Maria so stupid and into witches? Why are Shannon and George so cringe? Why is Kanon so edgy? But despite them not being written in red, these are all clues to piece together what’s happening.



Slowly but surely, the layers of the characters unraveled themselves, and with it grew the unconscious feeling that I’m seeing what I’m seeing for a reason, until the game outright spells it out.

“It is forbidden for the culprit to be anyone not mentioned in the early part of the story.”
“It is forbidden for the case to be resolved with clues that are not presented.”

Finally, at the end of episode 5, I resigned myself to try and actively solve the mystery at every moment of playing the game. I am not ashamed to admit my utter failure. Nor do I think it took away from the experience.

I did eventually figure it out at episode 7, despite how clueless I am, but by then, I found the question of “why did Beatrice” far more compelling than “who and how did Beatrice”. And episode 7 seems to agree with me on that. And at the end, the answers are not spelled out, the truth is not revealed.

And Bern mercissealy tears it out. In what are some of the heartbreaking hours of the game, and everything makes sense. There’s no mystery left, everything is depressing and done.

…and then episode 8 starts, and the script is flipped on its head for the final time. And at the end, I understood nothing, knew nothing, only had the characters, their heart, their sadness and happiness, the many tales they wove. And everyone was there, everyone, everyone, everyone.