It's said that the reason the Mona Lisa is such an impactful painting is because of the miracle Leonardo Da Vinci accomplished with her. You can spend hours and hours discussing what the Mona Lisa is and what she means, hyper-analyze the technique and flaws that make her as she is. I don't meant to devalue that critical process in any fashion. But if you look upon her - really, truly look upon her, and let yourself be open to idea, you might just experience what centuries of people have seen in her, what few people throughout history have been able to replicate in their own artistic endeavors: the essence of the human soul.

What on earth does this have to do with a metafictional murder mystery visual novel concerning the fate of a wealthy Japanese family? ...we'll come to that.

Umineko: When They Cry (to use the localized title) consists colectively of the third and fourth entries of 07th Expansion's "When They Cry" anthology series, something that has given me no end of trouble when it comes to thinking through how to present this review. As with Higurashi: When They Cry before it, Umineko is an episodic visual novel series, broken up into two collections of four episodes each, with each episode broadly retelling or rearranging the events of a two-day serial killing. While the mechanics behind how this works eventually become clear to the reader, it's sort of a hard effect to wrap your head around before reading. I would assume it's more natural if you start with Higurashi (which is the normal pipeline for readers anyway), only I went into Umineko first. Actually, at the time of this writing, I've read the first one-and-a-third episodes of Higurashi's Steam release and experienced nothing else, so I can't be sure.

No, instead, I was introduced to Umineko completely out of context by a friend. See, we were involved in a couple different forum games on this message board, and he would introduce random Umineko characters and music to them for variety's sake. So long before I ever read a thing, I knew about a couple fan-favorite songs such as "miragecoordinator" as well as memorable characters like Lambdadelta, Bernkastel, Ronove, and Rosa Ushiromiya. Also Nanjo Terumasa, for some reason. I have to say, world of difference between how relevant Nanjo was to me before and after reading Umineko.

But the most important context I had going in was familiarity with Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were None", specifically through René Clair's excellent 1945 film adaptation. My mother's childhood was spent watching television broadcasts of movies from her parents' youths in the 30s/40s/50s, something she was able to pay forward for her children with the widespread availability of DVD rereleases and Turner Classic Movies. "And Then There Were None" was not my very favorite movie she introduced to me like this - "The Thin Man" and "The Court Jester" are stronger contenders, and I've always been fond of "The Penguin Pool Murder". But it must certainly belong in the conversation! The private island setting, the revelation that each of the major players are baddies in their own way, each character being memorable despite their introduction as an ensemble ("Beastly bad luck" has managed to work its way into my daily vocabulary), the creative way they're each picked off in accordance with the titular song/nursery rhyme, the mounting tension as the number of possible killers dwindles down... Fantastic setup, great direction, captivating movie. The only thing it's missing is the original story's chilling confession-in-a-bottle ending, though I can accept the altered ending as necessary under the Hays Code (and also not being a bummer to film audiences of the time).

This is only loosely related, but since I'm on the subject - one way I used to connect with media as a kid was imagining what video game adaptations would have looked like for it. Keep in mind this would've been before I ever had regular access to non-computer games, yet this often took the form of imagining GameBoy or N64 tie-ins, since there was still allure in what intrigue those consoles held. I remember doing this while watching "And Then There Were None", and I specifically remember imagining a TV spot for it ending with, "And Then There Were None, only on GameBoy Color". It didn't occur to me until later how this was a pretty strange gaming platform to exclusively assign a black-and-white movie!

Anyway! Having "And Then There Were None" as reference, I was eager to read through what was to me a transparent attempt to invoke that book, only with magic and electronic dance music somehow incorporated. It took some time, but I was able to read it, first through an under-the-counter copy translated on the sly by fan effort The Witch Hunt (at the time, the only viable way to get it in English), then through buying the somewhat-more-official MangaGamer release (only "somewhat" because my payment to MangaGamer was listed in my bank transactions as a phantom charge to a random London ATM. Is this still people's experience with MangaGamer? That was a hard one to explain to my father, who at the time still had access to my bank account). All things told, I think it took me the better part of three/four years reading it on/off to get through all of it, around high school/college.

Let the record show that that loooong reading time was not a consequence of disinterest, just intimidation. Hard to find 80-120 hours to read a book! But I was pulled in immediately, even in spite of Umineko's notoriously slow opening leading into the First Twilight, when things really kick off.

Before that, you have the soundtrack. I say this with no hyperbole: Umineko has my favorite soundtrack of anything ever. There's a decent amount more instrument-driven atmospheric pieces than melody-driven, and thus less likely picks if you're specifically looking up music from the game - but even then, tracks like "Witch in gold", "Apathy", "Stupefication", and "Voiceless" are all great. But then you get into some of the main leitmotifs, some of the main melodic set pieces, and holy crap, the musical team drives the story in ways that words alone could not do. It's just a song that plays over a crawl of character names, but "Ride On" gave me chills the first time I heard it, that buildup slowly giving way to triumphant strings. "Towering Cloud in Summer" comes shortly thereafter, a less-bombastic progression of the melody that receeds into the backdrop of a bright day on the coastline. The melody finally comes into its own after these hints once the family reaches the island and wanders through the rose garden. As the cast experiences this serene beauty - "Hope" plays.

I don't think it's much of a stretch to call "Hope" the song of Umineko. It's a quiet, understated, beautiful composition, constantly finding its footing and receeding into the background in sequence, its simple musical phrases swirling in turn as more instruments are added, until it finally lets itself fade away to the call of seagulls. Because that's what Umineko's title refers to: the crying of the black-tailed gulls, the Japanese "sea-cats", sure to be heard once the storms clear at the end of the story.

There are a lot of emotions tied to "Hope", largely contingent on the context of the scene during which it's played. Most of the moments to use the main composition are introspective and melancholic character beats, sometimes used to punctuate conversations about the future or the past. One of the lyrical versions (not used in-game) places it as a sad piece, regretting the curse of the singer's existence and how much better everyone's life would be if the singer did not exist - a desperate misery that wishes for a hope that does not exist in this world. Another places it as a triumphant piece, bemoaning the circumstances that have come to pass but becoming a rallying cry to burn it all to cinders and fly onward. I think, ultimately, the song is less about having "hope" and more about finding "hope", particularly in such a dire situation.

Because, you see, the main family - the Ushiromiyas - are cut off from the world during a tropical storm that ravages their island for two full days. Once the storm passed, when the seagulls cried, none were left alive.

I don't want to cover too many specifics, because so much of Umineko comes from experiencing its story beats and songs in the moment. But I will mention the First Twilight. By this point, you've been reading for about four hours. Not a whole lot of exciting stuff has happened - you had an out-of-context scene of a dying old man playing chess with his doctor, then the family arriving at the island, then discussions around inheritence, the storm, and a strange riddle placed next to the beautiful portrait of the family's mythical benefactor. There is some intrigue as one of the characters reveals a letter, supposedly from their benefactor, the Endless Golden Witch Beatrice, announcing that she will take back everything she had given the family lest they solve the riddle. The family sets to it, but they're not able to make headway before turning in for the night.

Then we follow one of the characters, who wakes up the following morning. There's a subdued atmosphere as they start to prepare for the day. They start to search for the others, who should be here. They reache for a doorknob...

...and find blood. The terrifically filthy, oppressive "Golden slaughterer" kicks in as a frantic search begins, more of the family waking and scouring the grounds until finally, six horribly mutilated bodies turn up. In accordance with the riddle's "First Twilight", six were offered as sacrifices.

If you haven't read it, you might think this is giving a lot away. But this is only describing the first chunk of the first episode. You've been reading for about four hours to this point; that's at best one-twentieth of what the book has to offer. And it will be full of this sort of thing, constantly inventing and reinventing itself, becoming somehow bigger and better the whole way through. This? This is nothing in the grand scheme of things. And yet when I read through this first part with my (politely patient) sister, I got four hours' worth of conversation out of it with her.

Ryukishi07 is a master of tonality in writing (though, due credit goes to The Witch Hunt as well for capturing his writing essence in English). Umineko tackles a lot of extremely complex emotions and themes throughout its entire runtime, as we come to know the family and the myriad other characters who crop up here and there. This might sound weird, but a lot of how it's able to capture this wildly divergent tonality is through how sloppy the writing comes across. We know that Ryukishi07 is capable of formal prose - that prologue scene with Kinzo and Nanjo playing chess is played largely straight with a stiff third-person narrator, only devolving towards the end as Kinzo falls into a passion and begins to scream (but this is contained in dialogue tags, and anything goes in character speech). But for much of the narrative, there's little effort to keep a consistent tone with how the story is presented. Sometimes the narration is in first person, following the stupidly-named Battler Ushiromiya as he directly addresses the reader. Sometimes the narration is in third-person limited, only following a single character around. Sometimes it's third-person omniscient, flitting from character to character or describing things that characters present could not know about. Sometimes, in moments of heightened emotion, dialogue bleeds into the narration, and a third-person narrator briefly becomes the character. Sometimes the narration just devolves into repetetive onomatopoeia or stage directions, and you get digital pages worth of metaphorical noise.

If we're strictly focused on proper form, then yeah, this is rough. But pay attention to what the music is doing, or what the visuals are doing, or what the words are trying to communicate, as this goes on. This is always in service of emphasizing a certain mood. Some of my favorite books do this sort of thing, too: "Everything is Illuminated" makes excellent use of run-on sentences, forgetting punctuation to communicate both the POV character's rough grasp of English as a second language and his heightened emotions during particular sequences. The "How to Train Your Dragon" books use different typefaces to communicate different spoken languages. "The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear" plays with font size to communicate volume, uses garbage characters to communicate incomprehensible dialogue, and - in one of my favorite scenes - creates "dialogue" between the in-universe encyclopedia entries and the narrator. I love it when fiction plays with its specific medium to articulate itself, and Umineko is a masterclass example of that. Honestly, something I think anyone who wants to be a writer should study...

...with the caveat being that if you're squeamish about... oh, just about anything... then this probably isn't for you. There was a point in my life where, as soon as this came out on Steam, I started buying copies for all my friends who I thought could learn something from it. But one friend gleefully spoiled one of the more explicit, mean-spirited murders to another friend. Dude was so offended that he proclaimed he was disappointed in me as a person and loudly uninstalled the game from his hard-drive, just so his computer wasn't tainted by this filth. So, um, just to avoid another heartbreak and wasted twenty-five bucks: if you're someone who has a weak constitution for any heavy subject matter besides racism or animal abuse (two of the few subjects Umineko doesn't cover), I'd understand it if you steered clear.

At the same time, that willingness to tackle just about anything means Umineko has the ability to connect to the reader through extremely specific, unexpected moments. There are ultimately a LOT of characters that do a LOT of things, and while some are mostly there to serve some narrative purpose (I don't imagine Sabakichi is a character a lot of people think about), a ton express very specific ideas. This is largely a consequence of the game's narrative and central theming... becoming unmoored, let's say. This is never a work to abandon its given themes, but each episode represents a separate cycle of the same events, which suggests counter-narratives running alongside everything that has been established. In particular, the visual novel is metafiction, a story that becomes a commentary on murder mysteries as much as an example of the murder mystery genre; even this gets unmoored, and the commentary becomes about storytelling and commentary on storytelling.

You'd think this would devolve into gibbering madness, but there's always some sort of emotional core and throughline for the reader to hold onto. Sure, at a given point we might be three layers deep in the Witch's Game (how the metafiction manifests - a game of wits between characters, where the murder mystery is the gameboard), but the narrative still devotes time to the character dramas of the Ushiromiya family because that remains the heart of this experience. Like, Natsuhi is a character who was pretty important in the first episode but got largely abandoned by the narrative, only to become a central character again in Episode 5, at a time when the narrative has flown off the rails into deep metafiction territory; I'd argue we get even better insight into the character in Episode 5 because the game's now set up the tools for the reader to read between the lines of its own narrative.

We're getting into abstract territory, so I'll give a specific personal example to highlight why I think this is so effective. This is a line from Episode 6, paraphrased a bit to avoid spoilers (why am I still trying to present this unspoilered, mumble grumble). This is a point where the Witch's Game is a central part of the narrative, so we're spending more time with the characters in the metafiction rather than in the initial Ushiromiya murder mystery. Still, we're viewing a gameboard presented by a novice Game Master (who I'll refer to as 「Guy」), so the Ushiromiya murder mystery is at the forefront of the text. At this point in time, within the murder mystery, Rudolph Ushiromiya has just asked Krauss Ushiromiya about the whereabouts of another character (who I'll refer to as 「Character」). As readers, we know exactly what 「Character」's whole deal is. We learned all about that over the last five episodes. There's a perfectly valid explanation for their whereabouts, and it has nothing to do with the murder mystery. So, the narration explains:

"Flustered, Krauss tried to explain away 「Character」's silence. 「Guy」, the Game Master, hadn't made '[「Character's」 absence]' a major theme for this game, so the conversation didn't progress any further at this point. They stopped talking about 「Character」 without Rudolf thinking anything was particularly suspicious."

This is a complete throwaway line. And yet, this is one of the lines I think about most from this visual novel. As mentioned, to this point, we've spent a LOT of time thinking about '[「Character's」 absence]'. It was a major theme of the previous episodes, because the metafictional author of those murder mysteries chose to emphasize it as a major theme. This time around, 「Guy」 didn't want to express that theme, because 「Guy」 has different narrative goals in mind. So the characters in 「Guy」's drama don't fixate on it, even though they would have if someone else was writing the story. It makes me think a TON about the essence of what storytelling is. Like it's so easy for someone just learning to write or engaging in literary criticism to fixate on the monomyth or the Seven Basic Plots, and fear that anything they say has already been done by someone else. Yet every author chooses to express different themes, both as conscious goals and unconscious expressions of the author's lived experiences and worldviews; it's from this divergent understanding of reality that we get our stories. We read stories and look for authors because of the way they express ideas, not because the ideas being expressed are wholly new.

Or, another way to look at it: as a writer, characters are your tools to express certain themes. Because 「Guy」 didn't want to roll with '[「Character's」 absence]' as a theme, 「Guy」 made the characters not worry about it. Now, presented with this quote out of context, you might suggest that this is a clumsy way of diffusing this question, since the reader will just want to know more about what's going on with 「Character」. I would agree! Within the text of Episode 6, 「Guy」 is not a good Game Master. There are much better ways of diffusing the question of given themes. But this clumsy example still proves the point: you don't have to make every potential consequence of your characters and your setting an element of your work's text. You can naturally diffuse situations if you don't wanna tackle them. Same reason why we don't see a lot of toilets in fiction, or we don't always ask how fantasy characters can wear their hair or clothes like that. The work doesn't have to be about that.

Like I said, complete throwaway line, but from that I've found those two extremely fundamental things to hold onto as I work to be a novelist. Because of how dense Umineko is with its narrative goals, there are so many things like that throughout. And it's not just the metafictional angle! The story has a lot to say on faith and belief, on self-identity and actualization, on logic and magic, on love and hate, on kinship and family, on fantasy and reality. The literary stuff just happens to be the main thing I really held onto over the last ten years, on top of the music.

...that, and Beatrice.

I cannot say much about Beatrice without giving things away, because Beatrice is the essence of Umineko. Nevertheless: I have never seen a more fully-realized character in any fictional work than Beatrice. So much of it is her role as the assumed killer, and the extent to which the narrative examines the possibilities of its central murder mystery. But so much of it as well is how often she surprises you. You'll think you have her pegged, only for a single line to completely change everything. Even by the end, you don't completely understand her; I don't, not even after having ten years to think about her. But you understand what you need to, and you accept that that's all you need.

And, I'll be honest - I see within Beatrice the essence of the human soul. I struggle to articulate what it is, specifically; perhaps it is that struggle that forms that essence? But the act of going through the visual novel and making sure I understood the themes and lessons at play made me want to believe in her reality, even if just for a moment. Beatrice is my Mona Lisa.

I have no interest in pretending that Umineko is a flawless masterpiece that everyone will love. It's really long, there's very limited interactivity even for a visual novel, it's frequently crass and vulgar, syntactical errors can be distracting, it's easy to read a bad message out of the thematic conclusion, there are pros and cons to each art style (though using anything besides Ryukishi07's original art is weird to me), etc etc etc. A lot of people aren't gonna resonate with it. And that's perfectly fine (as long as you don't take me to task for it)! But for me, it was an extremely formative piece of fiction. Some of my favorite fictional characters, one of my biggest writing influences, an incredible soundtrack, and one of my favorite things to think about. I don't expect I'll be rereading it any time soon, but I guarantee it'll remain a part of my life for a long time yet, even if it's just me centering my thoughts again by listening to "Hope".