I tend to like to find reasoning in things, so I occasionally wonder why someone chose the exact medium they did to express the story they wanna tell. On a surface level, I’d mark the route-less visual novel as strange; kinda feels like a budgeted version of a bunch of other mediums. Not that I’d judge someone for going for a budgeted option of anything, mind you, but I guess what surprised me was how clear regardless it was that Higurashi’s writer is a game designer. Or at the very least, an equipped dungeon master; the way even in its most mundane moments Onikakushi manages to rip chunks of substance out of its characters via understanding their psychology through a game is kinda incredible. Obviously, the way it religiously mixes callbacks and narrative parallels between its board game sessions and obscene murder scenes is cute and all, but occasionally a detail would catch my eye that was so visceral, it changed my understanding of the game as a whole.
And honestly...I liked a lot of the downtime. Maybe more than I should have. I think the way Mion and the protagonist are constantly on the same wavelength comedically works really well to personalize our relations to her in a way that made me genuinely upset to see her hurt later on
Lots of cute stuff to wonder aloud about as well, like is the main cast’s obsession with western culture and roleplaying as aristocrats supposed to be some ironic-tragic element to how their lives are conflicted between interests in westernization and traditionalism, or maybe they’ll spin that in a different direction later on? Also hoping we see more positive angles to the beautiful solidarity of the town as well, it’d be sad for them to throw that out for village-conspiracy cult stuff.
Really good first chapter!!! Felt good to see some moments that were clearly iconic to a whole lotta japanese teenagers in the 2000s blind; I think the door scene and its aftermath had the best buildup of tension and little humane nuances yet.
Also, the presentation? Awesome. We love it. Ryukishi's art isn't very traditionally good and tends to get a 'how do I take this seriously' rep that is maybe deserved (but also still only a complaint from the weak), but he sure is genuinely good at expressions. I cannot imagine the way these characters act without contexts like Mion's boisterous smiles, or Rika's vague squiggly stare. The photography does a lot to add texture and power to the words regarding the village, and its inhuman solidarity. I assumed they were stock photos for a while, but nah - they really did go to a remote village in Japan that was interconnected with a real life tragedy involving dam submerging. This is also one of those games where the author just happened to find the best music ever on a royalty free music page, so yeah. Cool.
So uh, yeah. Real good. Loved it also i think this ryukishi guy is a pervert but im sure yall noticed that already

Ryukishi wasn't lying, this really was a lower difficulty but much more vicious. Found this chapter fundamentally weaker on a basis that most of its mysteries are built on 50/50s, and said mysteries have emotional hooks built in something that feels cheaper than chapter 1's subject matter. Not only this, while I loved chapter 1's downtime, I started to feel fatigue to the depth of the character's tropes. They just didn't get as much out of the downtime in this chapter we hadn't seen already... THAT SAID, this certainly isn't a betrayal of what made Onikakushi special for me; the sincere sympathy and belief in seeing the good in its characters shone through for me. Horror as a means to process our trauma owns
Oh by the way he DID sexualize the characters more so I hope we lock up Ryukishi and beat him up with hammers or something IDK.

…..
Damn.
Maybe the most emblematic of what Higurashi is plays out here; our early chapters introducing us a character who is a 30 year old who goes “btw im a pedophile :3 just kidding” like 5 times, only for the second half of the chapter to barrel into sincerely well handled and discussed topics of child abuse. And whether or not this makes it more or less frustrating that these tropes are present at all, I think Ryukishi expresses teenager-dom very succinctly on this cut. The section in which Keiichi argues with himself over if there’s anything he could do to save his friend for hours straight, tossing and turning as he remembers every single little limitation his lack of agency can't afford him is one of my fav scenes in the series so far. That sense of hysterical powerlessness keeps growing and growing and growing until it's suffocating. And at the climax of that suffocation, we realize that the world is rejecting us, and we couldn't break through the surface of its hulking mass no matter how we try.
There’s something to be said about how this chapter plays with the built-up expectations and concepts the series plays with already. Keiichi begging for the supernatural concepts that have haunted him to work in his favour, only for them to be most clearly fake when he needed them feels so right. Like this supernatural world will only become grounded in reality when he wants to break through a reality that is just too brutal to the people he wants to love. And when that supernatural unreality finally reels its head to work in its favour...He snaps. Fuck, dude. Ugh.
Ultimately, this chapter just felt earnestly lived through to me. The trio of Keiichi, Mion, and Rena as perspectives of strong-armed naivete clashing with someone who has been through some shit a bit too young and has the burden of having to know too much. I’ve met both of them many times in my life, and probably been both of them over the course of my life. At the center of this chapter of course is Satoko, who's trauma is painted excellently through so many angles. To be blunt, this character's dialogue is fucking hard to read this time around, for all the right reasons. This is where Ryukishi being a social worker was first visible to me; he's definitely seen what a child's panic attack looks like, and knows how ugly it is.

That's not to pretend the series' caviats are subdued this time around; there's still a ton of pacing issues, repetitions and overexplanations that show the humbleness of the series' Komiket 100 yen origins. The part in which a character being revealed as a sexual assault victim in conjunction with a wacky horror game stinger sound effect felt a little insensitive to me, but the ripples of that event existing in the plot's canon are astute and mature. There's also the ending of this chapter, which I had heard was controversial, and uh, yeah. I get it lmao. Ripped us out of the tightly knit sequence of events surrounding Keiichi in a way that screams intentionally dissatisfying, all the while smashing us over the head with a million genuinely tantalizing questions...I think I like it, honestly. Every single thread left loose end makes me think that if these are interestingly answered later on, I'll simply have to respect the fuck out of that decision to cut it short here.
Personally there's a lot to resonate and fiddle with in my head in this chapter. Uncomfortable to read shit, educated shit. Can't say that nearly as much about the first two entries. Caviats can't change that Higurashi believes and is fighting for something. Its anger, pain, and wishful thinking are so razor sharp, our gazes were always glancing in the same horizon.

This one smelled a bit too much like cigarettes for my taste. Most damning thing I can say about it is that every chapter up to this point is sincerely compelling of its own merit--not just as an overarching mystery--yet this one is entirely flat and running on pastiche in comparison. But the ending sequence intertwines with the player's own experience rather memorably, and I am just fucking sentimental to this series already so Who's To Say If It's Good Or Bad
Anyways that chapter was two minute long so since I'm out of things to say about it, I might as well move on to the series as a whole - now that I'm done w/ questions arc and whatnot. My friend group has personally read the entire story out loud together, which is a dizzying thing to plan for a series this long and spiraling, I can't help but think that razor sharp attentiveness and required focus on every line in the VN ultimately has turned into something positive. It makes it blatantly obvious how overwritten and repetitive Ryukishi prose is for sure, but I also can't help myself from appreciating how that same repetition can play into its feverish world-gone-slow horror. Wow, this is like, the best genre to be bad at editing down your scripts for! Just feels distinct to me that I've never really felt this involved with a cast of characters in my life before - and equally never imagined getting into this series would be such an ordeal. I choose the word ordeal both due to the direct nature of how fucking unbelievably long this series is, but also afflicted by the nature of its 20 years of fandom history suddenly being placed onto my lap. Haven't felt this culture shocked from dipping my toes into a sub-culture since I played a Touhou game for the first time when I was 14; speaking of which, I was surprised to hear this series was already so popular in 2004 during the after-party, having polls that garnered ten thousand+ votes! It's all a lot of words to say that my experience with When They Cry is already weighty. Something that imagining the throughlines of has ended up becoming a part of my day to day thoughts - and it's understandable no matter how technically early I am in the series; I mean, dude... Just from these first four chapters, this entry is close to hitting a 500 000 word count. And yet...95 hours invested into this, my passion for the concoction of themes wafting through this series remains burning.

Why do I read Higurashi?
...The answer was simple. I've had my fill of polished styles.
Then why do I read Higurashi?
The answer was simple. Getting into something easier to parse would be boring.
So...why do I read Higurashi?
To be honest, I probably wouldn't mind reading something easier than this.
Basically, it was just that the tears would water my heart, which was withered with boredom.

Ryukishi kills me and murders me and sends me to the evil torture dungeons for not hearing him out on Chapter 2.
I'M SORRY, OKAY? I'M SORRY.
This is a pretty decisive chapter for Higurashi as a series, I’d say. This whole time we’ve spent seeing small but pointed glimpses into the mind of Fucked Up Anime Girls, but for the first time we actually pierce deep into the mind of one of those. It’s exactly decisive because, well…people are bad at writing women. Especially the fucked up ones. This whole time I felt this series was surprisingly intelligent in how it conveyed a character’s past, consciousness, and trauma through their actions, but if the inside of their head was filled with the sort of condescension and misunderstanding of a teenager’s intelligence this sort of thing is wrought with, it’s game over. So…does Higurashi have the sauce?
Yeah. sure. it does
It just struck me how the writer would never allow these characters to stagnate or to become less than intimately alive and conscious human beings. From the very beginning of this journey through the character’s mind, all of their actions are so sharp with intent. An incoherent evil laugh that rings insanity? She did it because she had to force herself to keep making noise, to keep up an act, because being this person is hard. Being someone who hurts people is hard. When the only coping mechanism you have left is to stop seeing your hands as yours, and you dehumanize yourself until you see your actions as some narrative you’re following.
Fate has been contextualized and re-contextualized over and over in this plot, but this one hit me most personally. We have a million opportunities to challenge fate every minute, but it’s so easy to stagnate. Once you’ve already crossed the line, you’ve already accepted that this is what you are now. There’s no point in reaching out to anyone anymore. This is what’s left for me, so I’ll keep going until I’ve fallen into hell.
It is also the first time I've felt confronted in this series having actual explicit depictions of deranged violence against children - you'd think it'd take us faster to get here with how people talk about the series - and like, yeah. The violence of children being used to push character development further DOES feel gratuitous, but it's also so anti-satisfaction that I don't think anything here yet froths in sadism... It is sad though. It made me SAD
This chapter is just sad. It is the saddest Higurashi ever made me feel. this is the saddest shit ever. The pointed picture of twisting self-identity swirling into something that chokes us out is just so much. The final moments of this story kill me they kill my ass so dead

I just wanted someone to save me, someone to rip me off this path that I dredge through the mud to the other side of, because I can’t see my legs anymore in this grime.

That’s probably the most interesting component of the psychology here; the strong depiction of how our protagonist has lost a sense of self-control. Of course she couldn’t stop herself once she got started, because she has already dulled and desensitized her mind to tolerate what she sees her hands doing. That in combination with a sincerely good depiction of the sort of upbringing that would lead to someone being desensitized in the way she did; born into Yakuza, her mind attempted to be scrubbed into learning to be subservient by religious boarding school. Infected by dangerous traditionalist ideas of paying for actions via atonement - and forcing others to atone. Violence is justified via narrative to the people who brought her up, so all she had to do to justify violence was to narrativize herself until she was no longer human. You gotta appreciate the simple aesthetic choice of how after facing the generational cycle of atonement from such a young age, the aesthetic of nail cleaving has become so twisted in how she performs it on others.
Everything that’s every been pointed about Higurashi froths up into something so unbelievably aggressive and nihilist.
The prosed 5000x over perpetual theme of “maybe these characters would be able to sort out these issues if they spoke to each other” reaches such an obvious climax here; our protagonist is the perfect candidate to fall into immortality, because she was exiled. Ex-communicated.
Lastly wanna add that while I'm not exactly sure where this plot is going to go, if the direction its mystery is going is intentionally trying to be a message about how not one person is to blame for the issues we face, then this chapter really conveys that direction perfectly. In her intense rage, our protagonist hurts Satoko repeatedly, not realizing that she is perpetuating the violence against the Houjou family. The curse of Hinamizawa is systemic.
You can paint a lot about the direness of a situation through the lens of teenagers, where we're at our most emotionally sensitive states; Meakashi shows us that what sends us to off the edge is not being allowed to be ourselves. Fuck, dude. I’m gonna be mourning this for like a week

Anyways I personally want to put Ryukishi on blast for a bit. I wanted to look at an interview with him to know why the fuck he was like this, and found this, in which he said:
"The Question Arcs are all Bad Ends. Starting with Meakashi-hen even though there are still some mysteries left… *laughs* I am going to move towards a relieving and healing ending. The last arc will be the final."
YOU'RE A SICK FUCK, DUDE. THIS IS NOT UPLIFTING. I'M SICK OF YOU, DAWG. I WANT IT SO OVER FOR YOU

I think if there’s anything I wanted to revise a little about earlier entries, I think I’d specify I exaggerated a bit about how flawed Higurashi is. Maybe defensively, almost; like I’d have to elaborate to the sort of ppl who heard my glowing praise of the series’ strongpoints that it can actually be very well paced and filled with brevity when it wants to. But uh, dude…this is like, the most fucked arc in the series, lmao. Something something ‘Scuffed media fans when they encounter a real 8/10’. Higurashi at its most and least meathead, at its worst paced and least subtle. Sheer contrast of some of the most bitterly real depictions of cyclical mental illness fighting against bonkers wild shonen tone. The transformation of the series from a well maintained hatchet to the hemorrhaging of a blunt object. But we still love it, everyone does. Let’s try and grapple with why.

Starting off, it’s immediately apparent and important how much intelligence and respect is given for Rena’s mental health. The way the guilt complex and privilege guilt swirls into a maelstrom in her brain is painstakingly real. I found it poignant how near the end of the plot, she plainly states to herself that she felt like she was the saddest person in the world when her dad was being courted - considering she spent the entire first half of the arc denying that out of feeling she had it too well off. Rena is a lavished depiction of how a concoction of untreated mental health issues can allow for someone - particularly someone who is consistently portrayed as a sharp, mature figure - to downward spiral when there are no reliable adult figures in her life. The recontextualization of her silly little persona she’s developed over the series are so sharp, I’m surprised I didn’t expect a lot of them; I think I genuinely learned things about mental health from this 2005 visual novel! I also got a little annoyed when Steam gave me an achievement of her doing an evil anime yandere face at the end of a chapter about her being traumatized; man…this series’ distributors really don’t fucking understand it, huh?

All that being said, a frustration sorta crept into my view as the chapter went on…you’re gonna have to forgive me if this is a bit too cynical of a criticism. But…did anyone else feel that the way Rena dealt with Rina felt too easy? Like…I think depicting Rena as a victim of childhood divorce leaving her with a sense of opaque guilt is very grounded and spoke to the people I was reading this with. Not only that, but the way Rena’s father was debilitated by their own adult-problem depression, leaving Rena to deal with her mental health afflictions on her own is also a very effective expression of one of the core tenets of this series - the importance of healthy upbringing of teenagers. And Rina as a figure that makes Rena feel unwelcome in her house is depicted with heart wrenching detail in its prose! But for her to be the instigator, the one that puts Rena on the spot to commit murder, suddenly feels less brutally real than everything that had happened up to this point. It felt a little too much like the plot was speedrunning in order to bring the central point of Rena making the wrong decision - which is a great central conflict, mind you - but I wish it got even a little more time, especially considering what would happen later. While the first half of the chapter went too fast, I think the second half went way too slow! Once again, the ways that Rena’s arc consistently both shockingly and subtly uses her own misunderstandings and assumptions about Hinamizawa to make us question our own predetermined viewpoints of the town is very succinct. But the way that it will bring something up, outline it, then say it in a less subtle way to make sure you get it ends up making the second half drag so much. I got it, Ryukishi. Something tells me that the people who like this chapter more than me probably read it faster than me. And despite all of this, something tells me it’d be wrong to dwell on all this. I’m going to try and find the right words to convey why.

Despite all of this, the chapter still worked for me. I have not been mentally well recently. I feel like a trainwreck. And when I sat down, surrounded by my friends, to read through Keiichi accepting Rena for everything, I cried. Even as my mind screamed that Keiichi being able to forgive and move past Rena doing this felt a bit contrived, I think the series’ own ruleset plays to this strength! The lowkey morbidity of Keiichi being able to move past a murder so fast works in favour of how he is the same person he was in other arcs - he is still desensitized to violence. 140 hours in and it truly felt like we reached a climax.

“......We all……. forgave each other for our sins for the first time.”

This chapter is also tripping over its words, trying to find the best way to phrase the contradictory idea of atonement. A traditionally sensical set of morals will never protect every single person who deserves kind treatment.

“...Sins are sins.
You can’t just get rid of them.
You have to carry them for the rest of your life.
I know that’s the fate of a sinner.
…If you don’t want to live like that, don’t be a sinner. I understand that logic, too.

…But then… how are sinners supposed to live…?”

I cried when Keiichi expressed how difficult it is to move on from your own childhood mistakes; the way that trauma glues itself to every inch of your past memories and makes you want to perform every menial way to find a "fresh start" was palpable pain. Also I'm like 99% sure this character is autistic from how he talks about his school experience no I will not take rebuttals ^_^ don't talk to me. Keiichi grappling with cosmic hypocrisy as he challenges his own close mindedness, while often repetitively reiterated, is still fantastic. Being in the head of these character is so enthralling as we see them challenge their own viewpoints and double down regardless. Genuinely wondering if some of the lines in Onikakushi regarding him being unable to turn around are meant to be PTSD of that one night. Love this shit mwa
Just a general testament to how baked in small, quiet sadness this series has become. Keiichi and Mion being able to quietly discuss how to help Rena with each other are some of my favourite scenes in the whole thing. Mion’s ordeal-filled upbringing working with Keiichi’s 6 arcs of wisdom finally giving him enough hindsight to realize where he went wrong blooms into the first true maturity these characters are able to convey. We’re getting there, we’ll escape this maze with no exit if we keep going like this.

And like, how do I even grapple with the finale. Dude. The cartoon tonal whiplash of a schoolroom takeover (which must hit harder in Japan considering they don’t just do this with guns) spiraling into some wacky climactic movie action scene where every character gets a one liner. Ooishi kicks a dude in the balls during this. Dude. Keiichi grabs a bomb off a table and has an anime showdown clash on a rooftop under the moon. Kinda disappointed in them using the moon as a lead motif for this climactic scene rather than playing into the evening cicada aesthetic to be H. I just really didn’t expect this kind of drama in a series that had put so much emphasis on utterly grounded fear!! It’s…well written on a technical level? Thematically relevant to the series? The worst I can say about it is that the rooftop scene needed an editor? But I feel like it makes sense that this would be utterly hard for me to swallow…

At the end of the chapter, Ryukishi states plainly that he feels like a bad writer for needing all these words to say such a simple thing. Reach out to your friends. Talk to people. There always has to be a better way than accepting defeat. I’ve lived this moral before, and I can say that I know exactly why finding the perfect words takes 160 hours of stumbling. Because there aren’t perfect words. It’s why we have to forgive Rena for doing the things she did; most people won’t find the perfect words to show people this is the simple outcome for their whole lives. I want to say as undramatically as I can that this chapter - and series as a whole - is very flawed, but has maybe more spirit in its soul than I think I could ever put to pen. I’m just thankful someone someone did their best to try and say it