Ryukishi07 is capable of achieving profound insight on a wide variety of subjects from fresh and surprising angles. At its peaks, this is undoubtedly the most conceptually ambitious work of mystery fiction ever written. If it takes him 30,000 words of repetitive, superfluous scenery-chewing a chapter to get to those peaks... well, it's not ideal, but I guess I'll allow it.

This is a far more mature work than Higurashi in many ways, but it's also too long to feel so often like it's scrambling for meaning on the fly, shying away from its constant lofty promises with smoke-and-mirrors philosophizing about the nature of narrative. There's little value in telling this kind of story in an orthodox fashion, of course, but at one point or another you have to call the trick out for what it is and move on.

I can't call it a disappointment because it's a triumph on so many levels, but I feel the concept frequently outstrips the execution.

MysteryBait carried ad infinitum in a work made on the march that has the impudence to make you believe that it has an internal logic and a common thread, umineko is one of those pretentious stories that just by taking itself less seriously and stop pretending to be the most serius thing in the world would gain an infinity of value,It is proof that you cannot expect to generate an interconnected plot full of characters that come out of nowhere and ambiguous rules that contradict each other along the way while the story constantly self-sabotages its progress in order to lengthen the gum as much as possible... and that it is useless to have a deep thematic value with good dynamics in your cast, if in the end everything will be constantly reset.

This game is so much of a meme of a romantic visual novel in so many ways with at the best functional or decent ideas. Saki especially is a standout in how much irony in a VN you can reasonably experience. Of course this sounds like a recipe for a 2 or 3 out of 10 right? Wellllll a certain route exists and it completely breaks your mind to an impressive extent, even more so than better VNs with better mindfucks. I'm not saying it's bad though, it is in fact very good and fascinating but the fact that this game exists and you can have such an insane reading is both amazing but also not exactly conducive to a wholly good story. It's hard to describe anything else, I'd say read it but I am not even sure you should do that. I don't remember the routes well enough to rate all of them but Saki route is a 1 or 10 depending on if you are applying irony or not.

It is better than ZTD.