Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni (with Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni Kai)
Alternate Titles: When they Cry,
Original Japanese Release Date: 2006 (Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni), 2007 (Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni Kai)
Episode Length/Run-time: 26 episodes (Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni), 24 episodes (Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni Kai)
Summary:
Maebara Keiichi moves out to a small backwoods town in the summer of 1983. He befriends his cute new classmates and settles into his life as a student, playing board games after class, and generally being a carefree kid. But he quickly discovers not all is right with this town and the people he’s met may not be who they seem to be. A series of deaths begins to sweep across the city but after a short period of time events seem to “reset” and continue again. The circumstances surrounding this town, and the deaths, remain in mystery.
Review:
This review is covering both the first (Higurashi no naku koro ni) and second (Higurashi no naku koro ni kai) seasons at once. The reason for this is while the first CAN stand alone it makes little to no sense by itself. The first season is setting up the characters, premise, and introducing the questions of what is going on and why things are happening. The second season is the “answers” to the first season. Where you see why the town is caught in this confusing loop and being continually restarted after the unfortunate events which occur. In other words, the second season is the story and the first season is the “set up.”
From here on, there may be some loose spoilers, as the review will be near impossible to go forward with without them. I recommend you stop here though if you have not seen this series stop here and just take my word for it, watch it.
… Still here? Okay, review time. So the simple explanation for what is happening in the village is that all the villagers are infected with a parasite that makes them go crazy should they leave the village, OR should the host parasite (which is within Rika Furude) be killed. The way the series begins to show this in the first season is through the subtle thing that every time she is killed, or someone leaves the village that’s when the crazy happens. This then justifies the random scenes when they’re all playing boardgames because it provides contrast. I love things like this, things you don’t notice unless you’re really keeping track. Rika has the power to move time though a local deity (and I won’t spoil more than that) so she is attempting to move through time in an effort to find a course of events where the village is saved.
Cool, right?
This series starts out good, and just becomes fantastic. It’s gory, surprising, disturbing and doesn’t hold anything back. It is so nice to finally see a series that is not only shocking and surprising but it doesn’t rest or rely on that plot device, there is more to it than that. If you watch this series you MUST watch both seasons. There’s no point in watching just the first season because you really then don’t even see the full story.
It well deserves a 5 and is one I recommend for anyone mature enough to handle it’s dark subject matter.
[starrater]
September 23, 2011 @ 4:04 am
Higurashi, huh. There is a lot to say here, and yet very little at the same time.
I agree with most points in the above review, but at the same time, I don’t believe it deserves a perfect 5/5 either. It comes -very- close though. Maybe I’m just being a tad picky though, but, I guess I’m allowed to be.
My reasons are very simple though, it’s the source material. The Visual Novel was pretty darn amazing, a near-perfect story (the experience of which the writer then took to write the Umineko no Naku Koro ni novel, which was perfect, in my opinion), but because it was so good, I can’t help but see flaws within the anime.
The visual novel was much, much more based on the mystery aspect of it, which didn’t really flow into the anime all that well. That’s okay though, in Higurashi’s case, the anime made up for it by focusing on horror and gore more in the first season, creating a shock effect and a general “what’s going on here?!” feel, which the second season then explained and resolved. But, this also leaves almost no room for thinking, and there is almost no chance in hell that you’ll figure out what’s going on before Rika does, if you just watch the anime.
Though, my above points would just lower it from a 5/5 to a 4.8 or so in my eyes. The biggest issue I have is with the studio which produced this, Studio DEEN. …were they drunk when they drew this? Most of the time you won’t notice, but the art is HORRENDOUS during violent scenes, so much so, that I believe a child would be able to draw it. If you don’t believe me, pause the screen at random intervals during violent scenes, especially the ones where one character attacks another. I hope I’m not the only one seeing how badly the quality drops. It’s almost like they aren’t even trying…
Those 2 are my biggest complaints however. Don’t get me wrong, I like this anime, I like it a LOT. It’s so much better than most anime out there, especially those of the last 2 years or so. But a 5/5? Nah, I’d say somewhere inbetween a 4/5 and 4.5/5 would be where this anime ranks to me. So at the risk of it sounding silly, it’d be a 4.25/5 for me.
Also, small sidenote:
“Rika has the power to move time though a local deity (and I won’t spoil more than that)”. Just for sake of accuracy, yeah, she does travel through time, but she does so by entering a different reality (‘kakera / fragment’), so the realities in which everything does go wrong, they won’t go away, they continue to exist. 😉