Recent reviews by BarsX7

I finished Episode 6 (Umipro) and I don't want to continue.

It's not even a bad story. It's competently written, for sure. But it's so "not for me" it hurts.

Edit: I watched the rest of it. The ending is amazing. Most of the Answers arc was awful for a number of reasons, but the ending was really good. Whether that makes the story worth it or not is questionable, but maybe it's just enough for me to give it a positive rating after all.

Edit: I watched the rest and feel like the entire Episode 8 is something Higurashi would've gotten as a console-exclusive part that no one reads, jesus christ, thirty hours of convenience and character assassinations

I don't think I can sit through two more rounds of the same structure of:
- 20% of "interesting start, i'm excited"
- 40% of "okay this is pretty boring and drawn-out but i'm still interested"
- 30% of "oh what the ♥♥♥♥ is this shoehorned excuse for a story"
- 10% of "oh, the ending is really good but I hate literally everything else about this chapter"

The mystery's pretty much dead, the metanarrative is really annoying and overcomplicated, and not even the characters interest me enough to continue.

I really wanted to like this. Maybe my expectations were way too high after Higurashi, but I really tried. I don't think I'm stubborn enough to spend 40 more hours of my life just to see how it ends.

I don't think I should continue if my biggest thought after finishing 75% of the story is "I don't want to do this anymore". Questions arc was better than this. Hell, Higurashi overexplaining children's card games was better than this.

I'm not even starting about the absolute laziness of using pretty much the same sprites and ambiguous remarks when it comes to Rika and Satoko just to draw more people into Umineko while absolutely assassinating both characters in the process. Why would someone write a story with the aim of answering his fans in the most absurd way imaginable? Why would you make Bern an absolute ♥♥♥♥♥ just because your friend liked Rika a lot and you wanted to make him mad?

My expectations of this after Higurashi were impossibly high.
Maybe that's why it wasn't that surprising for me to realize that Umineko massively disappointed me.
But it's also really weird. I can see that the story is competently written (also suffering from the biggest issue of Higurashi - word bloat, especially during action scenes, with like a dozen scenes per chapter), I can't say I dislike it for some specific reason, but I just... don't vibe with it at all.
I don't feel interested, I don't want to know what'll be next, I'm just waiting for it to be over.

There's a lot of competently written characters. Some you love, some you hate, it's great. But the story itself... well, I guess I can figure out one specific part of the story that I don't like - the amount of metanarrative it uses

Not only the whole original point of little "epilogues" after each chapter is completely lost and they are just straight up story elements now (why bother separating them into categories then, just to mess with Higurashi readers?), but they're also extremely on the nose when it comes to its ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ tricks.

Example 1: The end of chapter 3. I know, I know, that was the whole point, to make Battler believe that Beatrice starts being good to just absolutely lose her biggest chance at victory at the last moment only to gloat how Battler (and, of course, the player behind them) are such morons that they expected this kind of anime trope to happen. I know that was the whole point of the chapter, sure, but it also felt like such a pointless slap in the face of the player, considering how many stereotypes Higurashi used while playing them completely straight.

Example 2: End of chapter 4. Same ♥♥♥♥, really, you're presented with a two hour long "battle" that starts to feel cathartic to a degree, before you realize how ridiculous most of their arguments are (don't get me started about the small bombs).
Not only that, but these entire two hours are completely undermined in the literal next scene with Lambda and Bern (which are really hard to not treat as complete evil caricatures of Satoko and Rika) stating how all these arguments are just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and are full of holes.

You have to continue the story somehow, I get it, and the whole separation into "questions" and "answers" was a joke even in Higurashi, but there should be another way to handle large section finishes without straight-up crossing over hours of your own writing just to continue the story.

I don't know anymore. I suffered through 80 hours of this already (umipro). Maybe 10 of those hours felt like something Ryukishi wrote, The rest felt like his own extrapolated caricature that got told he can do no wrong and should not take any criticism or improve in any way after his first work got popular.

I don't know if I want to continue if the Answers arc is just more of the same or just more ridiculousness while hoping that maybe 10% of that would feel like something worth reading. Maybe the way Ryukishi writes murder mysteries a-la danganronpa is just not for me.

Also ♥♥♥♥ Ushiromiya Rosa. Truly the worst ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ parent in the history of fiction. Hurr durr single parent life is tough my ass. Her, Ange, and Maria are probably the most well-written characters in this mess.

I find it difficult to read overly positive or cliche-y side stories for serious content. Which is probably the reason I have yet to play any of the dating sim-esque games in SciAdv... Nevertheless, this one is just about Saikoroshi and I would pretend that the rest do not exist.

Saikoroshi is a short but absolutely fascinating "epilogue" of sorts that works off of where the original story left.
It is also a very good example of an interesting moral dilemma that I fell in love with when I first discovered in Faris ending of Steins;Gate.

It works off of the assumption that the best way to "prevent" certain negative events from happening is to change stuff a lot earlier and bigger than usual - and here, the big "change" was that Rika was not the eighth child that was supposed to be the reincarnation of Oyashiro-sama with the connection to Hanyu, which affected pretty much every single event in the original story.

If interested, the "choice" in Steins;Gate was that the best way to prevent Okabe's friends from being affected by the events of the game was to... not be friends with them to begin with, resulting in a butterfly effect of an unimaginable magnitude. It was a really good chapter.

While the original motivation of "getting back to the world we fought for" is clear, it becomes a lot more complicated once Rika realizes that this is, in a way, the "ideal" world for all her friends and herself, and she is only dissatisfied with it because it is not like the one she got used to.

Once Rika discovers how exactly she can go back, a second major moral topic is brought up - is it worth it to pretty much ruin the life of "this" Rika just to go back to where Bernkastel came from originally? Barely anyone thinks about people and worlds that are left behind in these situations, and, once again, Ryukishi manages to present the topic beautifully, if a bit more word-y than I would've liked.

Once the decision is made, a different opinion is presented - while the circumstances where nothing bad happened are originally beneficial, a lot of these characters experienced profound growth as a result of surviving these circumstances. As such, which one is better? Which one is worse?

And, surprisingly enough, the answer is not binary whatsoever - the answer Ryukishi presents is that the mere act of "choosing" while knowing the consequences of both options is already not in human nature when presented at such a world-like scale. Humans make choices without knowing their consequences all the time, and living with your choices is a large part of how character is formed to begin with.

Personally, I agree with how the story went, knowing that this was the future everyone fought for, growing tremendously in the process Yet, the questions themselves are completely valid, and it was a much better addition to a story I thought was complete already. Epilogues like these are rarely successful or actually interesting, after all...

Anyway. This one's going to be all spoilers but I felt like talking about it. Good stuff.
Good read. 9/10.

Don't watch Gou or Sotsu. It's just the same concept with a lot of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in execution and most budget is in torture porn. Actual waste of time.

Endings are very important to me. I would say a good ending can make or break a piece of media in my eyes. Same with a bad ending.
Luckily, Higurashi pulled through and delivered a truly amazing experience that tried its best to plug every single story-related plothole that remained.
The execution of the fragment stuff could've been better, and the current geopolitical context makes it very hard to have any compassion for Takano at all. The politics of Japan post-war were also something I could not sympathize with much, but it was important for the story, so I was fine with reading about it.
I still liked it, a lot. That would be a 10/10 for me.

Can't wait to see how this - not perfect, but amazing - ending is ruined by the attempts to make a sequel or something. At least Rei is supposed to be good, but I'm dreading Gou/Sotsu already...

Well, at least Umineko is good. Right?...

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, this chapter.
I love these games so much, man.

First of all, it's a 10/10, straight-up.
Some of the best moments from the entire story are from this chapter alone.
It recontextualizes pretty much most of the previous chapters in such meaningful ways I just sat there in awe for a minute after each time. Friendship truly is magic.
The only thing I'm sad about after all is how this version of Keiichi being the de-facto voice of the village is not the one that is canonically out of the loop. And that is also more like wishful thinking than anything.
I still found stuff I didn't fully enjoy in this one, of course - like Takano being pretty much a massive nazi allegory with all the poison gas and the symphony scene, I found it really hard to find any compassion for her in Chapter 8 after that.

However, it's all minor stuff because that ending just destroyed me, in the most not-negative way possible. If the game ended here I would've probably been fine with it, too.
Hollow as a song has a completely different meaning with this one, and god, it hurts. But it's also hopeful somehow, after all the deaths and gore, it all remains hopeful. How do you even write stuff like this.
Amazing. It truly is some of the best the media has to offer.

One of the best chapters so far.
Technically speaking, it's not even the "answers" chapter but a Rena chapter, with two distinct parts. I probably liked the first one a bit better, but the second one is also peak.
For me, this was when the game got to a steady "10/10 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ give me more" and did not let up until the very end of Chapter 8.
It can sound a bit pretentious because I still found some things I didn't like in each chapter, but all of those are minor and did not affect my overall enjoyment in any kind of significant fashion.
The rooftop fight scene was too long. That's it. That's my only serious complaint.
The rest is pure, unfiltered, raw "power of friendship" stuff written in the best way possible.
The soundtrack is amazing, by the way, and the ending is, as they say, pure anime.

The beginning of the "Answers" arc is pretty good.
Not the best one, for sure, but I can't say it was bad, either.
One of my biggest gripes here is that Shion, as presented here, is a difficult protagonist to find any kind of compassion for, I struggled with that for a while. Some of the sister-switching logic also got too complicated near the end.
Nevertheless, all of those are minor at best, and it is still a true Higurashi chapter - sometimes nice, sometimes depressing, but still amazing as the complete experience.
However, maybe five different ending fake-outs were a bit too much after all...
8/10

If you've read the staff room section from Chapter 3 - you'd know that this one was originally not even supposed to be released as "main content".
However, it is still a good addition to the overall narrative - short, sweet, and a decent setup for our favorite van-punching superhero
8/10

One of the best chapters in the series.
I often dislike characters like Satoko in japanese media overall, for a lot of different reasons, but this one character is almost awakening my older brother complex - and I'm a single child.
The context of later chapters makes this one some of the best of what this series has to offer.
It's painful, it's funny, and it feels great when you say "let's just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ kill him" and the game actually goes for it
That last bit alone is why this chapter is a 10/10 to me. This never happens in media as a whole (at least not the ones I went over so far). Even if it does set it up to be the bad end later

Really good chapter. By now you're starting to get the basics of how this story is going to work overall, and there is a bit less of the slice-of-life stuff, too (although it never repeats itself throughout all 8 chapters afaik, so it does help set up context for later) - but reading it is still rough, especially when you're like me and just finished Chapter 1 five minutes ago and want answers.
I would say it's about 9/10, some things only made sense to me later Chapter 5 but I enjoyed it overall.