Higurashi no Naku Koro ni

Information of Anime

In a small village called Hinamizawa, death happens every fixed day of June.  This has started since a fight from the villagers against constructing a big dam in the village.  Since the project was removed, a chain of death occurred.

In the summer of 1983, Maebara Keiichi moves into the village.  Making friends with Rena Ryuuguu, Satoko Houjou, Mion Sonozaki, & Rika Furude, he lives a simple peaceful life in the village.  Together, they form a club where they play a lot of games.  However, Keiichi would later stumble upon the dark history of Hinamizawa on its past dam construction project.  As he learns more about its past, Keiichi starts to doubt about his friends.

Higurashi no Naku Koro ni is based on the doujin mystery murder game by 7th Expansion.  This is the second doujin game to ever become a commercial anime series.

Storyline (CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Below is a summary of the storyline I've seen.  This section does contain some spoilers.  If you haven't seen the series yet & don't want to be spoiled, skip this section.  If you want to know the story & want to see how I viewed it, read on.

The anime breaks the show into arcs.  And those arcs seem like short stories as they are broken down into chapters.  In the beginning of each arc, we are shown the endings or deaths leading to the chapter & they aren't pretty.  Although the arcs don't follow well with each other, they give the viewers clues about the dark mystery of Hinamizawa's scrapped dam construction project & the Oyashirosama curse.  Each arc gives some hint & backgrounds of Keiichi's friends & the village before & after the festival.  The links are what ties the mystery together as they are linked to one another.  Every arc starts off with a happy atmosphere & gets dark as the plot moves on.

Keiichi tends to be the center of all the village's murder mysteries.  Being new in Hinamizawa & surrounded with strange friends from his club, he's pretty much a target to the village's deadly past.  In the first few chapter, we see him how his relationship to each of his females friends affects him.  However, all the outcomes leads to misfortunes.  The show later shifts to Shion's views & fills in the mysteries that left viewers pondering.  As we see the story in her view, everything starts to make sense.  But when Rena's arc appears, things start to fall apart again as we try to figure out how her story links to the others.  When we start to learn the truth about the Oyashirosama curse, it falls apart later on near the end.

The show ends with the key to preventing the Oyashirosama curse by trusting & believe in others.  However, the whole picture isn't fully solved as a possessed Rika is questioned & answers about "playing the game".

My Personal Review

Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni is surprisingly an interesting series.  It really drew me into the show as bits of the puzzle were revealed & the surprises really get me on the edge of my seat.  It has a lot of psychological stuff & really plays with the mind..  Despite its loli & cute characters, it's really gruesome.  It has a lot of sick actions such as knife stabbing to the neck & baseball bat bashing people to a pulp.  If you can't stand these kind of scenes are situations, I highly recommend staying away from this anime.  It's not for the weak of heart.

Animation

The character designs are different from the doujin game.  They aren't loli-sized as the game & they are quite tall due to long & thin legs & arms.  The big heads don't seem to balance with the thin limbs.  Also, they seem to be cuter than the games.  I didn't like the game design ones as they were a bit chubby & short.  Also, I didn't like the face designs from the game.  But the clothing designs remain the same.  Although drawings are more cuter than the game, the designs tend to change a lot.  It's almost like kid designs when the characters start making weird faces or go into some sort of SD mode.  Overall, the drawings are really simple & quite flat.  It's like the studio didn't spend a lot of money on the animation department.  However, I would like to think of it as the studio spending more money on story writing.

The backgrounds are as simple as well.  However, there are some areas that as well detailed.  But most of them are in the dark scenes & they really help get you into that chilling atmosphere.  Also, the areas outside of town seem to be more nicer than the buildings in town.  I assume more work is put into the outdoor nature stuff instead.

The colours are quite dull & boring.  In fact, it's pretty flat.  This holds true mainly for the characters.  It makes them look one dimensional.  The choice of colours almost makes it look like a kid's show from the 80s.  However, it seems the studio made the right choice as the setting is set in 1983.  For the backgrounds, the colours are much better.

The animation movements are funny at times.  It's not really natural.  Most of the time, you get silly animation movements like blown up faces or legs running in a circle.  It only starts looking natural when the dark killing scenes appear.  However, they don't seem to coordinate well.  For example, the scene will Rika stabs herself in the neck with a knife doesn't aim on her neck.  It's more to the head or face.  However, people may not notice it since it's pretty gruesome to watch.  However, there are times where it goes a bit overboard.  For example, it's hard to believe that Satoko can push Keichii away more than 8 feet with a lot of force that could hurt him.

Sound

The sound effects are really on the realistic side with some horror effects.  But most of the time, it's on the silly & cute side.  Problem though is that it's a bit fuzzy most of the time.  I'm not sure if it has anything to do with the source that I'm watching it from.  But from the voice side, I know it's a problem from the anime production itself.

The seiyuus for this show is a pretty good cast.  However, their voices aren't projected & mixed into the show properly.  There are many cases where the voices would overpower the background music & sound effects.  Also, the volume level on the voices isn't stable.  It can get loud & suddenly soft for some reason.  It happens a lot with Keiichi's voice.  Also, they sometimes have this closed room studio effect where the voices really sound mono.  For some reason, it sounds fake.

The music is pretty good as they set the mood well.  There are quite a lot of dark music in this show as well as silly ones.  However, it would be better if the producers set the volume right.  You can either barely heard it or the volume goes out of scale.  The opening & ending theme songs are really got my attention.  Very dark.  Although the English singing for the ending theme song isn't very good, it's still a great song.

Story

It's really interesting how the story is broken down into chapters.  This is the show's strongest point.  After seeing a disturbing killing scene that leads to the chapter's ending, we are taken into a happy atmosphere that would only turn dark later on.  After seeing Keiichi kill himself in the first chapter & coming back to life in the 2nd chapter, it can confuse a lot of viewers that don't have background of the game.  I originally thought the chapters are occurring in a different universe or something.  However, it turns out that I was correct in the first round.  But this isn't revealed right away until we reach to Rena's arc.  Watching it for the first time, transition to the next chapter isn't too smooth & can be sudden for first time viewers of the series.  However, all the information in each chapter tie together the key in solving the mystery of Hinamizawa as they fill in missing parts to the previous chapters.  But, it can be hard to accept the fact that Keiichi knows some of the characters from the previous characters already.  It can feel like you missed out on something at times.  You need to think of the chapters as missing information from previous ones.

All the backgrounds of Keiichi's friends are clues & they don't change anything from past chapters in terms of personalities.  The character backgrounds are really mysterious, even though most of them have psychological problems.  It makes the viewers think about Oyashirosama's curse.  In each chapter, you learn more about his friends as it focuses on the relationship with him.  However, a lot of the outcomes comes from Keiichi being paranoid most of the time.  He thinks of things that he thinks he did, but never actually happened or existed.  This causes the viewers to rethink a lot about the curse & how each chapter ties up the whole story.

A problem I have with the show is some of the endings of the arcs.  In the first arc, Keiichi's life goes to a different approach than another arc when the ending result of the village is given.  Because of the outcomes, they don't tie the pieces of the mystery well.  I wasn't sure if it's suppose to mislead the viewers on purpose in giving false clues.  But, things tie up in the Detective Arc as you see events from the view of Shion & going into Rena's arc.  Then, the pieces starts to fit together.  Even though Shion's view fills in the question marks of the show, they still lead to some unknown answers.  It's hard to explain this without spoiling the plot.  But once you watch it, you will be having some questions about "why" & "how" on some situations.  The story is very complex than it seems.  Plus, the last arc doesn't seem to tie with the other arcs well in terms of where in the timeline it occurs.  However, this is where we learned that the psycho killer Keiichi from the first arc really existed & all the events there are true.  Thus, the whole thing has a number of different universes or life occurring.  This really cause a lot of thinking for the viewers to see how everything ties together.

The ending for the show is somewhat incomplete.  It's open ended as the mystery of Oyashirosama's curse isn't solved.  Plus, a lot of the pieces of the puzzle isn't present.  Although we know the end result of the village, we don't know how it all ended & if the fact of Keiichi surviving from it is true.  Also, what happened to him would been great to know.

Overall Conclusion

Higurashi no Naku Koro ni is probably the best anime shows to come out this year & probably something we story/plot hungry fans are looking for.  The story is broken down to a number of chapters with many alternative scenarios that provides clues to put the whole puzzle together.  However, it's incomplete & the ending can be a disappointment when you are trying to solve the mystery of the curse.  If you can withstand a lot of disturbing bloody scenes, I highly recommend watching this show.  This may be part of my top five favourite anime shows of all time.

Higurashi no Naku Koro ni gets an eight out of ten from me.  The story is very well written as it's broken down into chapters with that put the pieces together later on.  Problem with the show is how the sounds aren't well done & the animation is too much on the plain side.  Plus, first time viewers to the series may get lost in the show as it moves to new chapters.  Also, the ending is too much a cliffhanger.