Category: Finished Series: Mystery/Suspense

Whoa, the CG Shaders have found Umineko at last. I have to say, that now that the properly shaded characters actually look pretty good. That’s the thing with Studio Deen’s graphics: it either looks really good or really bad. There’s hardly any in between.

Anyway, this episode rounds off the second part of Ange’s background. We learn that she’s not only revived Maria, but also she attempted to train as a witch, which eventually went wrong. On top of that, Maria is also revealed to be not just a witch, but also as Beatrice’s ally. Which does at the moment make no sense because I have no idea on whose side Maria truly is. If it is true that magic even existed in the first arc, it would explain her strange behavior there: she indeed was on Beatrice’s side, and merely enjoyed Beatrice’s little game a bit too much.

The question of course remains: if this is true, then what was up with her in the subsequent arcs? And I think that that’s where the real killer comes in. My guess is that as a little kid, she knew Beatrice and she really believed that whoever was behind the murders was Beatrice. This worked in the first arc because she was one of the people that the killer apparently let live (or at least, killed the last), however in the subsequent arcs (especially the third) she wasn’t as lucky and realized that someone other than Beatrice was on a killing spree.

I really suspect that Maria is able to remember every single arc. That would explain her huge change in character, and more importantly why she was able to write down every single detail about all of the arcs so far. It’s a bit of a mystery how she ended up writing about her own death, but again: at this point we have no idea exactly how much influence magic has in the real world. The witches must have been able to use illusions: otherwise people would not have been able to see them, and if magic really was the culprit then it doesn’t make any sense that it completely disappears once the magic scenes are over.

Lambdadelta comes with an interesting twist at the end, although I don’t think I fully understand it. She mentions how, when Battler wins the game he gets sent back to 1986, not 1998. However, doesn’t that mean that Ange still gets to meet her brother, only his 30-year-old version? Or did she mean that Meta-Battler gets sent back to the dimension he came from, while the other Battler simply remains dead? After all, it actually seems that Battler survived in the second arc. I’m actually pretty interested to see what happened to the Ange of that world.
Rating: * (Good)

This episode takes a bit of a step back as it explains more about “Gretel”‘s past. Her classmates were… stereotypical to say the least, but at least it’s good to see a bit more attention for her, and a bit of a more detailed report of what happened to Eva after the massacre of the third arc.

Maria was surprisingly tolerable in this episode, though. There’s one thing that I agree that the anime adaptation screwed up: the first few arcs showed her evil side way too much. The past two arcs actually gave her a bit of a character. The way she teased Battler with his fear of flight and how she was resurrected by Ange through magic (again, questioning how much magic there is in this world, and whether the world she came from is the same that Meta-Battler came from).

This episode also showed that even the starting events of each arc don’t necessarily have to be the same: we don’t know whether Rosa confessed about how she killed Beatrice in every single arc, because in this arc we see how Kinzou himself decides to attend the family meeting due to Krauss’ incompetence. This episode also raises the question: is Kinzou really alive? We’ve seen him a few times, but that says nothing: we’ve also seen Beatrice once in a while, and she too clearly wasn’t there. The only question is the point at which Natsuhi talked to him in the first arc: I’m still not sure whether that arc was completely free of magic, or whether it too had magical elements in it.

By the way, now that we’re nearing the end of this series’ airtime: has a second season already been announced? I know that the “no naku koro ni”-franchise should be popular enough to warrant a sequel that animates the answer arcs, but lately I’ve seen too many series that are in need of a sequel, yet never ended up getting one.
Rating: * (Good)

It’s episodes like this that really remind me why I’m still such a fan of anime. This episode was just… beyond awesome. Major spoilers coming up, do not read this entry if you haven’t seen the episode, and for the rest I can say little else than:

What the Fuck!?

I sort-of suspected that this episode would end with a bang, but this kind of a bang… I never saw coming: freakin’ Beatrice set everything up. The reason why her acting felt so forced was that it was SUPPOSED to be acting: there’s no way Battler was going to notice, and instead Beatrice started playing the innocent victim, while creating a new villain in Evatrice. Holy crap, talk about an awesome plot twist!

I’m now starting to see why Beatrice was supposed to be such an awesome character. The sheer cruelty in which she continuously keeps thinking of scenarios to fool Battler, and does it every time, and at the same time you can see that she isn’t perfect. My guess is that she originally didn’t plan to include the Evatrice plot in this arc, and instead just tried to use her Teacher to confuse Battler, but when he cornered her (when Ronove interrupted her when she was about to give away an important clue) and they went into that emergency meeting of theirs, they decided to go for such an elaborate illusion.

On top of that, Beatrice seems to have two intentions that contradict each other: her first goal is to “win” from Battler: make him acknowledge that she’s a witch. However, on top of that it’s also her “job” to “win” the game endlessly, and she seems to be under the orders of Lambdadelta. While seemingly contradicting each other, could it be that the first goal of hers is also just a red herring? That she simply already is a mage, but needs to keep the Ushinomiya-family in that endless loop of theirs for some reason? That could explain why Battler’s sister suddenly popped up as a major player.

Anyway, back to the murders: the survivors this time are Battler, Eva, Jessica, Krauss and Rosa. It’s interesting how Evatrice confirmed that Jessica isn’t one of the murderers, and neither Eva nor Battler killed Nanjo. However, that doesn’t go for Krauss and Rosa. In fact, while I don’t think that Krauss was the murderer in the first two arcs (perhaps he got killed off before he could get started), but he actually seems like a pretty likely suspect this arc: remember how he said that surprisingly nice comment about how he regrets having been so mean to his family members? After Beatrice’s act and all, I don’t believe one word from that anymore.
Rating: **** (Fantastic)
And remember, I reserve the right to delete posts that talk about what happens in the novel after this episode

It’s perhaps taken a long while for this series to really get fired off. Especially how the first two arcs were merely introduction and build-up with hardly any conclusion, wrap-up or answers, But seriously, for me this is a show that just gets more intriguing with every episode. This episode didn’t necessarily contain any new plot twists, but it excellently continued building further upon the plot twists of the previous episode.

We also learn what was up with Beatrice’s sudden change of character in this episode. It wasn’t just that Battler’s words hit her so deeply back then, but while that definitely had its effect, a lot of the blame also seems to lie at the title of “endless witch”. Since for an Endless Witch, the concepts of time really don’t mean anything, and this gets reflected in her personality, turning her into a homicidal maniac. This then brings us back to the element of risk in magic: Beatrice wanted to become a real witch. It seems to me that in order to become the Golden Witch, she needed to make Battler accept her, however it felt to me that if she also wanted to continue being the Endless Witch, she had to give up her personality and become a psycho killer. That makes me wonder about Lambdadelta and Bernkastel.

The thing I liked most about this episode was the powerful dialogues, though. I think that this was the episode most focused on dialogues, as it portrayed a lot of characters, symbolizing their change through this dialogue: Eva rejecting her younger self, Krauss on how he stopped treating his siblings like trash, Beatrice as she tried to make up with Battler by reviving Shannon for George, Battler as he grew up and used his mind much more, instead of his emotions, and Jessica as she lost her parents and her mind. That’s really a lot of development!

And through all these red herrings, you’d almost forget that there’s an actual human killer on the loose, who’s operating under the guise of Beatrice and Evatrice. Why did the killer bother moving Shannon’s corpse? Since it’s also very likely that there are two killers (to match the six locked doors mystery). Right now, it seems very unlikely for any of the eighteen suspects to really have been able to pull off these murders, unless you start to look a bit further.

MAJOR HIGURASHI SPOILERS in the paragraph below.

Remember how in Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, one major culprit behind the murders was a simple disease that drove people to insanity. While I doubt that Ryukishi07 is going to use the same thing in both his stories, I do think that we need to look in that kind of a direction. Up till now I’ve simply thought this story to have the simple formula of your average detective novel (you know, “the butler did it!”, and things like that), but what if the real killer never even touched the corpses, and simply poisoned the victims with a strange kind of potion that would make one mentally delusional? I mean, for one thing, it is common for mentally delusional people to see conspiracies everywhere, which could explain the presence of the magical circles drawn in blood.
Rating: ** (Excellent)
Again, do note that I reserve the right to delete any comment that spoils what happens after this point in the visual novel.

A very solid episode this time, and instead of the chaos of the past few episodes, it was surprisingly slow-paced as it showed the aftermath of what happened in the previous episode, as well as develop the current storyline even further.

The past few episodes also completely changed how you should look at this game that Battler and Beatrice have been playing. Looking back, Beatrice’s plan right now is indeed pretty clear: she had the scenario of this mysterious person killing everyone but five (including him/herself) of the Ushinomiya Family + Staff, and she twisted those events around to make them seem like magic with some sort of illusion. Apparently she thought that as long as she did this for long enough, the ingenuity of this mysterious killer would go unnoticed and Battler would be forced to accept that witches are real. It indeed seemed like a nice, though one-sided plan at first, but like the past episodes showed: there’s no way you can get a raging bull to shut up, just by yelling at it.

However, with the new Beatrice, this is completely different: why would the new Beatrice want to bother faking the deaths when she can just as easily kill people herself? Is this world perhaps a copy of the original world where Meta-battler came from, or something similar, and the witches have the power to play with the rules just as long as they match what really happened? We now know that Beatrice did everything in order to be accepted in the outside world as a witch, which indeed seems to signify that she had no powers in the world Meta-battler came from but instead of the worlds she created herself, and of which Eva-Beatrice is now a part of.

However, at the same time I wonder: remember how in the first episode, Battler’s father said that he was probably going to get killed the next day. Back there, he knew that something fishy was going on, and he was going to die, however there’s no sign of that here, even though this arc is supposed to focus on the adults. That means that not just the order of victims is different for each arc, but even before that they differ slightly… In any case, I also liked the extra bit of info on Battler’s parents: this episode really gave a bit more character to them, since they’ve stayed pretty much in the background until now, being immediately killed off and all.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Oh and regarding spoilers, my patience has run out right about now. DO NOT TALK ABOUT THE EVENTS THAT HAPPEN AFTER THIS EPISODE. From now on, if I even suspect an Umineko-related comment to have spoilers of the visual novel I will mercilessly delete it. This of course doesn’t go for most people, but every week there seem to be one or two people who can’t resist to ruin the fun for those who haven’t played the games yet. Even when properly marked, it’s really hard not to look at them, and I unfortunately don’t have the software here for proper spoiler-codes.

If you want to talk about the Visual Novel, doesn’t it make sense to look for a forum or blog that discusses the Visual Novel instead of the anime?