Category: Finished Series: Mystery/Suspense

Well, talk about a different atmosphere in this episode. For once, nobody died and instead we’ve now come to fleshing out the characters, with Shannon, Jessica and Kanon being the first. What the hell is going on is still pretty much a mystery, but we did get quite a few new answers to what went on. Not the most spectacular episode, but I liked it a lot. So right now we’ve either moved to the past, or a third universe. We either have ourselves a non-linear storyline like Baccano or Touka Gettan, or this series really is like Higurashi which resets itself every time Beatrice kills everyone (or lets everyone kill everyone), just in the way that Higurashi went. My suspicion is the latter, though. Beatrice is known as the “eternal witch” who likes to put people through eternal suffering. But then again that does raise the question of why she’s resetting in the first place when her goal simply seems to be regaining her powers and ruling over the island. In this episode, it’s also revealed that Kanon and Shannon are siblings, or at least, Kanon referred to Shannon as his older sister. I could be mistaken in this because kids have a tendency to refer to anyone as older sisters or aunts. We also learn that they are the only two who can see Beatrice, which seems to suggest that either in the past or in this universe Beatrice has yet to say hello to Maria. This episode was mostly about explaining Kanon’s deep-seated grudge at his position as a servant. He and Shannon both started out as furniture who fell in love with a member of the Ushinomiya family (for Kanon, this was Jessica). Shannon accepted Beatrice’s help and therefore got to date George without any problems. Kanon however, was different and refused Beatrice because she he believed that she kept toying around with the lives of others. So saying that people can’t date furniture in the first few episodes turned out to have been a bit of a rejection to Beatrice. Jessica in the meantime very much reminds me of Mion: she’s supposed to be the heir of an important family, and yet when she is with her friends she puts up a completely different character. Perhaps she also has a twin in the same fashion. This is also something seemingly unimportant that caught my eye, but with this series in which everything seems to be relevant, perhaps it’ll turn into an important clue later on: why do all of the direct heirs of the Ushinomiya family have just one child? Is this also something that was dictated by grandfather? And why is Maria the only one who doesn’t match the ages of the others? Did something happen with her parents in the past that caused them to go against Kinzou? Rating: * (Good)]]>

As much as I don’t care about the original visual novel, I have to admit that this episode stretched even my suspense of disbelief. Battler just acted way too weird in this episode, it just doesn’t make any sense.

So basically, the bodies continue to fall when Natsuhi commits suicide. Butterflies then appear again, Battler tries to shoot them, the eye-catch appears… and suddenly Kanon, Sharon and Natsuhi are perfectly fine and everyone acts like nothing happens! Sure, I can see how Beatrice is screwing with everyone’s mind by magically reviving everyone and all… but what happened to the others? There isn’t even a single mention of them! And besides, everyone was talking like they just returned from a Beach resort, instead of a murderous mansion.

Then Battler’s refusal to believe in the existence of witches. Sure, I believed that too until the end of the previous episode. HOWEVER he completely seemed to accept that everyone and his dog came back to life, and yet he never even questions it, and yet he doesn’t want to believe that Beatrice killed them. That just doesn’t make any sense.

Overall, I’m a bit disappointed that it really was Beatrice who killed off everyone, but let’s see what the rest of the series can do to spice things up. This show now seems to be developing into a battle of wits between Beatrice and Battler, but I wonder how the creators are going to make this interesting without making Beatrice Mary-Sueing Battler over and over.

I’m intrigued by that letter in a bottle from Maria, though. What was up with that, and could that one explain what happened to the real Maria? So that Maria was basically killed and replaced by some thing that could keep an eye around for Beatrice?

Oh boy, this really reminds me back to the first season of Higurashi. I remember how my love for that series was also as inconsistent as he series itself.
Rating: – (Disappointing)

You know, despite the supposed details that are left out from the original Umineko, I’m really enjoying this series. Even Maria is getting better if we consider her as the culprit, or one thing very much related to the culprit, but that’s where the mystery comes in: perhaps she has a very good reason to act the way she does? I mean, this is a fantasy-series: we’ve got glowing butterflies, so a bit of a mental delusion also might fit.

Anyway, what really struck me about this series is the amount of fans from the visual novel that complain about the details that were left out. I’ve been blogging for more than three and a half years now, and I’ve covered lots of series that had the same “the manga/novel/game is so much better”-vibe. The thing however, is that I haven’t played the original novels. I’m simply trying to watch an anime here, and without all the comments on the things that were left out, I probably wouldn’t even have noticed. The only thing that would have annoyed me was how the anime creators tried to overplay Maria’s Higurash-faces, but even that would have been a small detail that’s easily overlooked.

While I haven’t read Umineko, I do want to try and put this into a bit of perspective. If I recall correctly, the first episode of this series lasted a whole three hours. With four episodes, the anime has now been going on for let’s say an hour and 20 minutes (assuming that every episode is 20 minutes long, plus 3 minutes of OP and ED). Within that hour and twenty minutes in the game, was the storyline already this exciting, intriguing and mysterious in the game? I really doubt it.

The point I’m trying to make is this: Take any anime A, it doesn’t matter which one it is, as long as it’s really, really good; amazing in every single way. Now, ask yourself the question: would that series have been even better if we knew every single detail about the cast? How they spent their exact life, what their hobbies are, their entire wardrobe, childhood sweat-hearts, whatever. In my opinion, it doesn’t necessarily have to be so.

This of course is an extreme example, but the same principle goes for Umineko: according to the comments I’ve read on the previous episode, Ryukishi decided to go for the far end of the spectrum by adding lots of background, but that’s not the only way to achieve a deep cast, in my opinion. I’m of course not saying that the anime does have a deep cast, but we’re only four episodes in. There is NO way to tell whether the cast is going to be deep or not at this point.

Anyway, as for this episode, I’m really curious to where the creators are going with this: there are only five people alive at this point. Are the creators going to pull the same thing as Higurashi, and keep pulling a time loop over and over? There are a multiple amount of different arcs, after all.

Remember that the Higurashi anime was also incredibly inconsistent. Every arc was different, and even within each arc there were huge mood-changes. what if this goes the same in Umineko? We’re now at the point at which the story is building up, using the past slaughters in order to create a sense of despair. However, with so many episodes left, there still is enough time for the characters to either die and revive, or regroup and try to figure out what the heck is going on, and who Beatrice is. The thing I liked best of this episode was the atmosphere. It was a really tight one, especially considering we’re only four episodes in.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

I have two problems with Umineko: Eva is too much stuck in her Takano-voice, and Maria is trying too hard to sound like Rena. Especially Maria gets on my nerves. I’m not really bothered with how she’s a little girl, but the way the camera keeps giving her close-ups when she’s making Higurashi-faces for no reason. I mean, one thing is that you can almost hang a sign on her with “Yo people, I am evil”, but the stranger thing is that nobody even seems to notice this. I mean, doesn’t anyone find it weird that a nine-year-old can quote and redraw exact passages on the bible?

But yeah, apart from that I’m getting really fond of this series: it’s basically one really big murder mystery so far in which the characters themselves try to find out what the heck is going on. This episode even continued to reduce the body count by killing off Eva and her husband. That killed off just about all of the direct heirs and their partners, aside from Natsuhi. Also, if the killer was just after the money, then why did Gouda and Sharon also die?

Right now, the most suspicious ones are Natsuhi, because she now is the most likely to succeed Kinzou and has shown to be the least emotionally stable of the cast, and Genji, who was alone outside of Eva’s room for a while and therefore could have made the blood drawing. Since the chain wasn’t cut or anything, it was very likely that Eva’s body already lied on the bed when he opened the door, but he skillfully hid it from Kanon.

Rating: ** (Excellent)
I’m going to remove these blurbs after this entry, because it’s getting tedious to write them for every single episode. Episode ratings will remain, though.

Okay, so this is about half impressions on Umineko’s latest episode, and half a wrap up of the first episodes of the summer season. Overall I have to say that this is a very successful season, and the second-best Summer Season I have ever seen based on first impressions. The best was in 2006, but that one is nearly impossible to beat anyway: it had something of everything and about half of the series were ground-breaking, did something new and/or were just plain awesome.

This seasons stands out in its surprisingly large amount of great, nice and enjoyable series: only a small fraction of them was dull or uninteresting. This season actually shows an interesting effect of the economic recession that hit Japan so hard: you can see that the quantity of series is slowly decreasing (although it’s not even by that much; this season only has one or two shows fewer than last year). You can see that there has been a great increase of moe, because it’s been clear by now that moe sells. And yet on the other side of the coin, the amount of bad series has decreased dramatically as well.

This season only has four series that I’d classify as below average (Element Hunters, Princess Lover, Kanamemo and Juuden-Chan; okay, five if you consider Weiss Survive as a series, but I don’t). Compare that to previous years, in which those numbers are twice as large, even 2006 had more mediocre series the current season and this trend even continues in years as 2003 and 2004, where the amount of series that debuted in total was even smaller. So yes, I’m really happy with this season.

As for the shows I’m going to blog (I can only blog 4 new shows this season), I decided to go with the four shows with the most ambitious setting. That obviously includes Umineko no Naku Koro ni, and I’m also going to cover Bakemonogatari and Canaan (and yeah, Umi Monogatari is also dropped now). As for the fourth show, it’s all going to depend on whether Tokyo Magnitude (Noitamina) turns out to be good or not. If not, then I’m going to be covering Aoi Hana.

As for this episode: it was awesome. I’m now starting to see why people are liking the story so much. It was a real improvement over the first episode in terms of acting, not to mention the shocking plot twist at the end.

I was expecting people to die, but to see six people already killed off within the second episode… that definitely was something I didn’t see coming. So, we basically have twelve people left now:

– Battler, the red-headed protagonist of the series (or at least, that’s how he’s being portrayed). He indeed was much less annoying than in the first episode, although the boob-jokes remained.
– Kinzou, the grandfather, whose intentions still are a rather big puzzle in the way that he seems to be inviting his entire family in some morbid battle of wits. It’s a bit of a weird dying wish, if you ask me.
– George, the blue-haired guy who just lost the one he proposed to in the death frenzy.
– Maria, the annoying little girl who seems to function as either Beatrice’s medium or spokesperson, depending on whether Beatrice is a ghost or an actual person. I just do wish that the creators would handle her foreshadowing a bit more subtle. I mean, with those close-ups anyone can see coming that she’s going to turn evil at some point.
– Jessica, the yellow-haired girl. We still don’t know much about her either but she seems like she’s going to be an important character.
– Eva, the woman with Takano’s voice. She’s obviously meant to be the red herring for the first part of the story. I mean, she’s acting so obviously evil that there has to be more behind her.
– Hideyoshi, Eva’s husband, though we haven’t seen much of him yet.
– Chiyo Kumasawa, the older woman maid of the house. Did we see her in this episode at all?
– Kanon, the servant who feels himself to be just an object and likes to repeat this to everyone who wants and doesn’t want to listen.
– Genji Ronoue, the white-haired servant. Not much has been shown about him either.
– Natsuhi, Jessica’s mother and the one who kept freaking out and seems to be the most emotionally unstable of the main cast.
– That doctor whose name I can’t seem to find.

Meanwhile, Maria’s mother Rosa, Battler’s mother Kyrie (who SO doesn’t look her age), Battler’s father Rudolf, the butler Gouda, the maid Sharon and Jessica’s father Krauss seem to be killed off, not including the possibility that someone used a fake body somewhere. There are all just simple first impressions of course. While a lot of the characters seem innocent at this point, I’m positive that all of them have something to hide.

But yeah, this is really fun do to, and the exact reason why I love mystery. This episode really reminded me why I originally became a huge fan of the first season of Higurashi: there’s so much that’s going on, but at the same time the creators know how to make the viewers keep guessing and formulate theories. It feels like it’s Higurashi all over again and Ryuukishi07 has really proven himself to be an incredible writer: not only is he a master of keeping these mystery-stories entertaining, but when the mystery stops being the main focus he still manages to write intelligent and meaningful dialogue, like what happened in Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Kai and Rei.

The only downside to this series so far are the character-designs. Studio Deen’s series usually look very good and they’ve got an array of unique looking series, but this just feels like a combination of their average styles. That was a bit of a disappointment, but this series is indeed one that shouldn’t be watched because of its graphics.

On a side-note: a small thing I liked in this episode were the small shots of seeing how all of the different characters like to spend their time while waiting (crosswords, puzzles, card games. Nice addition). I especially liked how Grandfather was playing chess with himself. That may give a hint that Beatrice indeed is something supernatural. Either that, or he’s just an incredibly boring guy.
Rating: *** (Awesome)
Now this is why I originally became a fan of Higurashi