YoshiKyon

7/10

Anilist: [Higurashi] / [Kai]

Disclaimer: I played the VN a long time ago, so this is approaching things from a position of knowing the plot and judging the adaptation more than as a stand-alone series.

Back when I was first getting into anime, someone tried to introduce me to Higurashi via the anime, and I hated it and gave up on it quickly. I ended up playing the VN a few years later and wondered how the anime got it so wrong so quickly, but I've become someone who doesn't like to abandon things, so here we are to figure things out.

I do think I judged a little early before, but it's certainly not a great adaptation. The VN already struggled to handle an incredibly complex world and story, and I think the anime struggles even more.

Mild spoilers ahead, for the maybe two people who will find this and not already know everything there is to know about the series. Also I'm reviewing these two together because they tell the story of the VN, everything beyond this is new territory for me.

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Back in my review of Vivy, I talked about how I love media that starts on an extreme note, then dials things back. It creates expectations for the viewer, then allows the show to steadily build to that point without it feeling like too much once things escalate. The VN of Higurashi does a really good job of this - it opens with the same scene the anime does, then becomes a slice-of-life comfort series for hours. Part of that is just the nature of VN introductions - I still don't think I'm through the prologue of Fate - but part is that it's given time to develop those characters and ideas and establish a world before it crashes down. This doesn't work with the way the anime is told, unfortunately: each VN chapter is only given a handful of episodes, so there isn't a steady build or an established world before things start to unravel. It leaves a lot of the base series feeling chaotic, and makes some of the character-centric stories feel irrelevant, in the sense that it's difficult to care deeply for a character who we've only seen the worst of to that point. (Satoko suffers from this a lot, although I think she's just a mostly unlikeable character honestly.)

The story itself is mostly adapted well, with a couple of key exclusions feeling odd. The underlying story of Higurashi is wrapped in characters acting on paranoia rather than actual desires, and that can make things difficult to follow; figuring out what's the altered behaviour and what's the actual character can get confusing. Shion and Mion are an exceptional case in this, because there's also the added difficulty in their storylines of figuring out which character acts where. That's why it feels really jarring that they changed or excluded some of the motives in those chapters - I'd expected it to be revealed during the explanation chapter later, but they only touched on the motives without delving into them. It's worth noting that the stories within Higurashi wrap themselves in circles a few times, between changing timelines and shifting character motivations, and the VN definitely handles it better, but it's just a difficult narrative to manage.

Kai is definitely better in terms of pacing and managing narratives, in part because the characters are mostly introduced already and in part because it affords a lot more time to fewer arcs. The backstory feels awkwardly positioned so that it both has minimal impact on how those characters are seen and takes away the build-up of the finale, but I don't know if there was a good place to include that. I'd have hoped for it to be left out, honestly, and for the earlier arcs to be fleshed out more, but those are two different series so that's a hard argument to make.

It was really nice reliving the Higurashi story, but I don't think this was a great adaptation of it. I think the original VN also struggles a bit, but this just rushes through some areas too quickly, and fails to build up the atmosphere, world or character depth that the VN manages. That said, those are all still good, and the plot and characters hold up well. It just doesn't create the same attachment that the VN manages, and loses a little in pacing and execution as a result.