Leaderboard

Quite some time since my last update, so I guess it's about time to write a few words before I forget everything. I guess I'm late to the party, but I finally read ~150 hours of Higurashi. I had somehow missed the news that this also got a graphic update from PS3, so I ignored that for quite a while, since I didn't want to be emotionally scarred by Ryuukishi07's drawing skills. That said I enjoyed the ride quite a bit, at least for the most part. Higurashi is widely considered as *the* classic horror and mystery VN, which I think isn't really accurate. I'd say Higurashi is first and foremost a VN about friendship. And it might well be the best VN I've read about that theme so far. Actually, it frequently reminded me of Steven King's It, which also has a group of friends trying to fend of an ancient evil and which is also a personal favorite of mine (both movies actually - I didn't read the book). Along with the friendship goes a lot of slice of life and comedy, which somehow hit a nerve with me. I found the slice of life very entertaining and the comedy freaking hilarious for the most part. Mostly because Ryuukishi07 found a good balance of when he could get a bit over the top and when to get serious. Especially the gaming sessions reminded me of my own youth, even if I didn't cheat that much. I swear! It also has to said that with the graphics update, the VN felt extremely polished. The art style did fit perfectly and the music and voice acting were also top notch for the most part. Ryuukishi07 also has a talent to create powerful scenes by choosing the right music and sound effects to emphasize his writing. This applies for both comedic and serious scenes. On the other hand, he also a tendency of not finding an end. Actually, for people who want to read this mostly for the thrills, this might actually be a rather boring experience, due to the excessive slice of life and comedy. I personally enjoyed it a lot, so I wasn't really bothered by it. The actual plot is a bit of a mixed bag and I want to split this into two parts. The first part is the world building, which is imho one of the biggest strengths of the VN. The whole history of the village and the aftermath of the damn conflict on the different characters is really well written. Especially the two Mion/Shion episodes 2 and 5 shine brightly in that regard, finding the almost perfect balance between slice of life, comedy, drama, world building and horror. The second part is the actual main plot about the repeating Watanagashi murders, and that's the part I wasn't completely satisfied with. First, it takes literally 6 episodes (!!!) until this part actually progresses. Until then, you just get some hints about what could go on, and tons of unrelated side stories. The VN in structured into 4 question and 4 answer arcs, but it's actully more like 6 question arcs and 2 answer arcs. The individual endings also felt a bit lackluster since having one of the characters go nuts for no reason wasn't really that interesting, especially if it's repeated in a similar manner half a dozen times. It's probably best to see episodes 1 - 6 as character routes and the final two episodes as true route, though episodes 5, 6 and part of 7 from the answer arcs felt like they could have easily merged with their equivalent question arcs to get a better pacing and progress. The final episode which should have been the great show-down was also unfortunately more a huge let-down. The hints in the previous episodes weren't particular difficult to follow, even if you ignore the somewhat obsessive hint sections of each episode, so I wouldn't exactly say I was surprised by the final resolution. However, it was probaby the most boring story resolution he could come up with, bundled with the worst writing of the whole VN. Honestly, you expect a show-down with a great ancient evil and what you get is instead: Seriously, did he play too much Resident Evil at that time? The only well written parts in episode 8 were the orphanage scenes. Though it already started in the second half of the previous episode with Satoko's overdramatized story arc. And as well as most characters were written, Ryu really has to work on the quality of his antagonists. Nevertheless, despite its flaws this was overall a very well written story, I enjoyed quite a bit. Character ranking: I loved the whole group of friends, though Rika, Mion and Hanyu maybe a bit more than the others. Overall rating. 7.5/10 (Could have easily been an 8+ rating with a better story resolution)

Insertion of scripts are halfway done. I apologize for the snail pace but real life is a bitch.

As a non-native English speaker I'm probably not the best to judge the translation quality, but I personally had no issues with it. And if I remember correctly, MangaGamer did re-translate all episodes from scratch for the Steam release back in the days, which took quite a while. So they certainly spent a lot of effort to get the translation right.

To me, the difference is more in the life cycle, not that much in the expression of the 'thorny attitude' (that could be anything from violent words to physical violence or anything for both) : - the classic Tsundere would generally slowly but steadily go from Tsun to Dere and, arrived, would mainly remain Dere ; - the modern Tsundere would repeat almost endlessly the cycle Tsun to Dere to Tsun to Dere to Tsun.... blushing shyly while hitting to death the cause of their blushing maybe ? Well anyways, I'm sure others would point you to other differences but that's my take on it. Classic Tsundere is more tolerable for me (sometimes likeable) because the character is often far more coherent and even if the character is too violent/irrational (which, I feel, happens less often than with the modern Tsundere), it should happen in a limited time in the story since the character should undergo Tsun to Dere cycle one time only (or at least not continuously).