Let's Read Higurashi When They Cry! - Ch.1 Onikakushi

Off-Topic
#21

I kinda like the Steam sprites so I’m gonna be sticking with those :stuck_out_tongue:

Anyways I actually finished this! A few days ago even! I’ve been meaning to post my thoughts but have gotten lazy.

I learned my mistake after reading Umineko, which I read one episode after another. These kinds of stories are the type that one must stop and think hard about after reading each episode, and to discuss with other people regarding their thoughts. To start off my thoughts, I guess I’ll give my opinions on the main cast first:

  • Rena: Rena is craycray. That much is certain. However, despite her being craycray, I can’t quite understand her intents and motivations. Does she really want to help Keichi, despite being crazy about it? Is she just fulfilling Oyashiro-sama’s will (putting aside the fact of whether Oyashiro-sama is real or not)? Being crazy, does she even need intents and motivations? It’s gotten pretty hard to try and figure out what Rena really wants, and I think that is one of the more interesting things to think about.
  • Mion: So I’ve been kinda spoiled about something regarding Mion, and I feel that that has influenced the way I think about Mion a bit… So to leave my opinions spoiler-free, unlike Rena, Mion seems to be a bit more transparent. We can figure out that she is definitely pushing her interests for Hinamizawa, and she even admits to having the chance to kill off Ooishi at one point. She’s definitely up to something fishy, but she claims not to even believe in Oyashiro-sama. If anything, her existence supports the People being the culprit idea.
  • Satoko: I’m gonna sound a bit silly for thinking this, but out of all the main cast, Satoko is the only one I trust. I can’t quite logically explain it, as it was a feeling that I received before even knowing about her background, but what supports it the most is that, in many of the cases, she has been the victim. She lost her parents and her brother to the string of incidents, and while she might be in fear of Oyashiro-sama, I don’t think that it would be something that she supports, let alone help put into fruition. This’ll probably come back to bite me in the end
  • Rika: Something’s fishy about her… Again, this isn’t a logical conclusion either, and she has also been a victim of one of the incidents… But I can’t help thinking there is something fishy about her. It’s always the innocent people that end up being the least trustworthy, after all.
  • Keichi: This one is a tough nut to crack. While I definitely felt the same as he felt while he was fearing for his life, there’s also something that isn’t quite trustworthy with him. Well, for one, he did lose control by the end. But he also constantly feels this “presence” haunting him. If Oyashiro-sama were real, then that could easily explain it… However, if he were, for example, delusional in that regard, then that only makes him just as trustworthy as Rena, whose intents we cannot gauge either. Sure, we know he just wants to find out the truth (and survive while doing so), but he tends to black out pretty often and we can’t say for sure what he does during that time…

Now then, to the meat of the question: People or Gods? If there’s anything I learned about Ryukishi07 from what I have previously read, is that he always always makes it just vague enough for there to be a possibility that both are real. And that is gonna hold way until the end of the series, probably :stuck_out_tongue:
So, to be honest? I’m leaning towards people. Perhaps it is my innate skepticism screaming that, but I feel that all the mysticism surrounded by the characters can also be explained by people… Just not entirely sane people.

It was a very fun read, however, and I’m eagerly awaiting the next chapter in the series!

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#22

Great write-up Pepe! I’m really looking forward to hearing your thoughts develop as you read future chapters :slight_smile:

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#23

Surprise~! Thanks to our resident Ryukishi07 fan @Karifean, I have been able to read the Steam release of Onikakushi-hen! Here is my review of it:

Thanks again, Karifean. I can’t wait to read Watanagashi-hen! :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#24

Interesting to see your thoughts @Pepe, and nice review @EisenKoubu

I’ve been reading some of the steam version, and I’m up to the festival now. While some lines are definitely improved compared to the older release, I do have some points where the older version was better:
1) The westernization of the names, what’s even the point of that? Leave it as Ryuugu Rena, in my opinion the japanese name order sounds way better for japanese names
2) Changing some of the Yen-values in the game to dollar, that makes even less sense because I doubt that 1,000 Yen back then were equal to $10, and it’s also not consistent, because in other parts the original Yen value is used, like in one newspaper tip. Example: http://i.imgur.com/37ZwAET.png
3) The biggest problem, which should almost be considered a crime: they changed Rika’s “mi-” to “mew”, absolutely disgusting! If they changed “nipa” I’ll have to make my own mod just to change those back!! Example: http://i.imgur.com/4BJr4so.png (screenshot from the festival)

Anyways, for those who finished it already, the questions I wondered about the most after Onikakushi are the following:
Who is the manager?
What was that syringe?
Why did Keiichi suddenly change his mind on Oyashiro-sama?
Is the whole village involved?
Can we trust any of the club members when Rena and Mion are like this?
Curse or people?
The all-cast review session actually sums everything up pretty nicely, sadly I only read all of them when I was already done with all of Higurashi (+Kai), so it was just some retrospective thinking about things, but whatever^^

edit: Welp, I found a program that finds&replaces certain words or terms in all .txt files in a folder, so the “mii”- and the name-order problems are taken care of, I’m happier now :3

1 Like
#25

[quote=“Skyzzed, post:24, topic:1249”]

What was that syringe?

[/quote] I believe it is supposed to be the same drug that forced Tomitake-san to scratch out his own throat. At least, that’s what Mion implied.

[quote=“Skyzzed, post:24, topic:1249”]

Curse or people?

[/quote]I believe these two questions go together with my own personal theory of this whole mess. My personal theory about it all is that yes, it is a curse, but it’s a curse that acts in a passive manner. From one perspective, it does seem that Rena and Mion actually are threatening Keiichi and he doesn’t feel like he can trust them anymore. However, there is solid evidence that Rena and Mion are actually trying to keep everything as it was before Tomitake’s mysterious death, and that included helping Keiichi struggle with his own inner demons (no pun intended). So, it might actually be the opposite, and Keiichi might actually be slowly drifting into insanity. That’s what I think Oyashiro-sama’s curse is: the subtle implantation of stimuli to trigger thoughts of fear, which directs the victim’s thoughts and actions until the victim becomes intensely paranoid and takes action on it. The incident with Rena attacking three boys from a different school and breaking all the windows was most likely the byproduct of the same process. Rena knew what Keiichi was going through and I believe she wanted to help him, even if she was wielding an ax and looking quite scary to Keiichi. If you ask me, I don’t think the curse has anything to do with people at all.

I could go on and on about this, but I’ll stop right there and leave things open for discussion. After all, the more I read into this series, the more my thoughts might change, but that’s what I think based solely on the facts presented in Onikakushi-hen.

2 Likes
#26

To be honest, at first, I really didn’t think it was the victim from the first event. That was just pushing it. But at the end, after finding out that that was one of the lines removed from Keichi’s note, then it got me suspicious…

As much as I can agree with the potential in this theory, I simply cannot discount the fact that Keichi was in legitimate danger. Probably everything instigated by Rena and Mion might not have been necessarily them having anything to do with Onikakushi; Rena shouting and spying on him could have just been Rena being crazy, and the needle in the mochi could have just actually been a prank (and a crazy one at that). However, by the last day, where he was attacked by a group of men after running from Rena, he was in legitimate danger. Whether or not it happened because he started getting paranoid I think does not matter. The fact that there are people who would go against you for trying not trusting the village just seems iffy to me

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#27

They changed the names in the Steam version? :o

#28

They just made it First Name before Last Name

#29

Sry, what @Pepe said, my wording was a bit odd there, it always said Rena Ryuugu, Keiichi Maebara, etc. and I changed it back to Ryuugu Rena, Maebara Keiichi… like in the original TL because first name before last name just sounds wrong for japanese names imho

If anyone wants the changed scripts with the original name order, mew changed to mii and $10 changed back to 1,000 Yen (I checked the exchange rate for june 1983 and 1,000 Yen would’ve been about $4 back then), I could upload them on mega or something

#30

Guess you must hate our site then XP

2 Likes
#31

It’s terrible! What am I even doing here?! Time to run awaayyyyy~

Nah 'tis more like, the wrong-sounding in VNs comes from it being… immersion-breaking maybe? Like, why would japanese people not use [last name] [first name] for japanese names? On the nets it’s mostly just confusing, because sometimes I have to stop for a second and think “is this the original or the western name order?” for names where it’s not immediately obvious, but in most cases I can deal with it^^

In other news, steam seems to hate me, I checked my card drops for Higu and this was the result

And I made another change to the script: I changed Mion’s “this old man” to “Uncle Mion”, that’s another thing that I preferred in the original TL :stuck_out_tongue:

Nipa~

Oh, also, while rereading Higu there’s so many things I want to comment on here but can’t due to spoilers… it’s tearing me apart!

#32

I honestly think that “old man” feels more accurate than “uncle mion” because, in Japanese, you say “Ji-san” (original text) to refer to other older people (we do the same thing in Filipino), but you don’t really call unrelated people older than you as “Uncle” in English, do you? so I think they fixed up the cultural discord by just calling her “old man” instead.

#33

I finally got the time to read chapter 1 and I’m glad that I managed to not get spoiled about it at all. Okay, I knew that it’s written by Ryukishi07 who also wrote Lucias route in rewrite. So the only thing I knew was that its probably going to be some mystery story.

The beginnig was quite amusing, I got to like the 4 girls pretty fast. Tomitake was a nice guy, everything was fine.
So the day after the festival where shit starts to happen I was waiting for some new characters to appear who could play the bad guys. I didn’t even think about Rena and co. But as you know, thats not what I got, I got a scary as hell rena… The first moment where she gets those crazy eyes it scared the hell out of me T_T But then it was clear that theres something really suspicious going on and it didn’t surprise me that Mion was involved too.

For Rena, my thoughts are that she maybe did go through the same thing als Keiichi in her old school. She got some friends and someday they started acting suspicious. Or she imagined that they act suspicious, to the point where she was so frightened that she beat them up and went crazy. Maybe the people behind the incidents made her do so and ‘safed’ her afterwards, so she would come back to Hinamizawa. But at this point I can’t think of a reason why they would do that so it’s just wild speculation.
But because of that she understands what Keiichi is going through and she wants to help him, but she doesn’t know how. And she’s frightened of Mion and the other people.
But as much as I want her to be a good person, as hard is it to find excuses for her behavior. The scene where she stands in front of Keiichis door for an hour, her chasing him with the axe, her standing in front of his house in the rain and so on. Thats some crazy stuff.

I found it interesting that she was apologizing over and over while standing in the rain. Keiichi did the same thing in the phone booth at the end… But I don’t know what to think of that.

For Mion, I think its clear that she is deeply involved in all of this and maybe she and her parents even are the heads of the organisation behind everything. I think that because of her statement that she had the chance to kill Ooishi but didn’t do it.

For satoko and rika, I hope they don’t belong to the bad people in Hinamizawa. Maybe their parents got killed because they tried to do something against Mion and her people. They could just be victims and act normal beacuse they’re scared as hell of the ‘curse’.
That would be the case for the majority of Hinamizawa. It’s clear that the whole village is somehow involved in this. For example, at the end when Rena is chasing Keiichi with an axe, why aren’t there any people on the streets? This points to the tale where everyone has to look away when the ‘demons’ (this time rena) are on their hunt. Everybody is scared and looks away.

I have a problem to believe supernatural stuff without hard evidence, so I say that there’s some shady organisation behind the ‘curse’.

For the things that happen to Keiichi. The presence he feels behind him sometimes could just be paranoia. The end where he goes crazy could be explained with the unknown drug that drove Tomitake insane as well. They injected him but he didn’t react how they expected and so they got killed. He stayed ‘sane’ and tried to escape but in the end the drug kicks in and he ended up killing himself.

All in all it’s really hard to guess whats going on. Many things and people that make no sense. I won’t watch the anime until I finish the whole VN, so I will have to wait for the next chapter to get some answers!
Does somebody know when that would be? :stuck_out_tongue:

2 Likes
#34

See, that’s the beauty of this series; this is actually a very plausible way of looking at it. Maybe she really was trying to help, despite her 360 turn in personality whenever Keiichi lies. Perhaps Keiichi was just being waaaay too paranoid! And maybe that’s what got him into this whole mess to begin with!

That’s at least one thing that I can find believable by the end of the series; Mion and her family are hiding some secret. Whether it has to do with humans performing the killings, or if it is simply in regards to safety against onikakushi, we don’t know quite yet…

+1 humans, then :smiley:

I just wish it would be soon T_T

#35

The TL on Watanagashi-hen is moving along surprisingly well these past few days.

#36

Man, reading the comments here… You guys are gonna love the rest of what the series has to offer.

I still haven’t found time to sit down and play it yet, but I will definitely get it done before the second chapter comes out.

1 Like
#37

chapter 2 hype

Read this some time ago, loved it. At first, I thought Keiichi had gone insane, but when part of his letter was removed, he definitely was not imagining it.

I too trust Satoko the most. She’s probably the person who’s in constant fear of being “spirited away” like her family. My question is: Did she know Rena and Mion were like this? And what does Rika have to do with anything anyway?

1 Like
#38

Watanagashi-hen just hit MangaGamer’s store and will be available for reading on Friday the 13th of November! You can already buy it and redeem your Steam key at a slightly reduced price if you want to.

5 Likes
#39

Good choice of release date there, and that’ll be another afternoon of rereading… if the PS-sprites mod gets released right away^^

#40

I could if Mangagamer wasn’t shitty and blocked Japanese IP addresses from accessing their website >_>