English Dub Review: Higurashi: When They Cry – Gou “Demon-Deceiving Chapter, Part 2”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

While staring at Rena and Keiichi searching for trash, Rika awakens as a slightly older version of herself in a fragmented void by Hanyuu, her spirit friend, who informs her that time has been reset. Mortified by having to repeat this timeline again, Rika vows to figure out what has happened. Later, the gang attend the Cotton Drifting Festival, Watanagashi, and observe Rika doing her part in a ritual dance while Tomitake the photographer meets with his colleague Takano.

OUR TAKE

This is where the show pulls off its reboot mask and unveils that it is actually a sequel to the original, as indicated by the “Gou (Karma)” addition to the title, though how much of this is meant to be understandable without the first two seasons is unclear. If you HAVEN’T seen those first two seasons and are only watching this, you now know Rika is someone who is used to repeating June 1983 for however long and has a ghost friend with horns named Hanyuu, things that only really became apparent at around the beginning of the second season. What the show seems to be being coy about, at least for the moment, are the key details that Rika learned in that season to finally solve the mystery and end the time loop, so I’ll avoid mentioning those for now. For people like me who do know that story, it is interesting to see she has aged a bit between then and now, though not super noticeably since she’s still a short little girl (and that’s not even getting into the sheer insanity that is Frederica Bernkastel), meaning that SOME time has past since the end of that series but clearly not very much. What Rika will do with the information she now has and how that may or may not help her is currently unclear.

Also, as mentioned last week, we finally have a dub voice for Hanyuu, who was introduced last season, which never got dubbed. Everyone else seems to be completely recast, though Hanyuu is just…cast for the first time. Given how important she becomes in the story, this is an odd little tidbit that I just thought was worth bringing up. And with how she become involved with things near the climax of the last season, it is also concerning that she’s at a distance again, possibly through deliberate action by whoever is resetting time again. But other than that, not a ton of other notable things to really discuss about this episode. Keiichi is starting to get unnerved by Rena, which is certainly how things progressed in this arc with the first season, but the main contribution it has to the story is introducing the Watanagashi festival, as well as a few extra shipping teases than I remember the first season having. This will be important world-building for next week, but for now it’s really just set up. We’ll see how it takes things from here.