English Dub Review: Higurashi: When They Cry – Gou “Curse-Deceiving Chapter, Part 4”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
Keiichi and the rest are still having trouble with Child Welfare Services, even when they bring in more of the students. They’ll need to bring together the whole village have a chance of fighting back, but it seems that a lot of the older villagers are still holding a grudge against Satako for her family’s participation in the Dam War years ago. Or rather, they all THINK that SOMEONE ELSE might still have a grudge against her family, so they keep up the grudge just in case out of courtesy for this imaginary person. The kids eventually win them over, but then must contest with Oryou, Mion’s fiery grandmother and head of the Sonozaki family. And after more arguing and cursing, they eventually get her approval as well. The entire village of Hinamizawa will be behind them next time.

OUR TAKE
I’ve probably brought up before how this and the last two arcs are combinations of previous arcs in the series, as well as how this is combining the two arcs which focused on Satako. Well, this episode in particular is mainly borrowing from the latter arc of hers, which involves this very scenario of trying to avoid outright killing Teppei and instead trying to help the village overcome its pointless grudges from the past. It’s a very compelling arc that sees the resolution of many internal issues within the village, but, at the time, was also a sign for Rika in her multiple timeline hoppings that there was hope after all. Suddenly her friends were taking the lessons learned from the failed scenarios and using them to break through the problems that had been plaguing the village for decades. So basically what I’m saying is that this episode is basically just a remake of this part of the second season. Granted, that episode came out over thirteen years ago, so I can understand doing it over a little, but it still ends up looking like an inferior copy.

That’s kind of my big issue with how this season has approached its first half, which we have thankfully finished. These first dozen episodes has been about going over many of the events of the first two seasons again in slightly tweaked ways for eagle eyed viewers to look over and speculate on. In this case, I think the main difference here is that we haven’t seen much from Satako and Teppei’s perspectives like we did in the original version of this arc, but I’M SURE THAT ISN’T IMPORTANT. And while I haven’t talked about the events of this arc on this site before, I did watch them and enjoyed them a lot more than this. It also honestly looks worse than that original version, making me wish I was watching that instead, which I don’t think is the impression that this season WANTS me to feel. So I can understand the function of approaching things this way, but I can’t help but feel like there were other approaches that would at least avoid the feeling of this being a bad remake, even if there is meant to be some metaness to that. And since we’re far enough into this season to not worry about spoilers, I should point out this arc also takes a hopeful turn before suddenly becoming a bloodbath later. Guess we’ll see if that gets remade next time.