English Dub Review: Higurashi: When They Cry – Gou “Cat-Deceiving Chapter, Part 1”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
We see Rika’s perspective of the end of last episode, with her briefly feeling like things are finally looking up and that she’ll be able to break the time loop again…and then a crazed Oishi shows up and starts killing everyone. Her hope quickly snuffed out, she accepts her fate and is killed as well. She then wakes up in the hub world with the fragment of Hanyuu that was left, who informs her that she’ll be using some of the little power that she has left to allow Rika to maintain her memories in the next loop, as well as tell her where to find a special weapon that can kill those like Rika who are stuck in these loops, which could be used on her OR whoever is causing this loop. Rika awakens in the next timeline and attempts to find the weapon, but it has disappeared, leaving only a shard. She decides that she’ll try five more time loops, and if she can’t win by then, she’ll kill herself for good.

OUR TAKE
So, we finally get to what is unambiguously new animated Higurashi content, probably the first in several years that wasn’t comedy based, and yet it feels like we’re back to where we started. Mostly because, in a way, we kind of are. We’re back to Rika’s perspective on things after spending more than half of the season in Keiichi’s oblivious head, but this gives us a chance to look over the clues of what we’ve seen so far. In particular, some things that would have been easy solutions in previous arcs, like Keiichi trusting Rena or giving the prize doll to Mion, did nothing to stop the tragic endings like they would have before. So, we’re left to uncover a new wrinkle: there is another time looper like Rika who is messing with things. This is a very different sort of threat than anything Rika has faced before, as she has always been the only one among the human characters who was aware the loop. But now she’s facing someone else who is trapping her here deliberately and will have to face them without Hanyuu, the one consistent companion she has had these collective hundred years of looping.

And much like before, where the question was who was killing her in the previous loops, the question now turns to who is the other looper. Keiichi is obviously out, considering we’ve been following his perspective for over a dozen episodes now and he is generally meant to be an eyes-in character for the audience in those arcs. The rest of the kids also seems like unlikely choices, but there are many things we don’t know about what they’ve been doing. It could also be Takano, seeking revenge for her defeat at the end of last season. I wouldn’t even feel confident leaving Hanyuu off the table, considering we have only seen a fragment of her this season and there’s much about her situation we don’t know that could be used for potential stories. But what I can say for sure is that we finally have a new mystery to really look into here, one that is already testing Rika heavily and has her on the edge of giving up. Not even near the end of the last season made her feel this hopeless, so we must be building up to something big. I guess that’s what this new arc is about, which we’ll see continue next time.