English Dub Season Review: Higurashi: When They Cry – Gou

Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni or Higurashi: When They Cry is a series of popular visual novel mysteries that was adapted into more globally popular anime series in the mid-2000’s, with two seasons ending in a very conclusive and happy resolution. The story chronicles mysterious killings going on in the remote Japanese village of Hinamizawa, following several characters as their mental states break down, leading to more bloodshed and time strangely reset. Eventually, it’s revealed that these time loops are actually happening to a single girl, Rika Furude, who is helped by her school friends to uncover her own murderer and finally escape the same set of days she’s lived for over a century. Higurashi Gou was initially marketed as a remake of this story, supposedly for new audiences who may have not wanted to sit through the first adaptation’s…kinda bad parts. But lo and behold, it was revealed after the first episode that this was actually a stealth sequel, with all the characters somehow trapped back in the same time loop.

You would think that putting these characters, who would have ideally grown from their experiences in the previous two seasons, would be given the chance to show that growth when put back in these same scenarios. To be fair, most of the characters who aren’t Rika would only remember the most recent arc, but wouldn’t it be interesting to see the rest of the cast in her position and see how they’d react? Well, we kinda got that with one other character, but more on that later because the show thought it would instead actually do the remake they said this would be but isn’t. Confused yet? Well, get ready, because if you watched the first two seasons, you’ll love watching the first half of the first season AGAIN…but WORSE. And SLIGHTLY different, because there are slight differences that only eagle eyed viewers will notice and get to speculate on. But if you’re here for both an interesting mystery AND a good story, well, then you probably get neither. Almost none of the characters are going to acknowledge the differences and the structure of the arcs is nearly identical to what they were before, but when we hit the different stuff in the second half, it goes hard different.

Once we do get to the actual proper sequel part, we do start to get to the heart of how this new scenario got going. It involves one of Rika’s normal friends, Satako, having apparently not adjusted well to time finally moving forward, and with the help of a mystical guide not unlike Rika’s companion Hanyuu (oh yeah, she has a horned demon girl who revived her, it’s a whole thing), Satako is able put everyone back in what she considers the good old days, even blaming Rika for being so willing to move on. If rehashing the first season but less good hadn’t killed my interest, it would probably be how this handles Satako. I’m not against turning good guys bad if it can be done well, but the story does not make me think this is something someone who has fought beside Rika this long would do, let alone once finally understanding what she’s dealt with for so long. So all it ends up making me both just confused and frustrated, even more so with so much more focus on needless gore when the first two seasons managed to balance that with the horror much better, where as this seems to just be about grossing people out instead of making them scared.

And on top of all of that, the tale is not yet complete, as next month marks the Japanese release of Higurashi Sotsu, which seems to be the actual proper final end to all of this. I can’t say that I’m all that looking forward to it considering half of this was a really bad rehash and the other half was pretty much a character assassination, as well as the fact that this kind of story shouldn’t take nearly this long to resolve, but if the rumors of it being only 15 episodes is true, it will at least be a shorter kind of hell. Plus it’s been fun to tear this season apart, so I bet that same fun will be had in Sotsu. In that sense, this review is a bit premature, so I hope that I haven’t used up all my talking points that I could be using for Sotsu too. I guess we’ll see in July.