It Takes A Child To Raze A Village.

[rionaleonhart]

batman: I've been playing Higurashi: When They Cry! It's about teenagers descending into paranoia and murdering each other and - where are you going?
Steam: Please confirm your purchase.

Higurashi is a game I became vaguely aware of some time ago. I thought 'huh, that sounds potentially interesting, maybe I should check it out' and Googled it and was instantly put off by the character art. But, fortunately for my shallow side (and the worrying side of me that can never resist a story about paranoid, murderous teenagers), there's now an official Steam release where the art has been redrawn!

Maybe 'game' isn't the right word; there doesn't seem to be any actual gameplay. It's a visual novel without narrative choices. (It calls itself a 'sound novel', but there are still graphics and visual novels still have sound, so I have no idea what the difference between a sound novel and a visual novel is.) I'm going to call it a game anyway, for convenience's sake.

I was expecting Higurashi to take a moment to introduce the characters and then jump straight into the horrible things, much like Dangan Ronpa, which wastes no time in going 'here's the cast, here's the horrible situation you're in, here's the horrible thing you'll have to do if you want to get out of it.' But three hours passed, and nothing horrible had happened yet; I'd just been watching Keiichi play silly games with his friends. And at some point, I suddenly realised, I'd shifted from impatient 'when are the murders going to start happening?' to 'oh, no, this is cute, I don't actually want everyone to be miserable.'

Too bad. Four hours in, everything became miserable. I knew exactly what I was signing up for, and yet there was still a part of me going 'MAYBE IT'S FINE, MAYBE IT'S JUST GOING TO BE A CUTE DATING SIM.'

(batman pointed out that Keiichi seems to think he's in a dating sim at first, and I immediately felt awful for him. If only!)

I don't know what Keiichi looks like, and for some reason my mental image of him is close to Hajime Hinata of Super Dangan Ronpa 2. I love Hinata, so just that inexplicable mental image automatically doubles my fondness for Keiichi. Enjoy your unearned affection, Keiichi. I'm sure it makes up for all your traumatic experiences.

The Dangan Ronpa series is still the gold standard for visual novels about murderous teenagers, and Higurashi is highly unlikely to seize its crown. If you're looking for a teenage murder mystery on Steam, get Danganronpa instead. (Or there's Danganronpa 1 + 2 Reload, now available for PS4! I swear I don't work for Spike Chunsoft.) But Higurashi is certainly holding my interest. I might make a less vague entry when I've played a little further; right now, things have only just started to go downhill.

Comments

[rionaleonhart]

Hooray! I'm glad more than one person reading this journal knows about this series.

Steam now has the first four chapters, and apparently the fifth is coming out this month! But apparently each chapter is... also divided into chapters? I'm currently on chapter eight of chapter one. I've been playing for almost five hours and I think there are probably still a few hours to go before I've finished the first instalment, so they're reasonably substantial.

I'd be interested to see the opening for the Higurashi anime! I've been fairly thoroughly spoiled for the first instalment anyway, having blithely ignored batman's spoiler cut.

I'd also be interested to see the Something Awful LP of Root Double! From that trailer, it does look like something I might be interested in, but it's a bit more money than I can really drop on a game I know nothing about.

[(Anonymous)]

CHAPTERS OF CHAPTERS. WHOO! And that's good that they're reasonably long. I guess you recommend picking them up? I may need to find something else to sink my time into since I may, er, have got a bit obsessed with Root Double (look at the hours in the past two weeks listing for Root Double): http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198090390475/games/

Mind you, Root Double also divides it's Roots (er, Routes, er, √s :P) into chapters, though I suppose that's slightly less confusing because at least the main things aren't actually called chapters.

At least it's not just me who ignores spoiler cuts. ("I REGRET NOTHING!!!")

Higurashi opening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt26CSwCNao In fairness, most Japanese openings of things sort of vaguely spoil things at most, but only become really spoilery when somebody goes "OH NO, LOOK AT THAT SHOT AT 10 SECONDS. END GAME SPOILERS!!!" when you're like "but I just thought that was pretty?" And I really don't know if there are spoilers in this one. (Don't read the comments, obviously. There are spoilers in those.)

The Something Awful LP is a screenshot LP. It doesn't have a huge audience, but they're pretty nice so it's safe - and fun! - to read the few comments between updates (and the speculation comments have gone down since a bunch of them have caved and bought the game to find out what's going on faster xD). It updates very regularly, too, and it's in the "chapter" Root Double (though not very far into it).

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3793037&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1

I suggest just reading the thread itself, but if you really want to just read the updates for whatever reason, make sure you start on the Root After stuff (been folded into a single link now, as have Root Before and Root Current) rather than the first link of the Root Double section since you'll be massively, massively spoiled, lol. There really aren't that many comments between updates though due to not too many commenters and fast updates.

[rionaleonhart]

I guess you recommend picking them up?

I wouldn't recommend them to everyone, but in your case I'm inclined to go 'well, you already seem interested in the concept and the first chapter is less than five pounds; if you're looking for something, you might as well check it out!' But there's the caveat that I've only just hit the part where things start to get messed up, so I can't give a full overview of how worth playing it is.

Also, ignore the first three minutes. They had me thinking 'this is really confusing and vague; is it just a bad translation?', but the translation has seemed fine since then; the opening just happened to be really confusing and vague.

Thank you for the Let's Play link! I'll definitely check that out. And thank you for the Higurashi opening as well. I don't think I've been spoiled by it, unless 'possibly floaty naked people are involved at some point?' is a spoiler.

(I should probably delete it from my watch history, though, because now YouTube wants to recommend me Dangan Ronpa videos, and that's something I really don't want to be spoiled for. Only six months until the new game is out in English! ...sigh.)