Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Sotsu (Higurashi: When They Cry

Rika Furude and Satoko Houjou are best friends who have lived in the small village of Hinamizawa for their entire lives. Alongside their other friends, they spend every day together, and every moment is filled with fun and laughter. However, as Rika and Satoko begin to grow older, a life-changing opportunity presents itself to both of them. Rika is determined to follow her dreams and wants Satoko by her side.

Although Satoko is hesitant, she decides to walk this path with Rika. However, the realization of her dream forms a rift between them. This leaves the girls living in completely different worlds, with Rika enjoying her new life and making new friends while Satoko grows more and more isolated.

Longing to return to the nostalgic days in Hinamizawa, Satoko despairs and wishes things could be changed. Just when she is at wits' end, an encounter with a supernatural entity changes Satoko's perception and imparts new revelations about her best friend Rika. This begins her journey to get the future she desires—by any means necessary.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

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Prequel:

Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Gou

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Characters & Voice Actors

Furude, Rika

Main

Tamura, Yukari
Japanese

Ryuuguu, Rena

Main

Nakahara, Mai
Japanese

Sonozaki, Shion

Main

Yukino, Satsuki
Japanese

Sonozaki, Mion

Main

Yukino, Satsuki
Japanese

Maebara, Keiichi

Main

Hoshi, Souichirou
Japanese

Houjou, Satoko

Main

Kanai, Mika
Japanese

Hanyuu

Supporting

Horie, Yui
Japanese

Takano, Miyo

Supporting

Itou, Miki
Japanese

Ooishi, Kuraudo

Supporting

Chafurin
Japanese

Akasaka, Mamoru

Supporting

Ono, Daisuke
Japanese

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Staff

Oowada, Tomoyuki

Producer

Kaneko, Hirotaka

Producer

Ishigami, Joutarou

Producer

Shimosato, Satoru

Producer

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Opening Theme

"Analogy" by Ayane

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Ending Theme

"Missing Promise" by Konomi Suzuki

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Sep 30, 2021

Chargecoulomb

Not Recommended

Full Sotsu Review from the perspective of a longtime When they cry fan.

Where do I start?

*Warning* Heavy spoilers ahead!

Story 1/10

The biggest disappointment to my parents since me. Everything was handled poorly and with sub par quality.
...

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Sep 30, 2021

Ryuseishun

Not Recommended

Do NOT watch this series. Whether you’re a fan of the Higurashi series or have never watched it before, do whatever it takes to avoid this at all costs.

The idolized Higurashi franchise, being part of the 07th Expansion series, is well-known for its blend of intriguing murder mysteries, conspiracies, and gripping horror / thriller vibes, juxtaposed befittingly with comedic lighthearted slice-of-life moments. Seven years after its last installment, the acclaimed creator Ryukishi07 was apparently either under some complicated contractual obligations or was in desperate need of easy revenue. So he decided to drop a new project advertised as a remake, except it turned out to ... be...an actual sequel. Countless nostalgic fans jump on the bandwagon in anticipation and delight for what this new installment has to offer. Instead, what we got here is a near-perfect epitome of what happens when one milks their own acclaimed and renowned franchise to the bone. While I’m not the biggest fan of Higurashi myself, I had my share of due respect for the original series. So when I look at this abomination and the previous season known as Gou, all I can really think was...what in the actual god damn hell was Ryukishi07 thinking? I heard people praising and defending this new installment with overly conceited and convoluted explanations; I bought none of that nonsense, and neither should you or anyone else.

Higurashi Sotsu is the sequel to the events in Gou; interestingly enough, the name of the two combine to make the Japanese term “Sotsugou”, meaning “graduation”. Regardless of whether or not that was intentional, this sure wasn’t the commemoration ceremony anyone expected or wanted. To start off, it’s stated as a followup to Gou, but it’s essentially more like a tweaked recap. Most of Sotsu consisted of reiterated content of what we’ve already seen in the original series and in Gou, with only slight differences. All the arcs progress in a similar way and all the answers are presented upfront with without any sense of mystery whatsoever. There’s no mystery. There’s no sense of intrigue or engagement. In fact, it quickly become a boring and inept cycle. The slight deviations aren’t changing the fact that we’re essentially experiencing the same damn thing over and over again. Focus may be shifted at times; sometimes to Rena, sometimes to Keiichi, sometimes to Mion. One of the fortitudes of Higurashi is that it’s able to highlight its characters in a reasonable way to make their arcs feel well-earned and impactful. None of that is present here in Sotsu. Everything feel recycled excessively to the point where nothing matters. The arcs finish void of emotion and progress. The one venture with giving some form of redemption to the likes of the initially despicable Teppei Houjou, Satoko’s abusive uncle and foster father, didn’t matter much in hindsight, if at all.

The only thing that we need to know is that one single revelation (if you want to call it that): Satoko is now the villain of the series. I can’t comprehend the need to make her the bad guy. What exactly did she do in the original series that would warrant or foreshadow her actions in Gou and now here in Sotsu? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Her reasoning to be antagonize and torture her friend Rika is so silly in context when you step back and realize what it is: that fact that Rika broke her promise to spend time with her in high school. The audacity to make this the main plot device and excuse for Higurashi’s version of the Endless Eight is astounding. Satoko thinks that her former friend should suffer a century’s worth of looping endless torture and mindless suffering, all because she overlooked a single vow between besties. This isn’t clever or engaging writing, this is just a silly and contrived interpersonal drama filled with heaps of misery porn. To add to the bedlam of ridiculousness, Satoko has those supernatural looping powers similar to that of Rika, given to her by some randomly inserted literal god character named Eua, whose looks and design are an obvious straight rip from the Umineko sister series. Her sole reasoning to enjoy observing the suffering of others inferior to her. Her motives and role to the story are so vague and muddled, only serving to add some fake sense of mystery to her, when she’s ironically just a mere engine to fuel the repetitiveness and recycling of the conflict. Seriously, what’s the deal with the need to add one-note pompous antagonists like this? If anyone has remembered how the original concluded its narrative impressively, you can despair now. Gou and Sotsu wasted away all of that. Nearly everything from the main story arcs is recontextualized. All of Rika’s efforts and development from before this unnecessary edition is essentially done away. There were no improvements or positive implications; instead, we’re given new issues instead. And as if to add more salt, Ryukishi07 decides to have a climax in the form of….a Dragonball Super battle? A ripoff of Naruto vs Sasuke? Seriously, I kid you not, everything gets truly tossed out the window from the top floor for the sake of magic battles and roid-rage clashes through loops and timelines that would make the likes of Beerus and Itachi shake their heads in disbelief. When the dust finally settles with your typical Hollywood epilogue, it's as if everything is simply back to normal; one can only ask if this was any bit worth the effort. If this was somehow a ploy to connect Higurashi with Umineko, then why go through all this pointless trouble to begin with? If anything, that would only serve to further adulterate the context of Higurashi as a whole.

The art of Gou and Sotsu is absolutely atrocious. I understand that Studio Deen wasn’t the best back then and especially not now, but they were still able to capture the enticing, thrilling, and dreary tone and atmosphere of the original story. Here with Gou and Sotsu, we got Passione, a studio who’s only known for making shows heavy with fanservice, which include the likes of the infamous Interspecies Reviewers. The overly bright and flashy modernized color palettes make the animation look stiff and cheesy. The Monogatari-like character designs are too fickle a combination. The thing is that the Monogatari series does have mystery and suspense as well, but it doesn’t focus so much on horror aspects like the Higurashi series does. Akio Watanabe’s Shaft-born style just doesn’t mesh well with the more melancholic identity and tone of the latter. Instead it makes the characters look goofy, dumpy, and hard to take seriously, like they’re the typical gag characters right out of a pure ecchi slapstick comedy. I’m not gonna lie, Gou and Sotsu would’ve come off more like a completely original show if you pretended to be blind. With all those saturated color gradients and highlights courtesy of Passione, it looks like something right outta Anime PornHub. Even with the most violent scenes, body parts and organs straight up look like spilled candy and blood genuinely could’ve been mistaken for fruit juice. It can still look unnerving to most people, I’m sure...cause I can agree that spilled food can look disgusting with the given conditions. Jokes aside, Passione’s aesthetics are far more befitting for a hentai show than a series driven by serious tension, drama, and mystery like Higurashi.

I’m not gonna say too much about the music and sound design. The opening theme is hilariously unfitting. I don’t really understand the reasoning to choose some random dubstep-esque soundtrack for a series like this other than some unspecified business reason. The ending theme and the insert song at the final episode aren’t anything special and quite forgettable, but at least they somewhat fit. The background music is mediocre at best; the only time the sound gets good is when they reuse tracks from the original. The voice acting department is really a struggle here, with Yuki Tamura at least making a valiant solo effort to channel Rika’s emotional beats.

The character department took the biggest blow in Sotsu. Back in the original story, the ensemble cast of Higurashi had a great sense of bonds due to their numerous interactions and shared growth. As much as I never really liked them, their ability to link to each other is so commendable and impressive and functioned as a main engine for Higurashi’s story more often than not. But in Gou and now especially here in Sotsu, all those positive and respectable aspects of the characters are snatched away, as they are merely reduced to toys for Satoko to mess around with during her plot for revenge. Defiled and desecrated, they’re turned into robots made to kill each other endlessly. For what? Why exactly do they deserve this? Why is Ryukishi07 undoing his beloved characters like this? While all of this is happening, Satoko continues to be the irritating cartoon level villain. Again, what’s with the random decision of making Satoko the bad guy in the first place? You’d think it would show a methodical descent into madness for her, but it doesn’t. Despite all those times she does something utterly awful to those close to her, she shows no signs of letting up or changing in any notable way like showing remorse or anything. Meanwhile, that Eua character is merely there to find pleasure in her observation of how twisted Satoko and nothing else, only acting when someone tries to intervene. Rika herself is tragically regressed to a stale typical “queen bee student” archetype and does nearly next to nothing about Satoko’s jealousy-driven actions until she finally decides to put the plug, which unfortunately simply leads to that ludicrous showcasing we see in the penultimate episode. Something else about Rika also really bugged me: why did she bother dragging Satoko along to the same school in the first place, only to end up breaking that promise, anyways, as stated earlier? I can only see this as another ridiculous plot convenience to start up Satoko’s malicious actions in the first place. It’s funny how the only remotely decent character work here involved Teppei of all people, and yet even that little development is a mere detour with minimal purpose. Everyone else cannot be considered characters at all, they’re just there to be moved as the plot demands it. Ryukishi07’s character writing here has truly fallen off the deep end here in Sotsu, and the series pretty much loses the strongest aspect of the story.

For my personal enjoyment, it’s safe to say that I absolutely hated the experience. As stated before, I wasn’t a fan of the original Higurashi to begin with, but Passione’s installment has been disgraceful to behold. I stuck through Gou and Sotsu to see if any decent revelation or development would turn up, but for the most part, it was a snoozefest at best. At the very least, Gou did have a few interesting things to observe at the time, but I got none of that here in Sotsu, on the other hand. Words couldn’t properly describe how infuriating it was to see Satoko channel her inner Scooby-Doo villain on a regular basis. Repeatedly. Over and over. Many times I lost my temper and many times I shook my head and laughed in disbelief. Not once did I feel fear or suspense, only disgust and some laughs...not from the lighthearted slice of life humor, but more from the derpiness of the bright, and flashy violent scenes. I personally don’t see how people can get easily creeped out by something like that. When it finally reached the point where Ryukishi07 had essentially ran out of ideas and went for some shounen-style battle, I was completely besides myself.

Like the Gou season, Higurashi Sotsu is an obnoxious cash-grab sequel that should’ve never existed in the first place. Riddled by ridiculous plot devices, redundant and repetitive plotting, utter disrespect of its characters, and a complete lack of purpose, it was one of the worst things I’ve ever watched in recent years. All it did was violate and disregard so much of the impressive groundwork that the original series by Studio Deen established with much care. It is completely worthless and added nothing beneficial or substantial in value to the 07th franchise. If you’re a fan and truly care for the Higurashi series, please stick to the original series by Deen and steer clear of this blasphemy. Otherwise, it’ll have you feeling extremely frustrated, dismayed, and betrayed in the end.

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Sep 30, 2021

Luubie

Mixed Feelings

Spoiler

- This Review contains spoilers -

Talking about Sotsu is really hard...

Going back in time, in 2020 we had the first part of the New Project of the franchise, which at the same time connected events of the original story, serving as a sequel for the anime, promoted a new experience, different from what was already presented.

It was confirmed that from the beginning Gou was a contradictory season for the show, as it involved a conflict within the very functionality and purpose of what was Higurashi until the end of the canonical arcs adapted from the Visual Novels. What marked the franchise for almost 20 years ... was set aside in favor of building a new story. An ambitious move, no? It is hard to think that a story already finished had anything more to tell, but honestly the feeling that Sotsu caused in the end was sadness.

The first three arcs (Oniakashi, Wataakashi and Tatariakashi), Sotsu oscillated quite a bit. The project really delivered a good start, where the conclusion of the arc in which Rena starred brought great anticipation for what would come next. Wataakashi was different... It was not the same feeling. The perception I had was that the staff had invested their time to start the show, but did not take good care in concluding this whole new phase. During this arc, it was interesting to see Mion being the real culprit in this little mystery. Of course, we can't forget that in the end the real culprit was always Satoko. When the show gives its plot twist still in Gou, it was expected that Satoko would be put on a pedestal as a villain. Well, that happened. If that's what the anime wanted, it got it. This idea whereby the show sustained itself injected added scenes with the perspective of Satoko having these "two faces". However, from here, it has a problem. Possibly the problem that destroyed much of the potential that New Project had.

From the third arc on (Tatariakashi), I could already see that the show was going to decline. I remember talking to some people about the status of the show during the release of the episodes and I knew that this projection of 15 episodes done the way it was would not be enough. Lack of time? Honestly, no. With 15 episodes it is possible to build a story that would conclude Higurashi, for sure. What prevented that was the time used during each of the parts that solved the mysteries separately. The show did this at the time with the second season. It was a formatting that worked and concluded the series in a positive way. Passione has consistently tried to repeat this, but has not succeeded. Tatariakashi was already a stage where you had both Satoko at her peak of madness, and moments where you didn't know what she really wanted.

Moving on, the franchise took steps backwards when it came to identifying the characters. The final conflict caused a sincerely silly fight between St. Lucia and Hinamizawa. Again, the selfishness that possessed Satoko exceeded her understanding with what she herself wanted. Episodes 10 and 11 demonstrate this, where there is a struggle unconsciously within her mind. A person who is already consumed by hatred against someone who still wants to have her life in peace. I didn't understand what actually occurred with this scene. It was just intriguing and would be a great way to cause Satoko's own redemption about what she did. But as the following episodes went on, that moment really didn't do much good. And even if Tatariakashi's conclusion had been good, the execution of the arc didn't please.

Remember what motivated her to do all this? Not wanting to lose her friendship with Rika was a huge desperation inside the character's heart. And now, she tries to fix it, even if she has to go through several loops and deaths to find the "ideal universe". Selfish, isn't it? This possession awakened a parallel personality that would cause more focus on the supernatural part of the series. Eua and Hanyuu were already characters that had this objective of serving as support to make the show's conclusions easier to reach. It turns out that with Hanyuu, in the original story, the explanations and dramas inserted were answered in a way that caused the interest of those watching. Yes, it's still a pretty boring way to think about it, but it was a lazy idea. Ryukishi could have brought this story turn around with a little more aptitude.

With Eua, same thing... It's really hard to define how far Ryukishi got involved in this original story, but the existence of Eua in the Higurashi universe sparked a problem that would be responsible for the very downfall of the show in the future. This was something that I predicted even in Gou. When there is the addition of an important character to the series, there needs to be a plausible way to contextualize the audience about what is happening.

"Who is Eua?", "Why did she help Satoko, being that it would apparently be of no benefit to her?", "What is the purpose of her existing in the franchise?"; honestly, I'm wondering that even now. Of course, it has the famous connections between Umineko and Higurashi, but I prefer to keep my feet on the ground about that. One cannot ignorantly state that assumption that connects the two worlds. Anyone who likes and understands the When They Cry franchise knows that this is a way to bring a more solid connection to culminate in this great universe, but while it's a good idea, it has displaced the goal of this show.

Speaking of purpose, what was "Kagurashi"? Four episodes made to conclude the series were not enough. Hanyuu reappearing in the astral world to Eua, Rika discovering that it was Satoko who was to blame for everything, and even the existence of the artifact that has the ability to kill those who live in loops... These issues are good at first glance, but insufficient to bring a conclusion. Since Gou I felt that what limited Hanyuu was already irrationalized. It already happened that she said "this time is our last chance" to Rika. That happened in Matsuribayashi (Kai), for example. The show tried to circumvent that and made Hanyuu have an ability and powers without much realistic explanation. It was not enjoyable, it was not captivating, it was not fun to witness after so many episodes the current fragments happen just "because they did".
Episode 14? Well, I don't think the problem with the show was that episode. In fact, it was more intense and was a nice way to bring a conclusion that needed to happen a long time ago. The build up to that stage was creative and I really appreciate the way the show tries to insert the abysmal powers. It was the famous "Dragon Ball" of Higurashi. A compilation of moments that disappointed most, as it was definitely no longer the "Higurashi" that everyone knew. Satoko and Rika awakening a power in a divine way was not really a good choice.

About the production, it was a factor that hurt the entire show. The amount of scenes brought entirely from Gou became more and more apparent as time went on and made Sotsu a definitive recap, rather than a conclusion. Passione experienced problems in writing a narrative that yielded well for the audience, but did not bring something new. Even with more than a cour of episodes left, it's still a sense of expectation to have something that was actually enjoyable to watch. Gou's phase was so interesting. The moments gave a utopian and cathartic awakening for it to have a good execution in the second half of the story. But I feel betrayed. In fact, I feel anguished. Anguished that I have absorbed a franchise that is so important to me and that even though I defended the show's more negative phases, I couldn't really like New Project the way I wanted to. The "miracle" that Hanyuu cites so much in the story is not for Rika, but for the project itself. Concluding the story in a good way was like a miracle, and it didn't happen this time.

Finally, Higurashi is still a franchise that I love, regardless of their criticisms. But Gou/Sotsu was indigestion. It's like you eat a whole cake. You'll be drawn to the temptation and think it's a good idea, but it won't be good for your stomach. As much as Sotsu didn't appeal to me, I can see some quality in it. I don't view this sequel as totally wasted, but I can't give it any more enthusiasm and say that it was a good experience.

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Poll: Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Sotsu Episode 15 Discussion ( 1 2 3 4 5 ... Last Page ) Stark700 - Sep 30, 2021	403 replies	by taynis »» Mar 23, 9:54 AM
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Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Sotsu

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