We were dead f*cking wrong.
This is anime at its most disgustingly deceptive, dragging you through 26 episodes of "mystery" and I cannot stress those quotation marks enough because half the time the mystery doesn't even exist. Hell I could hardly tell what was the meta-world, the real world, the alternative world, THERE IS NO PERSPECTIVE! None! I don't even know where I am half the f*cking time so how the hell would I be expected to know what's going on?!
The characters are a mess. We're rivaling Geass and Nanoha levels here in characters, and as such signifies, half of them have no personalities. Hell, you see them all die so many times over and over again that you just come to accept that's their purpose in all of this. In fact, there are some characters so f*cking annoying you cheer when its their turn to take the grotesque spill, but it's not even half as enjoyable as it could be because this anime is spammed with so much violence that it makes it seem uninteresting. I have never seen senseless violence become so BORING!
The art is laughable. Studio Deen has clearly learned nothing from Higurashi, kept the same production values and amped up the facial distortions to a saturation point that makes them entirely unremarkable. Fortunately they kept the original music of the games which is quite good in some case if you can hear it over blood splattering and insane laughter. Oh, and another rare prop to this series for Sayaka Oohara's performance. I wonder if she got drunk before coming in on days to voice Umineko. I hope so. She at least made it halfway entertaining.
But the real kicker is we aren't even close to solving any of the mysteries by the end of this and it ends with WAIT FOR SEASON 2 LOL. Now some of you may say "Hey Splitter! You gave Higurashi's first season a 9 and it did the same thing!" Yes it did, but it also got closer to the truth every episode and eventually made the big reveal that puts the whole series into focus while Umineko didn't do anything even remotely close to that. I've heard the games are better (more times than should be heard) but this adaptation does nothing to make me want to invest days on end into playing them and the adaptation certainly doesn't make me want to stick around for 24-26 more episodes as I care nothing about anyone in it and could care less if they all stay trapped in this game for all eternity. In fact, put Chiaki Kon and her staff in this game for all eternity with the characters. That's a suitable punishment for making this grotesque travesty of a "murder mystery". Seriously, all you've got is a good OST, a solid backstory with Maria and Ange (F*CK WHAT THEY DID WITH ANGE), and Beatrice's seiyuu performance. After that you have 22 eps of inane shit and characters you just want to see permanently shut up.
Overall, I give Umineko no Naku Koro ni a 4 out of 10.
