*Note: This review has minor spoilers for Higurashi and Higurashi Kai.*
Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Rei is a five episode OVA series that is somewhat of a sequel to Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Kai, though with only the three episodes in the middle actually serving as the sequel. These three episodes feature Rika arriving in another timeline where things are essentially perfect and all of the tragedies that befell the cast of Hinamizawa in all the other timelines simply never happened.
As such, it’s a look at how the cast was shaped by their experiences and how they could have ended up completely different people without them. In doing so, it also explores themes such as the value of having gone through suffering because of the growth that it can produce. It also touches on the concept of how because people are essentially who they are because of their life experiences, if the exact same person goes through completely different life experiences they are a completely different person, and thus if one were to choose the characters from one timeline of life experiences, that would be essentially rejecting the characters from the other timeline of life experiences. It also further fleshes out the lasting damage that going through countless timelines had on Rika, especially in regards to her relationship with her mother. It also felt like we got to see more sides of Rika as compared to the previous seasons, which essentially further cements her as the real protagonist of this series if there was any doubt after Kai.
The general subject matter and content it wanted to contain are solid enough in concept, but I think execution was somewhat lacking. It played way too fast and loose with the rules regarding Rika’s reincarnation and different timelines that had been established so far in order to push the plot in the direction of what was needed to for the themes it wanted to touch on. Still, if it had handled the themes well enough this would have felt warranted, but in the end I felt it only handled them decently well. The climax felt like it was essentially skipped over in some sense which felt kind of awkward in terms of pacing. Instead it went straight to an epilogue that felt pretty much like an overtly heavy handed infodump that tried to outline and explain why what occurred made sense and was justified with a heavy reliance on essentially stating that the problem that Rika was dealing with was one that humans weren’t meant to be able to consider. I feel this is a complete cop out however, as having the courage to fight fate was a core theme of the series up to this point with it being explicitly referred to in a conversation right before this, and thus the message here feels completely inconsistent with that. Thus, in the end I really have no clue what this OVA series was trying to convey.
The other two episodes, the first and fifth episode, were completely different. They were completely random comedy oriented episodes that story wise make no sense and clearly aren’t connected with anything else beyond having the same characters, though with their personalities exaggerated for humorous effect. The first episode is the standard anime pool episode pretty much. The fifth episode is a weird as hell episode where due to some weird magic Rena ends up falling in love with a string of people.
I found the first episode pretty hilarious in how the absurdity slowly escalated from the level of the slice of life sections in the previous seasons to extreme absurdity at the level of outright parody and thus overall I found the episode pretty great. The fifth episode was a bit more grounded while also having a few completely ridiculous elements, but in the end while it did have some humorous portions overall I didn’t find the comedy in all that great and thus found the overall episode only so-so. Though one of the reasons for that is likely that a pretty decent portion of it involved mahjong, which despite my best efforts I’ve only been able to gain a very minimal understanding of, so those that have a better understanding of mahjong may find it more appealing.
In terms of art, the art style and designs are still solid, and there’s a straight up pool episode so there a bunch of new designs on that front which are pretty good. The art quality and animation quality felt noticeably improved in the first four episodes, though there was a very noticeable drop in quality in the fifth. This may well have been intentional for comedic purposes, but I don’t think it landed all that well and thus mostly just felt like it was lower quality. The OP and ED were both decent in terms of audio and visuals, but not as striking or memorable as the OPs and EDs in previous seasons. The soundtrack also didn’t really stand out and wasn’t all that memorable.
