Reviews

As a fan of the original visual novel, Higurashi GOU probably would have disappointed me if I didn’t already know that people thought it was bad. The first half of the show made me ask, "why does this exist?” It seemed like the same stuff from the original Higurashi but with different deaths. This was kinda boring to me especially since they teased in the first episode that Rika has all her memories from the original Higurashi. I think it would have been more interesting to make her the protagonist to show her perspective on mostly the same events. Instead, we follow Keichi like normal so it’s mostly the same up until the point where people die. That’s why the show made me ask “why does this exist?” since it seems mostly like a reboot but at the same time it’s very clearly a sequel.

Around the halfway point it did start changing and it gave a reason why almost everything has been the same. It wasn’t a very satisfying answer, nor did it really excuse the show from just reusing content in my opinion. We did not need 3 arcs of almost the same thing to get to that conclusion. Now for the second half which is all mostly new content is where the whole thing starts falling apart a bit. It’s basically just Rika finding out who the villain is. Then is just switched to the entire backstory of why the villain is doing what they’re doing. It tries to get you to sympathize with the villain but their actions just come across as semi-stupid and really selfish. I really don’t like the motivations of the villain and I don’t think that character would do that. It never really got me invested in the actual plot and the mystery aspect is barely there.

The villain also uses loops(return by death) way too casually in my opinion. I think the villain's treatment of loops(return by death) is really bad and is definitely their stupidest decision. If I had to rate the show just purely based on the mystery aspect I would give it a 4/10. My final score for this show is a 5/10 though just because I really enjoyed seeing these characters again, especially in the slice-of-life scenes.