tl;dr: Slow moving and with an ending that is quite bizarre, but still enough worthwhile content to be pretty good.
Higurashi Sotsu is the sequel to Gou, and could be seen as the answer arcs to it. However, while the Question/Answer arc structure worked well for the original Higurashi, it does not work as well for Gou/Sotsu. The original’s answer arcs were interesting in that for the most part, they didn’t retread old material much but rather solved the mysteries of the question arcs while going through new stories. However, the first three arcs in Sotsu are straight up repeats of the first three arcs in Gou from new perspectives, which isn’t anywhere near as interesting. This is especially an issue because the final arc in Gou gives you enough information that you should be able to figure out essentially everything that matters in the three preceding arcs of Gou. As such these arcs feel unnecessary.
It’s not like these answer arcs don’t have anything worthwhile at all. The first arc I thought was pretty clever in how it essentially overlaid two of the arcs from the original on top of each other. The second is interesting in how it shows a character that was seemingly immune to Hinamizawa Syndrome getting it and it manifesting pretty differently from how it has in others. It’s a completely new story that’s pretty creepy even if you’ve gone numb to seeing Hinamizawa Syndrome in action. The third arc in hindsight I think may only be predictable to those that have read the Comic Anthology since it uses the same subject material as one of the stories in it. There are a lot of minor details that needed explanations for it to make sense, though the actual explanations given weren’t very good as they involved coincidence, luck, and things just working out how Satoko wanted them to. That fits with her character and abilities, but it’s still not all that interesting. Still, this arc does a really solid enough job of showing how low Satoko has fallen. So there is some good new content here. Just not enough for the runtime of the anime. It felt like each arc could have been cut down by an episode for a tighter better paced experience.
Still, after all that it finally gets back to cliffhanger that the second to last arc of Gou ended on with Rika realizing that Satoko loops. After that, things get messy. Really messy. At first things get extreme in a way that’s very un-Higurashi-like. Still, it’s really cool and well executed so I’ll give it a pass on not actually making much sense. But then they keep going in a way that doesn’t make sense and the anime overall ends in a way that feels like it completely ignored everything that just happened. It felt like throughout the anime it was heavily emphasizing how much of a psychopath Satoko was becoming while also emphasizing how traumatized Rika was getting, but in the end they just completely shrug it off. In the end, everything that happened is treated as the equivalent of the shounen trope where two friends get into a fistfight by the river as they bare their souls to each other. It’s just incredibly bizarre. Despite all that, I would still have to say that I enjoyed what they did with the epilogue. It doesn’t fit Higurashi very well, but I’m a sucker for endings like that so I’ll take it. All in all, Gou/Sotsu have major issues, but I’m still glad they exist.
The art and animation were really solid. Episode 14 especially was amazing, with the highlight being the shot early on that spun around. The animation of Rika’s Watanagashi dance was impressive in Gou, but after seeing it so many times it started getting kind of old in Sotsu. The OP and ED are both solid in terms of the songs and visuals used. I also thought the use of the insert song “You” from the original was very well done. As an aside, I didn’t mention it in my review of Gou since it would be spoilers, but I’ve always thought of Lambdadelta and Vier as Takano expys so them actually being Satoko will always feel weird.
