Higurashi: When They Cry - GOU

I haven't seen the original Higurashi, so I honestly came into this one blind. I was not ready. This anime has so many twists and turns, I don't even know what's gonna happen next! The adventures of Keiichi, Rena, Rika, Satoko, Mion, and Shion are so well fleshed out! This anime is fantastic!

I didn't know anything about Higurashi before watching GOU, but I do see now why the series has so many loyal fans.

The series is set in the rural village of Hinamizawa in 1983, following a group of school children as their idyllic day-to-day lives slowly descend into madness. The show is divided into five arcs, each of which follow different turns in the events that lead up to the local village festival. For the first three arcs, the story follows the protagonist Keiichi as he becomes closer friends with either of the girls in his group of friends; the last two arcs are told from the perspective of one of the girls.

The high points of the series certainly are the lovable characters and the intricate storyline, which often gives rise to fantastic cliffhangers. This, unfortunately, also is the biggest downside in my opinion: act four ends with a magnificent cliffhanger that honestly is one of the best I've ever seen. However, act five does not resolve it; it's instead left to the sequel series to tell how the story concludes (and, if the ratings are any indication, it does an absolutely terrible job of it).

While the fifth arc is a terrific story in its own right, it does not work as a conclusion to the series. Similarly, the final episodes of arcs one to three often feature a scene where one of the characters tells the then-protagonist what else happened off screen; this honestly feels rushed and comes out of nowhere.

It feels to me as if it would've made more sense of combining GOU and its sequel, SETSU, into one (longer?) series. This way, I certainly don't plan to watch the sequel and am left disappointed. Oh, well.

Apart from that, the series does a genuinely good job. The animations are nice but not stellar, the (English) dub even works pretty well, and the series itself is highly entertaining.

There's certainly a content warning for gore, though. I don't really mind if anime turns violent, but the graphic disembowelling was perhaps a bit much.

I watched several episodes of this because I'd heard "When They Cry" was a great anime series and I actually didn't realize that this wasn't that show but a remake. And I was really confused because what I saw was so bad and I thought, how could this be a classic?

I watched three episodes before I realized my mistake, then watched the original, which is notably better. While the first two episodes of this remake are all cutesy games and banter with almost none of the mystery and horror, the original got going by episode 2, and the card game in episode one was genuinely entertaining, unlike the more elaborate games of this sequel.

One of the big annoyances of this series is the nails-on-chalkboard voices of the girls. They are all painfully cutesy. In the original there was more variety, with Rena's cutsiness balanced out by Mion's dryer delivery. I wondered if it was just bad dubbing so I watched one episode with subtitles but they did the same thing in Japan.

The animation is also more straightforward and less wild, and I found that rather dull and conventional.

I will say that the third episode was mainly horror/mystery and was much better than the first two, but no way I could keep listening to those squeaky voices.

Even though I didn't ultimately *love* the original, which is intriguing and compelling but a bit too intense in places for me, it is certainly much better than this one.

As a fan of Higurashi series i had a worries about this new Series. But studio Passione did a really good work in keeping the soul of the original and making the story entertaining and surprising. The story is written as usual by legendary RYUUSHK07 who keeps driven characters to insane and horror as usual. If you were scared while watching gore in old Higurashi, then you will be scared here. For Ex. Satoko Panic attack scene here is really terryfying, i mean its amazing and we got a realistic PTSD scene instead of just Satoko kicking Keicchi for 5m. And yeah, pretty much every gore scene is a little masterpiece, the original did it pretty well but thanks to higher budget, experience, new art techniques we have a truly unconsious experience.

In summary, if you watch original, give it a try. And have a fun watching people suffering

There is just something too special about Higurashi that comes out to be very memorable, the story and the characters are so well written that it's a masterpeice at this point, I hope they make a proper anime adaptation of Umineko in the future.