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Review of Umineko no Naku Koro ni

SubjectUmineko no Naku Koro ni
ByHelpfulness: 0
Vote: 10
zakashi on 2021-07-05
ReviewPlot: It tells the story of a family going to a family conference discussing inheritance shit and then shit starts happening. The mystery is very well written and you start feeling like one of the characters trying to figure stuff out, the narrative structure is hard to understand at first but the game is actually designed to do that in order to set up the plot twists later. Ryuukishi (the writer) assumes his audience is intelligent and then provides clues to you if you want to guess how the story will unfold, and the way he does it is pretty interesting. There's a lot here, drama, suspense, romance, action, very rich story.

Characters: Some of them are pretty interesting, and that includes the protagonist, which is good since he has the most screen time (but there's one that can be very annoying most of the time), they can have very good morals while others can be very questionable, and some are definitely tragic, there's a lot to dig here. You go deep in most of them and each of their backstories tangles well with the family conference and mystery as a whole.

Music: Best VN of all time in this regard 🙌, there's piano, violin, electronic beats, organ, emotional pieces, badass music, happy songs (those were average :/), suspense songs, I give it a 10.

Artstyle: I played with the PS3 sprites because the original is terrible, and they made a good job, the background scenarios are good, nothing extraordinary but still good. The CGs are okay but there are very few of them if you count all the hours you'll spend on this. And I felt some CG was missing in some scenes to give more immersion.

The conflicts between characters are very good when they are talking. But when they physically clash with each other, it's just okay, VNs are already bad in this as a whole because there are only a bit of static images and a bunch of text, so Umineko does not help itself much when it has very few CGs in these scenes, so do not expect much, but the music is awesome.

A minor spoiler:

Here you have one certain place where Battler clashes with a certain character in a Battle of Wits, those scenes were very good and it even invites you, the reader, to be an active thinker in what's about to happen, it can be very fun ;)

I think the good points far outweigh the bad points so 10/10 on my list. My major complaint is that this got in the way of my sleeping routine.
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