…I started watching Higurashi no Naku Koro ni. God I suck at post titles. Was trying for a while to think of some lame pun or quote from the show, but no luck.

Anyway, I’m severely disappointed with myself that I put this show on hold; it ended up being one of the best series I’ve seen in a while. I had stopped at pretty much exactly the wrong point, right before everything started to make sense (Episode’s 16-21; bricks were shat) and the show became amazing.

The way the arc’s all tie into each other is well done; mechanics like that in entertainment are always a plus. A series of random, meaningless or seemingly unrelated events all coming together in the end to reveal what actually happened is just strangely appealing. Why is that? A sense of fulfillment? A possible hinting at higher forces at work, or something of the like? Bah, this isn’t a psychological post, so i’ll stop writing about that before I go off on a tangent about it. But still, the way everything worked and made sense all of a sudden at points was great.

Another element of the show I think that made it appealing was making it come off as a harem-type of show. One male lead character and 4 females, all cute in their own ways and attracted to the male character, standard moé-harem setup. Then the seemingly cute girls end up being batshit-insane psychopaths, turning the mood that the series first played off *completely* around and making for one hell of a good murder mystery.

The supernatural element of ‘The Curse of Oyashiro-sama’ played in nicely as well. Sometimes it was played off as a literal curse of an angry god. Other times it was used as a mafia-type cover up. Others it was used as a scapegoat, and I couldn’t help but be reminded of that book ‘The Crucible’ (as much as that book sucked), in the way that the supernatural/unexplained would just be blamed for everything that people didn’t want to deal with (‘We can’t explain it, so it must be witchcraft!’, ‘We don’t know who killed them, so it must be Oyashiro-sama!’). Overall it played into the story extremely well in more than one way, and showed a bit of the darker side of humanity (in b4 LOLDEEP).

The only thing’s I can complain about in the show are probably the animation and voice acting (or, more acturately, a combination of both). Sometimes the character will be screaming insanely, and the character will just look as if they’re slightly angry. Other’s they’ll look extremely pissed off, and yelling, but only like they’re slightly annoyed. I guess the emotion of certain points in the audio just didn’t match the animation. The animation in itself wasn’t impressive at all, but the show was an adaptation of a doujinshi game, so it was relatively low budget. Honestly though, this show proves more then usual that animation does not mean everything.