The versions of the game ported to home consoles additionally feature voice acting provided by professional voice actors. Gameplay is restricted to reading individual scenes, during which characters are displayed as static two-dimensional sprites.
Higurashi When They Cry is a “sound novel”, a variation of visual novel with a focus on sound and atmosphere. As mentioned in my review of Onikakushi, Manga Gamer opted to recycle the original backgrounds, which were real-life photographs of settings that somewhat resemble the story. While some minor improvements were made to make the story more lively, such as extra sound-effects and art, the continued use of the shoddy backgrounds leaves the reader with little visuals to enjoy in this visual novel. Even so, the novel continued to try my patience with its redundant writing style and lackluster art. Particularly Rika gets a lot of entertaining scenes and we get some intriguing background info on her that leaves you questioning just how innocent the little shrine maiden really is. KamiYaba Destiny on a Dicey Deadlineīut now that we are familiar with the basics it’s time to develop the characters more. I find this to be another positive change it made sense to keep the first chapter more focused so that readers don’t get confused. Besides Mion, Shion, and Keiichi, the rest of the cast also gets quite a lot of scenes, whereas Onikakushi purposefully focussed more on just Rena. Rather than focus on Keiichi descending into paranoia, it instead focuses more on him falling into a deep grief as tragedy strikes Hinamizawa all around.
Her role also stretches into the horror side of the story, which feels distinctly different from how Onikakushi handled it. Of course, I won’t delve into spoilers, but I will say the visual novel tackles these the best of all the different mediums Higurashi has been told in. This little mystery drives the entire slice-of-life part of the storyĪnd leads to some great scenes, including some of the series’ first emotional ones. To its credit, they do spend the time on something useful and which I find is one of the better storylines of the series. Keiichi, Rena, Mion, Rika, and Satoko enter into a games tournament and even after that we have hours upon hours of games, banter, festivals, and hijinks to work through. What may be jarring to some readers that were particularly fond of the paranoia-filled horror parts of Onikakushi is that, since the loop has reset, we once again start off with a comedy-filled slice-of-life setup. And someone who is here right now isn’t alive. Someone who was alive last night is dead now.
0 kommentar(er)
