Recent reviews by melon

1v1 me snipers only at the king's arsenal you won't

if bandwidth was a finite resource it would be illegal to send someone 5 gb of garbage like this

DS1 is a great game and it deserved a much better remaster. This ♥♥♥♥ is the worst case scenario and doesn't justify existing for a marked up price, let alone after delisting the original. All it has going for it is a portion of the fixes you can find in an unofficial patch and, in some ways, higher fidelity graphics which occasionally look worse than the original. It's an insulting missed opportunity that QLOC didn't fix some of the major bugs or port in any of the control improvements and QOL that From has developed on since DS1, for starters. If you have access to the original, consider how little more you're actually paying for on top of that.

if you ever played a souls game and said "I wish I could just fight the same few normal guys with swords over and over with no variation a thousand times" then this is the game for you

they did it again!

After reading all 8 main story chapters I can say Higurashi is an extremely mixed bag with stark highs and lows. Once the main plot finally picks up, chapter 1 becomes a high point. It's very easy to be engaged with the mystery and well-executed psychological horror and it left me eager for more. That's when you start getting into a lot of trouble with the writing. There are still things to like and appreciate about chapters 2-8, but they are not what chapter 1 offers or promises. If you've played chapter 1 and want to know what's in store for you before you spend time and money on the rest, or if you finished chapter 2 and worry now that chapter 1 was a fluke, let me go over the general strong and weak points of the rest of the work while avoiding spoilers. If this review seems too long, I've got bad news for you about the rest of Higurashi.

At and after the end of Chapter 1, the reader is encouraged to start coming up with theories and conjectures about what's going on and to try to solve the mysteries themselves. The cast of characters, the writing within the story, and Ryukishi07 himself will repeatedly suggest or even directly tell you this is how you're meant to enjoy Higurashi. Given that, the worst thing the story could do would be to make things up as it goes along and only try to force explanations or answers into the story in retrospect. Thankfully, Higurashi does not commit this sin. I appreciated the fact that in the back half of the entries you start seeing how almost everything really was planned out in advance and the mystery elements were written deliberately, but this only makes it all the more astounding that Ryukishi07 made some of the bizarre and frustrating choices that he did.

The second worst mistake a mystery story can make would be to encourage you to constantly be guessing and analyzing things only for the ultimate answers to be bizarre nonsense you couldn't have ever hoped to guess. Imagine reading a huge serious mystery novel where you're trying to figure out which guest at the mansion killed the butler. Dozens of hours of reading later, you get your answer: It was the tribe of evil mice living in the walls that figured out how to use a gun and hide all the evidence. This is never hinted at in any way. Mice are never mentioned once and you're given zero reason to think that mice are smart enough to wield guns and have a grudge against the butler. It seems horribly out of place with the sort of story you've been lead to believe you're reading up to now. That's how it feels to learn the truth behind the biggest mysteries of Hinamizawa. Maybe you can imagine a way that an absurd twist like this could be justified and used to great effect. Well, it isn't. I promise. There are still other mysteries you can figure out ahead of time and you can still have fun doing it, but if your goal is to uncover the biggest major reveals as far ahead of time as possible, you will be practically mocked for it, not rewarded.

So your investment in mystery solving may disappoint you, but what about your investment in the main character? In chapter 1, maybe you were annoyed at Keiichi's poor reasoning or his refusal to cooperate or communicate to solve problems. Even more, in chapter 2 you may be very frustrated at the protagonist's very dumb actions and lack of common sense. If you're the sort of person who considers it a writing crutch to make the protagonist stupid or the antagonist crazy whenever it's convenient to cause conflict, you will have a hard time reading the rest of the series. This bothers some people more than others, and if you don't know if you're the sort of person who gets annoyed by that, you will if you keep reading. Tension, horror, and most other emotions writing is meant to evoke are more powerful when you feel like you're in the shoes of the protagonist as you read, but it gets harder to empathize with them the more dumb decisions they make and the more they cause their own problems, which happens consistently throughout the series.

On the other hand, some people can forgive conveniently dumb and crazy characters. They're smart and mature when Ryukishi07 wants them to be, but they're kids, so maybe it's to be expected. What's harder for most to forgive are plot holes. You won't have the perspective to recognize the plot holes until the last few chapters in the series, but despite so many things being planned out over 8 parts, there are still several huge contrivances that feel incredibly cheap or make no sense at all in retrospect, some of them quite major. The big gaps in the writing made it hard to stay invested and as you go on you're probably going to be reading just because you like the characters or want to see how stuff plays out, not for the reasons you were ready to keep reading after chapter 1, because the series turns into something very different by the end.

What about the tension and psychological horror that hooked me in chapter 1 though? Well, not only that, but even the general tone of the series starts to evaporate relatively early on. Chapter 2 has more horror that's not as consistent or strong and Chapter 3 has a little, but after that it's pretty much dropped and then kicked in the opposite direction. This is not an exaggeration: The power of trust and friendship, the need to believe in miracles, strong conviction and spirit being enough to win any fight, and the idea that killing is never the answer all become recurring major themes of Higurashi. That may be surprising after you just read about what happens with that metal baseball bat or in a certain chamber, but I am not joking when I say that Ryukishi07 will, as himself, directly address you the reader and tell you that murder is always wrong no matter what because if you trust your friends and family and ask them for help there will always be a better solution. Afterward, he will work that philosophy into the writing from that point on. If you think that kind of children's story moral sounds at odds with the mature themes you've liked so far, you're right, because you can see the places where this bizarre philosophy push undercuts the weight of all the remaining writing until the end, by which point things start playing out like a typical shounen anime.

As this is a review of chapter 2, I'm giving a thumbs down since that's how I felt about chapter 2 and because this review is intended for people who are worried about whether the rest will pay off. So what about the rest? What's actually good about Higurashi? Is it worth reading anyway? I can recommend chapter 1 by itself to people who want a tense little horror story (after a bunch of setup), and I can recommend the full series to some people, but not precisely the people who liked chapter 1. If you liked the characters and want to keep seeing them and leaning about them, you'll get lots of that. If Hinamizawa intrigues you as a setting, even apart from the horror aspects, or if you like complex settings and lore for their own sake, you'll get plenty of that too. On the other hand, If you want more horror, a fairly written mystery you can solve yourself, protagonists and antagonists with smart and compelling motivations, or a mature tone and themes consistent in the meat of the writing, you'll get bits of this but it will eventually be stretched very thin or abandoned across many, many hours of reading.

So, if you've got a surplus of time you want to fill with something decent, Higurashi's got you covered. If you've got a little reading time that you want to make the most of, I'm sure you can do better looking elsewhere, because even if it took you 50 hours to find it you'd still come out ahead.

Many people will tell you this is a video game,

Insultingly awful game. Not even worth downloading, even for free, considering the full content takes several microtransactions of DLC to get anyway. Games like this are precisely why so many people distrust "early access" games. If you want VR gun simulation, there are many better options (Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades for instance), but better than that, you could click on any one of this game's tags and get something way better, including actually free games and not just games that pretend to be free in the hopes of baiting and switching you. At the very least, they wouldn't randomly lock up your whole computer while your GPU fan nearly tears itself off its bearings like it's trying to find the higgs boson in there on a setup that runs any other VR game just fine. It's a shame that anyone with 100 bucks can upload any irresponsibly broken trash they want to Steam now and I wish I could take this disgrace of a program back into the past because I think it would change Valve's mind about that.