Higurashi no Naku Koro ni: Complete (rewatch)
Many years ago, a troubled young man with a worryingly regular desire to beat people to death with a baseball bat finds himself in a new, small, tight-knit community where he makes good friends, gets into fights and generally has a laugh, never imagining that he will still be stuck in this same routine decades into the future. But enough about my time spent on AUKN since I first watched Higurashi back in 2008.
The show holds up, certain things were more clever than I remembered them being
chiefly the whole Mion/Shion plot and the way it's revealed in stages, as well as "folder 34" being presented as the real, plausible explanation for everything when in fact it's only one of many cuh-razy theories. It's definitely not a show to stick on in the background with all the important things to remember from one arc to the next. Satoko is still best daughteru whose smile needs to be protected, Rika is still fascinatingly enigmatic and I think I have more of an appreciation for Mion this time around. And Ōishi. Poor detective Ōishi, he might not suffer quite so badly as the other characters but
having to repeat an investigation he can never solve over and over is truly a kind of hell. The other thing I really appreciated was the music, I don't think I ever realised that Kenji Kawai did the incidental music for Higurashi, but it shows. The sound design is excellent, as are both the OP and ED which fit the show's creepy atmosphere perfectly.
Where it doesn't really hold up so well (if indeed it ever did) is in the animation department. This really is cheap as chips stuff. Higurashi's distorted creepy faces are the stuff of memetic legend (see above) and are thus forgiven, but that doesn't really excuse the characters' heights and eye sizes changing drastically between shots (there was a particularly moe looking Ōishi-san at one point I wish I had screencapped) nor the constant inability to understand how boobs work in a sweater. Most shows you would expect to hold on to some budget to use on the climactic action scene in the final episode, but it seems the well had already run dry by that point and it's kind of laughable how bad it is.
After checking out some blu-ray rips to see if it was worth upgrading my original Geneon DVDs, the answer was a resounding
no. Higurashi is of the SD digital era that just looks like a waxy mess upscaled that actually seems to blur
out detail rather than enhance it (the reason I never upgraded my DVDs of Haibane Renmei and Niea_7 either, even though I love those shows). Sorry MVM. It's not your fault that despite having the good taste to license some excellent shows their upscaling jobs are horrid. I will be taking you up on the offer of those clearance DVDs of
Kai and
Rei though, which weren't even licensed last time I (apparently) watched them.
Watching Higurashi again after such a long time doesn't only make me nostalgic for my early 20s when I thought I might have a future, but also for a world I've never known of rural Japan in the 1980s. There's a word for that, isn't there? Probably a stupid one. Still, it manages to evoke an atmosphere that does rather make me want to move into a cheap rural akiya no-one has lived in for 30 years and just leave everything the way it is, CRT TVs, rotary phones, family photographs, dusty windows and mouldy tatami alike and live like a ghost of the 1980s. Maybe if I actually pretended to
be a ghost the immigration authorities might leave me alone, perhaps my goth years were not wasted. And like Rena, I did also enjoy scrapyards as a child. The proper ones where they just piled up cars on a patch of wasteland, let all the oil soak into the ground and let customers climb up on them to get the parts they needed without a second thought to health and/or safety. Those were the days.
Higurashi no Naku Koro ni: Nekogoroshi-hen
Not a lot to say about this one-shot OVA really, other than that it perhaps does itself a bit of a disservice by trying to cram both the creepiest and the most light-hearted elements of the show into another short episode. Seeing Mion narrate a story of childhood disappearance and death while outfitted in a cow-print two-piece did spoil the atmosphere a tad. All in all though, I was in absolutely the right mood to revisit this series. I don't know if there's anything else quite like Higurashi, but if anyone else has any recommendations I think I'll probably still be in the mood for creepy mystery gore after I'm done. The more sinister the atmosphere, the better.
