Review of Higurashi: When They Cry – Kai

If you are reading this review, I am presuming that you have already finished the first series, so I'll be dealing on spoilers from season 1. As I mentioned in my review of the first series, after meandering a bit too long in what seemed like disconnected, iterating plots with seemingly random variations, the series plays its ace: The revelation that a significant part of the events portrayed are presented as seen through the eyes of increasingly neurotic and paranoid people, to the point of sometimes being outright hallucinations. A brilliant case of "unreliable director", if you will. The chief effect of that revelation is to bringinto focus the events that—disregarding variation and apparent cause—repeat themselves in each or most of the plot lines, as they become a rule to discern fact from hallucination. With the series' last (and unsurprising) revelation that one of the characters is jumping back in time a la Groundhog's Day, Higurashi goes all of a sudden from mediocre gory horror to enthralling mystery that you feel encouraged to solve.

I was expecting Kai to go along the lines of the previous series, a succession of irrelevant, unrelated timelines where you would be able to glean some nuggets of truth from the information previously gained. However, where series one was abstruse, Kai was straightforward, happening in a mostly linear continuity. Where series one raised so many questions that you could only hope to be asking the /right/ questions, Kai dispenses answers and fills apparent plot holes with generosity. That is not to say that it is heavy handed or overly expository. It manages to artfully leave clues and outright answers just laying around for attentive viewers to pick up and make sense of.

Another big triumph of Kai is the character development, which had been almost completely stagnant in series one. Finally "our heroes" become real people that we can care for and cheer on as they start making use of their agency, as opposed to being the mere puppets that we cynically got to watch murdering and being murdered over and over.

Finally, it needs to be mentioned, production values were raised across the board with greatly improved character design and animation.

It is a pity that series one was so flawed. Kai is so good that I actually went and raised the score I had initially given it first, but, similarly, I'm giving Kai a lower score than it deserves, because it cannot be enjoyed separately from that big mess. Nevertheless, both together are something that I definitely recommend.