Alternate realities show that anyone can be a harmless friend or a psychopath.
Series in more sentences:
A secluded town with a dubious history holds many secrets, mostly covered up or explained with their belief in their god. A group of friends have to deal with their personal problems on top of that and there are countless of alternate realities where these play a crucial role.
The basics are always the same: the same people visit town, the same people befriend each other, the same people die at the upcoming festival, but the role of evil psychopath is often switched around. Some of the later episodes connect themselves to earlier ones, so those weren't alternate realities, just a different view. I really liked that as well.
The series sounds like a clutterglutter, but I had alot of fun watching. If I ever get around to it, I'll check out the other seasons/instalments. This one is a "good" for me.
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9-7-2021 UPDATE
When They Cry: Kai
Season 2, finally checked it and the following seasons out, here's my view on it.
Concerning this season, the first handful of episodes were a chore to sit through. Episode 1 was just a barrage of repetitive talking, and afterwards, the plot progression got ruined by filler scenes where the characters acted overly happy and quirky with each other. It was pretty annoying.
Their playful banter was so boring to sit through at times, I had to skip these scenes. I get it, you're super close friends, chill out, just give me the real story.
When the show got to the point, I was enjoying myself, though I can't say why the beginning was set so heavily on the abusive uncle storyline, out of all things, or why it took 100 years of getting reborn for Rika to attempt some real measures to change her own death. That feels very late. To have not figured out in all those years that the possibility exists her allies might be enemies was also weird. You can casually try to call the police, but why carry a shocked face when those people don't show up?
The main story is put to a halt in the second half of the season and instead takes a look in the past of the recently revealed main villain and some of the events that led to the show's present time. I see what the series tried to do with her, but I was not emotionally invested in the slightest. All her hardships were pretty overdramatic and it really didn't need this many episodes to tell her story.
The other events weren't that exciting to sit through, either, but I guess they were important in the sense it answered some loose ends. Don't know how Rika can sit there and watch it all happen again, since last time she reincarnated she clearly stated her time was shortening and she only to had 2 weeks left, but perhaps this is a 4th wall narration of a flashback? Don't know how else to describe it.
The end battle was fun, but I'm surprised these kids took the non-lethal Home Alone route and didn't just brutally kill everyone. Not because it felt out-of-character for them as kids, but it did feel out-of-character for When They Cry.
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When They Cry: Rei
In other words, season 3, here we goooooooooooo.
Ridiculous start. Episode 1 was this confusing filler ghost story shit and you might as well skip it, it'll just leave you confused.
It supposedly follows up after last season's victory, but then, why is the mentally insane villain chilling out with them? Is it because Rika went back in time to meddle with her past by letting her join her parents on the bus, as shown in last season's end credits? Wasn't that supposed to mean her death? An older Rika approached her with the offer to live or die, and without running away crying over getting threatened by a stranger, this little girl joined her parents, you see them on the bus, the driver gets a heart attack, but then you see her stash away a miniature flag from a meal she supposedly got that day. I first assumed it represented afterlife happiness, as we're not shown how/if everyone survived the bus crash, but I guess it was real?
But even if the villain survived, how did she and the doctor character end up meeting the main cast again to act cute with them at a swimming pool? The sole reason they got stationed in their town was because of the villain's bad past and drive to investigate its local disease. Are we supposed to ignore the credit scene and assume this villain received no punishment for her crimes and everyone forgave her? I'm really confused, and the writers seem confused as well.
But alright, episode 2 knows what the audience wants and introduces a pretty interesting conflict, though I'm not sure why Rika cares. She's in an objectively better world, where the once dead and suffering are now walking around in peace, yet here she is, entertaining the prospect of killing her own parents if it means returning to the previous world. Ridiculous.
Rika should've just settled with this world and put all that effort in re-establishing the friendships she's lost. Or not. What does it matter. Go make new friends. And the show itself brings this up, yet there are no scenes of Rika actually putting in the effort of befriending anyone. Instead, she kills her mother off-screen and returns to her old world with her heavily traumatized friends, and the show/characters act like that's a good choice. I'm not blind for the message they tried to convey, but I simply don't think that going back to an inferior, yet familiar world warrants killing a person.
But here's the fun part about all this; it's just a troll. Rika is being stalked by a deity, who made her dream all this, just for teh lulz. Or well, she claims it was to make her re-appreciate her parents, because apparently, she actively tried to hate them as not to feel sad about their death.. alright then?
And I say "fuck you to that logic". Hasn't this girl suffered enough? What the Hell is this goddess' deal. After 100 years of struggling, everything was going fine for Rika, and then randomly out of nowhere, she's forced to go through a staged setting that has her believe there's a chance of losing her old friends and killing her mother is the only way back. That's sick.
The last episode of this already short series is the same Looney Tunes shit as in episode 1, no point in watching it, and since the conflict ended up being fake as well, I'd say you might as well skip the entire season.
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Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Kira
Hardly a season, rather a short spin-off series.
Firstly, it has a very inappropriately happy intro. It made me worry that it was going to stray away even further from the intriguing horror genre When They Cry once started with.
And.. I was right. Episode 1 is again this Looney Tunes shit, which includes the involvement of that weird "Soul Brother" group that really came out of nowhere. Keiichi doesn't have a particularly close relationship with any of the men in that "group", why was this made a thing?
Anyway, the majority of the episode is about these shameless pedophiles fantasizing about the girl cast, I had no patience for it, but by skipping to the end, an interesting idea was being brought up.
I didn't care for the new disease that was being shoehorned into the story, but if every one of those stupid out-of-place episodes is in actuality Keiichi's delusion.. that would still not make me like those episodes, but they'd have a place in the series.
In episode 2, all the scary elements from season 1 are turned into jokey gimmicks and Rika is a magical girl, again stuck in a weird parallel universe, but this time she's not stressing out about it for some reason, fucking grand.
Did they steal a bunch of lazy fanfictions from the internet for this season or something?
Episode 3 was a breath of fresh air, there were no openly supernatural occurrences inserted here for the sake of comedy, but 4 was a drag, I just couldn't care.
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Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Kaku: Outbreak
Not a season, a short movie/OVA.
An average pandemic story with a slow start, yet it's a rushed case of no show and all tell. But after all those horrible seasons I've sat through, this one at least went back to its roots.
It apparently plays off in another alternate universe, I really have no idea how it fits in the main story where Rika's death has been the end game every time, but if the creators don't care anymore, I won't either. Apparently she's not a queen carrier in this reality either, since the characters are able to leave town without the original Hinamizawa disease activating.
The ending is pretty open, not sure what to think of it or all else that happened prior. It left me with no strong feelings, though there were some cool scenes here and there.
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Higurashi: When They Cry – Gou
A very recent sequel that revisits and combines some of the original show's episodes, and gives them a new ending. Halfway through, it introduces a new story that more clearly explains why we're getting all this deja vu.
I hated the idea pushed upon Rika that she should stay and appreciate a town that killed and held her hostage for the entirety of a human life. She deserves to see the outside world, she didn't ask to be this revered person or reincarnation of a god.
I did like the twist, and that it gave a better explanation to how the original villain might've earned herself redemption, though I still believe she was too leisurely added in the later seasons of the original series. If we have to believe that's canon, then nothing has been really fixed in that department.
I think the writing and delivery in some parts are better here than in the original series, though whenever Hanyuu "explained" something, I pretty much never understood what she was saying.
Near the end, you get another twist. I'll try not to spoil things, but I want to ponder this section of the anime, as I'm not sure how it makes sense.
If Rika's been dealing with another reincarnating time traveller, she should've noticed it way earlier. It was also a bit strange to think there are multiple Rikas now, caused by someone else's time travelling, who've all met with a non-lethal ending, while Rika's entire deal was that she'd always die. And after looking at everything she's gone through in the last heavy 100 years, this other time traveller doesn't conclude it's better to accept her dream of wanting to leave the village that offered her nothing but heavy trauma, but to wear her out by ruining her happy endings. One Rika from a particular timeline was being targeted.. So, a "happy" Rika should still exist out there; a Rika who has been accepted into her school of choice and was heading off to a restaurant with the rest of the cast. Nothing happened to that version of Rika so far anyone knows, so what whisked her away from this reality and why?
Why is this newly spawned goddess so powerful that she's able to undo everything that happened in the original series, just to please her pompous time travelling buddy? The anime basically argued that everything has been made undone, but that can't be possible, since Rika still remembers her previous experiences and the fact she lost her happy ending.
Time travelling in fiction, always a mess.
Also, is it implied that this time traveller keeps killing themselves and starting over from the very beginning just to get small matters right, like winning card games and guessing briefcase codes? That doesn't sound practical at all.
Anyway, most of the original voice actors returned so far I can hear and remember, which is good, though I'm not too keen on the new art design. It made some characters look off. The photographer guy looks 20 years older now, though Keiichi grew on me. Could be worse, but I liked the previous 90s look.
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