When the Sea Catcadas Cry

Spoiler

There are always more Beatrices. She keeps multiplying.

 

Spoiler: AAAAH

New theory (made by someone who knows the actual plot shit): Beatrice is actually a series of highly intelligent moon rabbits with transformation powers.

 

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH

 

I'm watching the preview video and they have voice acting on the narration and I can viscerally feel the image of tabletop gamer Beatrice reading off her carefully-prepared setting description from behind the DM screen.

though why does she have lipstick now

 

the aesthetic

 

man though I absolutely cannot get over that English dub of One Winged Bird, I demand a full version yesterday so I can play it forever and ever.

Spoiler: geeking about lyrics, spoilers

I love how they respun it to fix the severe tonal issues from the original song; comparing the lyrics to the VN opening and the anime opening, it's super-obvious that for the VN opening Ryukishi gave Shikata a blurb about someone trying to reach someone else and be forgiven, but they won't be able to get through or understand anything without love, while for the anime opening someone told her to write a song about a guy being held captive in a repeating time loop by a witch and having to find his way to the truth to defeat her. That makes the anime opening, comparatively, a song with no love for Beatrice, and consequently a take on the source material that makes increasingly little sense the more you try to apply it to anything but the most shallow reading of EP1-4.

wow, much shonen, Battler's totally going to heroically destroy all the illusions and go home to Ange

But the dubbed song translated the same lines:

Much less shonen. And arguably not about Battler at all.

The video is also almost shot-for-shot referencing the anime opening, but removes the random shot of Maria standing in a graveyard and smiling evilly and replaces it with the much more appropriate-to-Maria visual of her standing in the rose garden, watching a gold butterfly land on her finger before Beatrice puts a hand on her shoulder, and rearranges the entire last segment to focus less on the shrine and Shannon breaking the mirror (the suggestion of it is brief and ambiguous, with a longer and clearer beat devoted to George giving her the ring, over the line "the vows you can't keep") and include the family on the chessboard visual from the VN opening. (And they added a shot of Beato leaning in like she's going to kiss Battler and then bursting into trollface, which perfectly encapsulates their relationship in EP 1-4. :::PPP)

You can feel the desperate desire on the part of the people who made the preview motion graphic to have an Umineko anime that doesn't suck, and they may not be able to actually make a new anime themselves but damn if they're not going to try to get as close as they can.

 

how much of umineko do i need to have read before i can cautiously start clicking spoiler tags

 

The vast majority of the clues to solve it have been presented by the end of EP4. Probably the biggest twist is out at the end of EP6. EP7 spells the most important parts of the solution out.

So, uh... most of it, sorry. :::PPP

 

dang it

ok follow-up question: in umineko, am I the reader ever lied to? (so not like "this character is lying to this other character" or "this character is mistaken/lying to themselves/infected by weirdass disease that causes hallucinations" but like... aw man i probably can't define what I mean by lying because I'm honestly not sure where i actually draw the line between "kinda fun misdirection" and "super annoying lie". ughhh. nevermind guess I'll suffer. and speed read.)

 

i guess what im asking is, on a scale from "pretty good actually" to "all the magic can be explained away by everyone in the village having been hypnotized to fall unconscious at the sound of a certain bell and also not to register the specific colour that we've coated all the lifting cranes and stuff with so they'll be invisible and thus appear to be magic", how bullshit are the plot twists

will I be left blindsided but satisfied or just feeling betrayed

 

Without getting into specifics, I'd say:

• Umineko doesn't break the rules. You may not know what the rules are at first, but they do exist, and the story follows them.
• Obviously I can't say for sure whether you'll like the twists or not, but I can promise there's none of the brand of bullshit you're describing! All the most important parts of Umineko (and most, though not all, of the rest) are fair play mysteries. I think they're amazing, personally; how much you like them is probably a matter of taste.

 

It's very much a matter of taste and how you end up viewing the story, I feel. I do feel though, as someone who doesn't care for mysteries that much, that the characters and their dynamics should more than make up for it not fitting to your tastes. If they don't. At least that's how I came out it feeling, personally.

 

I don't know if you've watched/read Higurashi, but at one point Umineko outright mocks one of the central twists of Higurashi for not being fair play.

If it helps your confidence, @keltena had solved the majority of Umineko other than one major twist by the end of EP4. And yeah, you can also just popcorn.gif along watching the characters bounce off each other and figuring out The Rules.

 

Thank you! Very reassuring, very appreciated ^^

 

The Kickstarter's been delayed another week, but they'll be doing an AMA on r/visualnovels on Sunday.

 

i want to die?

 

I'm never going to get over how fucking good that is.

Like it's not just a funny meme, it's also astoundingly high effort/production values, beautifully apes the canon's style, and is actually a legit really good representation of Umineko's narrative mechanics?

(I still need to download it so I can play the tea party...)

 

i just

oh my god

OH MY GOD

jesefufkc

 

Spoiler

goddamn these battler/beato quadrant flips are intense

 

HALF THE APPEAL RIGHT THERE