An English Speaker's Guide to Higurashi: Mei

‼️⚠️HINAMIZAWA DAM CONSTRUCTION SITE⚠️: This guide is still being written! Below is a list of pages to come. If they are unlinked, they've not yet been written! Thanks for your patience and please do not dismember me 🔪 🚧QUICK START: essential pages of the guide for if you just want the jist before jumping in.

Gameplay Basics Gathering Gacha Currencies Card Basics (Types of Cards & How to Get Them)

🚧DOWNLOADING AND SETTING UP guides to getting the game to work in your region 🚧CARDS everything having to do with cards, including a list of all availible cards and their stats.

Basics (Types of Cards & How to Get Them) Card Strengthening: Card Level Card Strengthening: Training Level Card Strengthening: Skill Enhancement Card Strengthening: Friendship Level Card Strengthening: Star Rank Party Composition CARD MASTERLIST (WIP)

🚧STORY how to view the different types of stories, as well as a masterlist of scenes that have been subtitled in english.

Cutscene Menu & Scene Theatre Links to Subtitled Scenes Translating Scenes via App Types of Scenes

🚧QUESTS & MODES

Story Quests Story Quests: Bosses "Difficult"/Challenge/Bonus Quests Special Event Quests: Boss Ema Event Special Event Quests: Prayer Card Events Treasure Hunt PvP Battles Takano's Battle Tower Hinamizawa's Most Evil Explosive Fight

🚧GACHA

Gathering Gacha Currencies Banners Prize Checklists Pull Screen Indicators Non-Card Prizes Gacha Chance Rates

🚧MISSIONS & MILESTONES

General Missions List Hanyuu Missions

🚧CLUBS

How to Join a Club Club Activities Club Shop/Souvenirs

🚧FREE SHOP

Coin Shop Battle Tokens Hanyuu Tokens Shop Treasure Hunt Tokens Shop Red Fragment Shop

If anyone would like to assist me in putting together to card masterlist, please let me know! I've only had an hour or so every once in a while to devote to it and it's more time intensive than I thought.

Cards Gallery

Each card you pull represents a character you can add to your party and contains information about their stats and skills/attacks. Let's take a brief look at each of these before going into depth about how to improve them.

‼️Note: I recommend setting up QooApp's translation feature to help navigating this menu, as it's a lot of text.

Stats

💮Strength: The card's "Battle Score", a general score for their strength. When you create a party of cards, their scores add together for a total Party Battle Score. 💮Level: The card's general Level. This is limited to your Player Level, found at the top of most Menus. 💮Treasure Hunt Skill: For the "Treasure Hunt" mode, located under Quests. We'll cover this more in the full post about this mode. 💮Training Level: Raise this to unlock new Skills for your card to use during battles. Skills are usually either Attacks, Buffs, Enemy Nerfs, or a combination of those. 💮Friendship: Your friendship level with the card. This unlocks a few things: It provides a general stat boost, as well as unlocks Sub Slots to place cards into when creating a party. For some SSR cards, this also unlocks bonus scenes, which depict a relevant mini story, and provide a generous stat boost after viewing. 💮Battle Position: This is where the character will stand on the battlefield, which can be one of three positions: Back, Middle and Front. This cannot be changed. We'll talk more about that later, but generally you want to have characters spread out a decent amount. 💮Time Type: The time of day which this card receives a boost in stats. The type of day is listed on the preparation screen before every quest. 💮Star Rank: A card can be anywhere from 3-6 stars depending on their rarity. R Cards: Drawn at 1 star and are limited to 4 stars SR Cards: Drawn at 3 stars and are limited to 5 stars SSR Cards: Are drawn at 3 stars and either limited to 5 stars, SSR (6 Stars): Not distinguished from other SSRs, but are able to be upgraded to 6 using special red fragments.

Skills

💮Active Skills: These skills are ones that have to be "used" or triggered in battle by the character in battle. 💮Passive Skills: These skills are automatically applied during a battle. They usually raise a stat, over time or immediately. 💮Passive Skills (SUB): This is a passive skill that, when equipped into another cards sub-slot, will then apply to that card. 💮Limit Skills: This is the skill that your character will activate when their Limit Gauge (LG) is full. This is always an attack but can also come with other stat boosts or status ailments to the enemy. Skills are unlocked by raising a cards training level. All skills are unlocked by level 7. The amount of each type that a card has is also based on their rarity. R Cards: 2 Active Skills and 1 Passive Skill (SUB) SR Cards: 2 Active Skills, 1 Passive Skill (SUB) and 1 Limit Skill. SSR Cards: 2 Active Skills, 1 Passive Skill (SUB), and 1 Passive Skill SSR (6 Stars): 2 Active Skills, 1 Passive Skill (SUB), and 2 Passive Skills.

Tap the "Strengthen" button in the top right to navigate to the more in depth pages for each stat. ‼️Note: A red dot next to the button or the card's icon means you have enough materials to upgrade that card in some way.

Since Higurashi Mei is a gacha game you are probably here to get pulling! This post is a quick compilation of all the ways you can collect Oni Stones and Gacha Tickets, which are the items you can exchange to pull new cards. I'll also briefly cover Fragments, another method of obtaining specific cards. (See the main Fragments post for more details).

Note: When creating your account, you'll get a free 10 Card pull. Some players like to re-roll; A process where you get your free pulls, transfer those cards to a new account and get more freebies, and repeat. I'll be adding a post on that soon, but for now you can find a video of the process here.

Here is a list of the various currencies you can exchange for cards.

Oni Stones: Rainbow orbs. A pull of ten is generally 3,000 Stones, and a single pull is 300.

Paid Oni Stones: Functionally the same as Oni Stones, but obtained through the real money shop. They are listed seperately on the gacha page, with Paid to the left and Free to the right. Singular pulls are discounted to 120 Stones when using paid.

Bronze Gacha Ticket: Can be exchanged for one pull.

Silver Gacha Ticket: Can be exchanged for 10 pulls.

Rainbow SSR Gacha Ticket: Exchanged for a pull of a guaranteed SSR card, the rarest/strongest variety.

Fragments: "Pieces" of a specific card. When you obtain 100 Fragments of a certain card, you can recieve that card. Note: These are different from the RED Fragments you may see. (See the full "Fragments" section of the guide for clarification.)

Gacha Points: Points accumulated through pulls that can then be exchanged for prizes, including Fragments of Cards.

Next, we'll look at all the ways to gather these items.

For the most part, I'll not be covering paid methods of gathering these, because that method is pretty self explanitory. However I will mention that every week there are special packs availible on the shop for ¥480 that give you some Oni Stones as well as other useful items. That's about $3.57USD, £2.87, or €2.39 at the time of writing this. The regular packs get a bit pricey, but these are a really good deal if you're in a pinch.

Gathering Oni Stones:

💮Log In Bonus: You'll be given a present for logging in each day, which can be often be Oni Stones. There's even different checklists for different special events. Note: The "Day" resets at 5am Japan Time.

💮Main Story Quests: Each story quest awards you 10 stones per achievement star, for a potential total of 30/quest if you get all three.

💮"Challenge" Missions: Each chapter has a second tab where you can find three bonus quests. These also have stars to gather. They also have the potential added bonus of awarding you Fragments of the card featured in the icon beside the quest.

💮Story Scenes: Every story scene concludes by awarding you 20 stones.

💮TIPS: Just like the visual novels, sometimes you'll unlock "TIPS" or bonus scenes after viewing a scene. You can view them in the Story tab for another 20 stones each.

💮Achievement Stars: Each chapter has 3 milestone goals for gathering stars on all the missions. You are awarded 10 stones for each milestone you reach, for another potential 30 per chapter.

💮Daily Gathering Quests: Like main quests these also award you 10 stones per star. The quest sets in the daily tab change day to day, but the stars are a one time thing.

💮Special Event Quests: Same deal, 10 per star.

💮Takano Battle Tower: About once a month for around a week, the tab under quests featuring Takano becomes availible. These quests award huge amounts of Oni Stones (and also blank notes, very useful!!).

💮Missions and Milestones: There is a list of "missions" to complete. Each award you with a different prize for completing them, some being Oni Stones! I recommend using a translator app like QooApp's "Servant" feature if you don't read enough japanese to understand what the missions are asking of you. (See the full page on the QooApp Translator for more details and help decoding the rough translations.)

Gathering Gacha Tickets

💮Log In Bonus Presents: Tickets are usually a login bonus or award for achievements.

💮Free Shop: There is a Silver Ticket for sale each month in the free shop. It costs Oni Stones to redeem.

💮Event Shop: Some special events allow you to exchange items for them in their event-specific shop.

Gathering Fragments

💮Challenge Missions: As pictured and mentioned above, each chapter of the story comes with three bonus missions. One of the potential drops for these missions will be a Fragment of the card shown.

💮Free Shop: Different types of coins and points can be exchanged in the free shop for Fragments, usually in sets of three. The Fragments availible may change when the shop updates. Note: Again, don't mistake the RED Fragments for the same thing as regular ones! (See the full "Fragments" section of the guide for clarification.)

Gathering Gacha Points

💮Each page of the Gacha is called a "Banner". Banners usually come in sets, each one in the set having the same general image or theme. For each set, you'll accumulate 1 point per card you pull. In the bottom left of the banner, you can tap the white button to redeem these-- The higher rewards are often large amounts of Fragments for a card on the banner! So if you spend a lot of stones trying for that one card, you can still end up earning it. Note: These points expire when the Banner event ends, so be sure to redeem them before the date above the white button!

General Tips for Gathering

💮Support Cards: As a beginner, the main story is your best friend. You can gather a lot of stones very quickly by running through the story, but you will eventually hit a wall where your party isn't strong enough to advance further. You might want to make use of Support Cards to help carry your team through! In a nutshell, you can borrow other player's Cards to help your team.

💮Healing Skills: Another way to advance the story when you've hit a skill wall is to make sure you have a healer (or multiple!) in your party. Look for a card that has a green capsule icon as one of their skills, and focus on leveling them and that skill up as much as you can. If you have a good enough healer, you can truck out difficult quests by chipping away, as long as you win before the time limit is up. Some cards also have healing Sub-Skills, so you can stack these effects for some really sturdy teams.

💮To make the most of your stones, definitely save up to do the larger x10 Card pulls. Event Banners will have present checklists, giving you a bonus each time you exchange for 10 cards. The first 10 are also usually 50% off, ten cards for 1,500 stones.

Higurashi no Naku Koro ni: Mei is an auto-battler mobile game based around collecting and training up "Cards", which each represent a character you can add to your party to participate in quests.

As it is the primary gameplay feature of Mei, here is an overview of the basics of most quests you can send your Cards on.

Quest Menu

On the Home Screen, tap the little scroll icon. This will take you to the quest menu, featured above. We'll cover each of the different options in more in depth posts, but for now let's go over the basics.

In order to run MOST quest types, you need to consume Stamina. You will find your current amount of stamina at the top of most screens-- It's the little counter with the big red Heart by it.

Quest Prep Screen

You will also see it once you select a quest to run, toward the bottom right. The middle line shows you how much stamina the quest will consume: In the example above, it will consume 8 out of my 18 remaining stamina points. A note: If you fail the quest, the stamina will not be consumed, aside from some exceptions.

I'll cover how to earn stamina in it's own section. As a beginner, you should have enough to play quite a bit for now!

Battle Screen

Quests come in many different forms, but all involve your party battling monsters and/or other Cards. Your Cards will battle on their own-- All you have to do is organize a strong enough Party to complete the quest.

Quests are completed by defeating all the enemies on screen. If all your party members are knocked out OR if the timer in the top right runs out before they can do this, you fail the quest.

💮Wave Counter: Firstly, in the top left, we have a "Wave" counter. This is to tell you what "Stage" or "Wave" of enemies you are currently fighting. Most quests have 2 to 3 Waves.

💮Item Boxes: Next to the wave counter is a little box icon with gold detailing. These are Item Boxes. Enemies drop them, and each contains a reward you will receive for completing the Quest. If your party loses, you will not get the boxes you've gathered.

💮Timer: In the top right, you have your time limit. It resets with each wave. As mentioned above, if the clock runs out and enemies are still standing, you lose.

💮Menu: The top rightmost button is your menu. The middlemost button will allow you to mess with volume mixing, as well as toggle whether or not to skip Limit Skill animations. The rightmost button allows you to quit the quest-- Select the red button on the screen it leads to to confirm, and the other to cancel. The leftmost button will resume the quest.

💮Party Members: On the bottom you will see your party members. They have a health bar, and, if they are an SR or SSR rank card, they will have a blue bar below it. When this bar fills up they can perform their special Limit Attack. They'll have a little "GO!" Next to their name when this is availible. Tap them to activate it. ‼️Note: If you see little flashing white segments on a health bar, that means the character is healing that amount due to a party member's healing skill.

💮Auto Limit Skill Toggle: The top button in the bottom right is a toggle to automatically activate a character's Limit Skill when ready. It's on when it's highlighted blue like above.

💮Speed Up: You can speed up battles up to 4x speed. Big recommend.

And Lastly for our basics guide: