Okay so what's the whole deal with Umineko, the time I got to ask someone they only made it seem like an overly pretentious trip that required an absurd ammount of time investment for an extremely small amount of answers and closure, if any at all. And I'll refrain myself from complaining here on how generally obnoxious the guy was.
âan overly pretentious trip that required an absurd amount of time investment for an extremely small amount of answers and closure, if any at allâ is uncharitable, but not entirely inaccurate
The tl;dr plot summary is that an obscenely rich and awe-inspiringly dysfunctional Japanese family are trapped on an island for a family conference when a typhoon hits, and over the next two days people start turning up messily murdered in convoluted locked room setups. At the end of the first arc, a witch (Beatrice) shows up after everyone dies and challenges the main character (Battler) to a game where theyâll play through various ways these two days could have gone, and sheâll argue that she did the murders with magic and heâll try to prove that the murders could have been done by a human. Thereâs very obvious Ace Attorney influence in the way their meta-world arguments play out, a lot of gory death, multi-page philosophywanks, some of the most unflinchingly accurate depictions of abuse Iâve ever seen in fiction, and an ever-escalating amount of Magic Bullshit⢠anytime the narration isnât first-person and through Battlerâs eyes.
It gets steadily weirder and more complicated from there, but thatâs the starting setup.
Episodes 7 and 8, which I havenât played but have encountered most of the spoilers for, give you the biggest pieces of the âmagic and witches had nothing to do with thisâ solution, and thereâs a manga called âConfession of the Golden Witchâ that spells it out even more clearly. But it still doesnât directly tell you what âreallyâ happened in scenes you only see as over-the-top magic battles or anything like that. The series is very open about the fact that it wants you to have to think to understand the mystery it presents you with, and itâs dense as hell and rewards close reading, even if you already know the solution.
Or, to put it another way, itâs frustrating, deeply pretentious multilayered-storytelling porn where a lot of what youâre reading is totally irrelevant because itâs just there to distract you and you can practically hear the author patting himself on the back for his own cleverness. Itâs very much not everyoneâs cup of tea, even putting aside the child abuse, gore, and squads of demon girls in terrible fanservice outfits. :::PPP
It also has really, really, really good music.
