[Renall]

Originally Posted by naikou

Professional, bah. No one complains that Franz Kafka and Emily Dickinson were not professionals.

Maybe Kafka would've finished more things if he had been, eh?

If you want a better comparison, look at "The Shining", which was adapted from Stephen King's novel. Stephen King hated Kubrick's movie, and Kubrick could not give less of a damn.

Stephen King's writing has a whole lot of problems, and the film version of The Shining was better off for not including most of them. King's work can be notoriously difficult to adapt; "Low Men in Yellow Coats" was changed substantially to create the film version of Hearts in Atlantis (which wasn't even about "Hearts in Atlantis," a completely different story from the same anthology). Would it have been a better film with all the references to The Dark Tower still in it? Probably not.

Actually, now that I think on it, Ryukishi and King are not entirely dissimilar. With a pinch of David Lynch in there.

Originally Posted by naikou

I think you're forgetting that he hasn't actually done the "Later Queen" thing with Umineko, yet.

With all due respect, how do you know that? He never once showed his cards, so how do you know he's always had the same hand?

Go back to ep4. Make certain assumptions as to truth (veracity of certain identity theories, identity of a killer, etc.). Now assume they're false. Notice how in almost all cases you can come up with a plausible solution, assuming it's false doesn't suddenly make the story unworkable. The correct answer... shouldn't do that. Let alone the supposed "answers" he's offered.

Originally Posted by Jan-Poo

Doesn't EP6 shows that the GM can do that all the time?

I don't remember Battler ever questioning the morality of such actions. And in the end Beatrice wins by making her own alterations to Battler's gameboard.

Does she? We don't actually know that. That's the problem. Your average mystery novel is a discrete entity; if I get to the end and something doesn't feel right to me, I can flip back from the answer and find the part that doesn't seem to square with it. If I never actually get to the end, I can never tell if I'm just getting clarifying information, replacement information, or more misleading stuff. In an episodic series, the mystery never has to end. Which... is kind of a problem. You ever see "Twin Peaks?" Or "The X-Files?" Lot of those mystery answers were kind of disappointing by the time we actually got them, precisely because of how long it took us to get there, and how they seemed to round off with what we'd already seen.

That aside, he never bothered to have anyone explain some of those tricks, so we haven't even an inkling as to his own thought process on the solutions there.