[luckyssol]

Originally Posted by Renall

Well, I'm sure there were some Higurashi fans who were unpleasantly surprised by how that turned out, and they'd been following it for a while themselves. Never underestimate the capability of a promising VN author to torpedo themselves in sight of the finish line.

I’ve actually been surprised by what he can accomplish in such a short window of time. He barely made the deadline for episode 6 yet I thought it was one of the better episodes of the series. It drove all of us up a wall.

Originally Posted by Keriaku

I think people that are calling it just a love story are greatly downplaying what Yasu is trying to do and what actually happens in the arcs. It's only a love story in a very tenuous sense. What I see Yasu trying to accomplish, with her wide scale murder mystery, is she is trying to engage Battler on a once in a lifetime intellectual level. It's like instead of just playing a game of chess or discussing a mystery with him, he/she is putting him in a game of chess or in the mystery and letting him experience it for himself, while still giving him the ability to fairly challenge him/her.

Calling this just a love story is very, very weak. It's disregarding the whole set-up basically. And this is not even touching upon everything that led up to being able to orchestrate this, the stray feelings between other people involved, and all the reasons that things could not go as planned. I think this is a story of Yasu trying to accomplish something great, and it's a tragedy through the many factors that break down the Ushiromiya family.

I believe a good end for EP8 will be that Yasu's murder mystery is carried out successfully. In the end, no one actually kills anyone and Battler works together with the family and solves the epitaph. Yasu reveals self, everyone becomes happy.

The line at the end of episode 7 clearly states that this story will not be given a good ending but I’m hoping for the best as well. I wouldn’t call Umineko just a love story either. Why can’t it just be a story to find the answer to the question Ange posed to Eva at the end of the third episode?
“On that day, on Rokkenjima, what happened?”
Maybe there is a culprit and maybe there isn’t.

Originally Posted by Jan-Poo

I expect at least one or two new sprites. Hopefully we will finally see Asumu? Damn I'd be really disappointed if we will never get a full account of Asumu's story from her perspective. Of course I'd also like to see how she looked like...

I've been waiting for this to happen since... I think since EP5...

Well, for me, the question is more along the lines of: “Has she already appeared in the story or not?”
I don’t have any expectations for her anymore after episode 7 though. It’s a shame really. I could make a pretty interesting character out of her if I were writing it.

Originally Posted by Cao Ni Ma

I can't really accept the idea that everything is being set up as murder mystery for Battler if he was never shown to be apt (at least in the earlier chapters) in the ways of mystery novels. A riddle maybe, as there have been continued moments of a character making Battler and everyone else for that mater, solve riddles however benign they have been.

Well, she knows that Battler has the strongest magic toxin in him. So you would have to plan for the possibility of his arrival with the most complicated fake mystery plot to convince him. Just in case he actually does show up. And he does.