[Aethos]

Originally Posted by HanyuuChan

Do you like reading VN's? Umineko is pretty hard to read if you havnt read VN's before. If you dislike reading VN's then maybe you wont like umineko. I always found umineko a lot more interesting than higurashi and most people that have read both seems to agree with me. Its actually also possible that umineko isnt as entertaining for you anymore after watching the anime.

Actually Umineko is the first VN I've ever tried to read really.

But that's not to say I hate Umineko. I love Umineko. When I watched the anime I was really engrossed in it, and wondering what would happen next to all the characters. I found every character to be very interesting, and someone I wanted to know more about. I know people say that the adults were bland and devoid of character development but honestly I liked them. I actually found them to be interesting and I actually felt something for those characters. Something I wouldn't feel if they were truly bland and two-dimensional.

To me I just feel the anime has a lot better pacing where it doesn't drag all over the place and divert from the plot every five minutes like the VN does. It gets kinda annoying too sometimes when the characters start talking about other subjects that supposedly have something to do with a character, but in the end it just seems like they're having a philosophical discussion. For instance in episode 1 reading through hours of the whole debate if there's a 19th person just got old after a while, but maybe that's because I pretty much know all those arguments already. That and when they randomly got into subjects like if Maria has a split personality. It's just distracting and in the end all those distractions just cause me to lose interest. Heck even the good natured moments like the school festival scene in episode 2 tend to seem very distracting. It just feels like every scene in Umineko moves at a snails pace.

But when the plot moves it really moves and my interest gets peaked again, but I don't want to have to wade through so many irrelevant theoretical discussions just to reach the parts of the story that are actually important.

While I enjoy 07th Expansion's work, many of their scripts are verbose and plodding by any standard (moreso with Umineko than Higurashi). An external editor would probably have a field day trimming and rearranging text.

To enjoy the games, you either have to be very tolerant of pacing issues or be able to look past them in lieu of the strong points (the interwoven mysteries and character revelations).

Well I'm guessing I'm just very impatient then. I'm not even sure if I'd get bored reading the Higurashi VN's. I'd like to say I wouldn't because the cast is smaller meaning it probably won't drag as much. Then again I could be wrong right? I guess I'd just be happy if Umineko actually had a good pace to it.

You might not be alone in your opinion. On aggregate user review sites, Higurashi episodes typically score a good 7-10% higher than Umineko, so it's just better received in general.

That's not to say Umineko is bad though, but the large cast does hurt it a lot. I think I understand now when I've been told that having large casts can be a bad thing for a writer. Because trying to give focus on so many characters at once can be a pain to the actual reader, and cause them to lose interest fast.

They're skillfully and meticulously planned, but hardly well-written (aside from a handful of emotional scenes, nothing's overly horrible though). In the fields of games, visual novels, and light novels, you won't find many writers who're particularly skilled in prose or scenario structure. They're often all over the place, although that doesn't prevent their stories from finding audiences.

True. I love the characters and the plot, and I love the twists. Basically I love Ryukishi's vision for Umineko, but the writing really needs to improve. I'd say I'm part of Umineko's audiance, but just for the anime as it seems to be the medium where I can most enjoy the series.

Then again I'm sure for speed readers it'd be quite easy to plod through all of Umineko no problem. Me being visually impaired I tend to read at a slower pace thus it might take me a week or two to finish a book a speed reader could finish in two days. Kinda makes me wish there was an audio track of someone reading it for me. It would make things go a lot faster for sure.