[Game] Umineko - Spoilers, Theories, Interpretations

[winter 923]

How much do the Intros count? I thought about George's POV when seeing the red sneering Faces. Also the "no dine. no knox. no fair" How strong is knox till now actually?
Knox 2nd. this one, really... Battler and Erika are pieces controlled by the Gamemaster (and maybe the Human side) yes they can't make them do things that they normaly would not but they are still somewhat directed. Also Erika in EP5 uses her Detective Authority as a supernatural ability to move People. (So that she can look at the victims/see the crime scene)
Knox 3rd. Beginning with EP 2 Beatrice says about a dozen times that there are no hidden passages by the crime scenes.
Knox 7th EP6 TIPS metaworld says that Erika is the detective and she also says it in red in the end. So a detective without being proclaimed as one can still say in red that he is a detective AND kill? Then Battler never was a detective, at least i didn't read a proclaimation
Knox 9th got broken by red by Knox's 9th, people are allowed to mistake a sheet in the wind for anything else and tell about it. ......However! Mistaking it for Grandfather in particular is not permitted in this game due to the red truth!!
However, in the cousins' room, you witnessed corpses which were impossible to MISIDENTIFY...! Are you trying to say that was a FALSEHOOD?! Without love it can't be seen. With love there will be falsehood.

With EP7 there is a chance van dine joines. We still don't know howmuch R07 will alter them but! any Organisation, Servant or more than 1 Killer theory would be dead. Also even ingame dine's "don't use cliche" destroyes EP3 Kyries/Hideyoshi cigarette blunt

[Judoh]

Originally Posted by winter 923

With EP7 there is a chance van dine joines. We still don't know howmuch R07 will alter them but! any Organisation, Servant or more than 1 Killer theory would be dead. Also even ingame dine's "don't use cliche" destroyes EP3 Kyries/Hideyoshi cigarette blunt

Actually technically with a little editing it wouldn't forbid that.

The culprit may, of course, have a minor helper or co-plotter; but the entire onus must rest on one pair of shoulders: the entire indignation of the reader must be permitted to concentrate on a single black nature.

The culprit is still allowed to have accomplices the main point of this rule could be that there can be only one central evil behind the plot.

[Pika_power]

Here are the Van Dine rules for reference:

Spoiler for Van Dine Rules:

1. The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery. All clues must be plainly stated and described.

2. No willful tricks or deceptions may be placed on the reader other than those played legitimately by the criminal on the detective himself.

3. There must be no love interest. The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar.

4. The detective himself, or one of the official investigators, should never turn out to be the culprit. This is bald trickery, on a par with offering some one a bright penny for a five-dollar gold piece. It's false pretenses.

5. The culprit must be determined by logical deductions — not by accident or coincidence or unmotivated confession. To solve a criminal problem in this latter fashion is like sending the reader on a deliberate wild-goose chase, and then telling him, after he has failed, that you had the object of his search up your sleeve all the time. Such an author is no better than a practical joker.

6. The detective novel must have a detective in it; and a detective is not a detective unless he detects. His function is to gather clues that will eventually lead to the person who did the dirty work in the first chapter; and if the detective does not reach his conclusions through an analysis of those clues, he has no more solved his problem than the schoolboy who gets his answer out of the back of the arithmetic.

7. There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better. No lesser crime than murder will suffice. Three hundred pages is far too much pother for a crime other than murder. After all, the reader's trouble and expenditure of energy must be rewarded.

8. The problem of the crime must he solved by strictly naturalistic means. Such methods for learning the truth as slate-writing, ouija-boards, mind-reading, spiritualistic se'ances, crystal-gazing, and the like, are taboo. A reader has a chance when matching his wits with a rationalistic detective, but if he must compete with the world of spirits and go chasing about the fourth dimension of metaphysics, he is defeated ab initio.

9. There must be but one detective — that is, but one protagonist of deduction — one deus ex machina. To bring the minds of three or four, or sometimes a gang of detectives to bear on a problem, is not only to disperse the interest and break the direct thread of logic, but to take an unfair advantage of the reader. If there is more than one detective the reader doesn't know who his codeductor is. It's like making the reader run a race with a relay team.

10. The culprit must turn out to be a person who has played a more or less prominent part in the story — that is, a person with whom the reader is familiar and in whom he takes an interest.

11. A servant must not be chosen by the author as the culprit. This is begging a noble question. It is a too easy solution. The culprit must be a decidedly worth-while person — one that wouldn't ordinarily come under suspicion.

12. There must be but one culprit, no matter how many murders are committed. The culprit may, of course, have a minor helper or co-plotter; but the entire onus must rest on one pair of shoulders: the entire indignation of the reader must be permitted to concentrate on a single black nature.

13. Secret societies, camorras, mafias, et al., have no place in a detective story. A fascinating and truly beautiful murder is irremediably spoiled by any such wholesale culpability. To be sure, the murderer in a detective novel should be given a sporting chance; but it is going too far to grant him a secret society to fall back on. No high-class, self-respecting murderer would want such odds.

14. The method of murder, and the means of detecting it, must be be rational and scientific. That is to say, pseudo-science and purely imaginative and speculative devices are not to be tolerated in the roman policier. Once an author soars into the realm of fantasy, in the Jules Verne manner, he is outside the bounds of detective fiction, cavorting in the uncharted reaches of adventure.

15. The truth of the problem must at all times be apparent — provided the reader is shrewd enough to see it. By this I mean that if the reader, after learning the explanation for the crime, should reread the book, he would see that the solution had, in a sense, been staring him in the face-that all the clues really pointed to the culprit — and that, if he had been as clever as the detective, he could have solved the mystery himself without going on to the final chapter. That the clever reader does often thus solve the problem goes without saying.

16. A detective novel should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no "atmospheric" preoccupations. such matters have no vital place in a record of crime and deduction. They hold up the action and introduce issues irrelevant to the main purpose, which is to state a problem, analyze it, and bring it to a successful conclusion. To be sure, there must be a sufficient descriptiveness and character delineation to give the novel verisimilitude.

17. A professional criminal must never be shouldered with the guilt of a crime in a detective story. Crimes by housebreakers and bandits are the province of the police departments — not of authors and brilliant amateur detectives. A really fascinating crime is one committed by a pillar of a church, or a spinster noted for her charities.

18. A crime in a detective story must never turn out to be an accident or a suicide. To end an odyssey of sleuthing with such an anti-climax is to hoodwink the trusting and kind-hearted reader.

19. The motives for all crimes in detective stories should be personal. International plottings and war politics belong in a different category of fiction — in secret-service tales, for instance. But a murder story must be kept gemütlich, so to speak. It must reflect the reader's everyday experiences, and give him a certain outlet for his own repressed desires and emotions.

20. And (to give my Credo an even score of items) I herewith list a few of the devices which no self-respecting detective story writer will now avail himself of. They have been employed too often, and are familiar to all true lovers of literary crime. To use them is a confession of the author's ineptitude and lack of originality. (a) Determining the identity of the culprit by comparing the butt of a cigarette left at the scene of the crime with the brand smoked by a suspect. (b) The bogus spiritualistic se'ance to frighten the culprit into giving himself away. (c) Forged fingerprints. (d) The dummy-figure alibi. (e) The dog that does not bark and thereby reveals the fact that the intruder is familiar. (f)The final pinning of the crime on a twin, or a relative who looks exactly like the suspected, but innocent, person. (g) The hypodermic syringe and the knockout drops. (h) The commission of the murder in a locked room after the police have actually broken in. (i) The word association test for guilt. (j) The cipher, or code letter, which is eventually unraveled by the sleuth.

And here's my take on them:

Spoiler for Size:

1. Followed. Will probably be changed to something akin to "The detective is not permitted to conceal clues"

2. Harshly averted. Unless it's only referring to the non-fantasy scenes, in which case we may be safe.

3. This obviously cannot be a ban on love, as love is a genuine motive for murder. It only applies to the detective. I can see Bern using this one a lot. It probably works if Blondie is the new detective.

4. The detective is not the culprit, as already stated by Knox.

5. Covered by Knox's 8th.

6. Semi-covered by Knox's 8th in terms of the analysis part. The necessity of a Detective can bring interesting perspectives into the rest of the tales. It'd give a sense of stability to EP5 and EP6, where we have no confirmation of ANYTHING except the red. I wonder who the Detective of EP6 is.

7. Corpses: Check. EP6 gets full marks on the deadness scale, while EP5 all but fails.

8. Knox's 2nd.

9. That's already there.

10. Kawabata is ruled out as the culprit. Oh well.

11. Ouch. This must be Ryuukishi's troll-in-waiting. You'll see. Seriously, it can possibly only refer to the mastermind. The sidekicks can still be servants.

12. And it looks like the explosion stumbling block just got reintroduced. I hope the explosion doesn't count as a murder.

13. Bye-bye TOKYO, see ya Yamainu. Lambda was right.

14. Can work if it only applies to the gameboard. Is basically Knox's 2nd.

15. Knox's 8th.

16. Bern's game is going to be very dull. I can't think of a way to apply this to passed games.

17. Should be safe, but can it be seen as Ruling out Kyrie?

18. This'll shoot down a lot of theories.

19. Stretching it with 1998, but otherwise it's fine.

20.
a) Close, but unviolated.
b) This is not Scooby Doo. Unviolated.
c) Can we even take fingerprints? Unviolated.
d) Is this a body double trick? It shoots down some Shkanon theories for EP3, but so far unviolated.
e) No factors other than humans participate in this gameboard. Unviolated.
f) We don't even have twins, and Shkanon is suspected to be one person. Unviolated.
g) Unviolated.
h) Shoots down a closed room in EP1, and I think EP6 violates it. Depends how it's worded.
i) Unviolated.
j) Unless the Epitaph counts, we're unviolated.

[DaBackpack]

Originally Posted by Pika_power

*snip!*

Well there is the infamous Knox's 5th, which has been completely removed for obvious reasons.
I cannot see how Ryukishi can get around several of these, quite frankly, without severely modifying them.

No love? Yeah, let's just ignore the main theme of the entire novel.
No deceptions? Unless, as you said, this does not apply to fantasy scenes.
No servants as murderers? DAMMIT.

This is the thing that is keeping me from accepting that the new characters are Van Dine-related. Too many of these rules, unmodified, would create big problems for us and even the way we view the game.

[Tyabann]

Originally Posted by DaBackpack

This is the thing that is keeping me from accepting that the new characters are Van Dine-related. Too many of these rules, unmodified, would create big problems for us and even the way we view the game.

The Knox Rules have already been heavily modified.
Knox 5 is going to show up and bite us in the ass one day, mark my words.

[DaBackpack]

Originally Posted by Kaisos Erranon

The Knox Rules have already been heavily modified.
Knox 5 is going to show up and bite us in the ass one day, mark my words.

Of course, but not to the extent that these will have to change.

The Man From 19 Years Ago is actually American. Case closed 8)

[ErenselTheJester]

Originally Posted by DaBackpack

Well there is the infamous Knox's 5th, which has been completely removed for obvious reasons.
I cannot see how Ryukishi can get around several of these, quite frankly, without severely modifying them.

No love? Yeah, let's just ignore the main theme of the entire novel.
No deceptions? Unless, as you said, this does not apply to fantasy scenes.
No servants as murderers? DAMMIT.

This is the thing that is keeping me from accepting that the new characters are Van Dine-related. Too many of these rules, unmodified, would create big problems for us and even the way we view the game.

The theme of the entire novel isn't the love that is spoken in VD's rules. Van Dine is saying that the affectionate love shouldn't be a motive, the love that is talked about in the game is quite different. Besides, it would be stupid if that was the motive. "I loved Battler so I killed his family members." Yeah... if this is Battler's only justification for Beatrice, then I'm quitting this thing.

I see Van Dine's rules as a way to write mystery novels. Knox's rules are a way to solve them. These two are supposed to be what composes mysteries. If the game is really "mystery," then Ryukishi has to follow Van Dine's rules as well. Not to say that they should be a subject in the next game, but if anything they should be a premise through the entirety of this game.

[CainSonozaki]

I went through and analyzed all of the Dine rules. and going by Dlanors TIP about Wizard Hunting Wright of the TWELVE wedges i went through to see which rules probably wouldnt be included

Spoiler for Van dine:

"o" means the rule hasnt thus far been violated, "x" means it has, "?" may not have been violated already but im not sure

o 1. The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery. All clues must be plainly stated and described.

o 2. No willful tricks or deceptions may be placed on the reader other than those played legitimately by the criminal on the detective himself.

x 3. There must be no love interest. The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar.

o 4. The detective himself, or one of the official investigators, should never turn out to be the culprit. This is bald trickery, on a par with offering some one a bright penny for a five-dollar gold piece. It's false pretenses.

o 5. The culprit must be determined by logical deductions — not by accident or coincidence or unmotivated confession. To solve a criminal problem in this latter fashion is like sending the reader on a deliberate wild-goose chase, and then telling him, after he has failed, that you had the object of his search up your sleeve all the time. Such an author is no better than a practical joker.

o 6. The detective novel must have a detective in it; and a detective is not a detective unless he detects. His function is to gather clues that will eventually lead to the person who did the dirty work in the first chapter; and if the detective does not reach his conclusions through an analysis of those clues, he has no more solved his problem than the schoolboy who gets his answer out of the back of the arithmetic.

? 7. There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better. No lesser crime than murder will suffice. Three hundred pages is far too much pother for a crime other than murder. After all, the reader's trouble and expenditure of energy must be rewarded.

o 8. The problem of the crime must he solved by strictly naturalistic means. Such methods for learning the truth as slate-writing, ouija-boards, mind-reading, spiritualistic se'ances, crystal-gazing, and the like, are taboo. A reader has a chance when matching his wits with a rationalistic detective, but if he must compete with the world of spirits and go chasing about the fourth dimension of metaphysics, he is defeated ab initio.

? 9. There must be but one detective — that is, but one protagonist of deduction — one deus ex machina. To bring the minds of three or four, or sometimes a gang of detectives to bear on a problem, is not only to disperse the interest and break the direct thread of logic, but to take an unfair advantage of the reader. If there is more than one detective the reader doesn't know who his codeductor is. It's like making the reader run a race with a relay team.

o 10. The culprit must turn out to be a person who has played a more or less prominent part in the story — that is, a person with whom the reader is familiar and in whom he takes an interest.

x 11. A servant must not be chosen by the author as the culprit. This is begging a noble question. It is a too easy solution. The culprit must be a decidedly worth-while person — one that wouldn't ordinarily come under suspicion.

? 12. There must be but one culprit, no matter how many murders are committed. The culprit may, of course, have a minor helper or co-plotter; but the entire onus must rest on one pair of shoulders: the entire indignation of the reader must be permitted to concentrate on a single black nature.

x 13. Secret societies, camorras, mafias, et al., have no place in a detective story. A fascinating and truly beautiful murder is irremediably spoiled by any such wholesale culpability. To be sure, the murderer in a detective novel should be given a sporting chance; but it is going too far to grant him a secret society to fall back on. No high-class, self-respecting murderer would want such odds.

o 14. The method of murder, and the means of detecting it, must be be rational and scientific. That is to say, pseudo-science and purely imaginative and speculative devices are not to be tolerated in the roman policier. Once an author soars into the realm of fantasy, in the Jules Verne manner, he is outside the bounds of detective fiction, cavorting in the uncharted reaches of adventure.

o 15. The truth of the problem must at all times be apparent — provided the reader is shrewd enough to see it. By this I mean that if the reader, after learning the explanation for the crime, should reread the book, he would see that the solution had, in a sense, been staring him in the face-that all the clues really pointed to the culprit — and that, if he had been as clever as the detective, he could have solved the mystery himself without going on to the final chapter. That the clever reader does often thus solve the problem goes without saying.

x 16. A detective novel should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no "atmospheric" preoccupations. such matters have no vital place in a record of crime and deduction. They hold up the action and introduce issues irrelevant to the main purpose, which is to state a problem, analyze it, and bring it to a successful conclusion. To be sure, there must be a sufficient descriptiveness and character delineation to give the novel verisimilitude.

? 17. A professional criminal must never be shouldered with the guilt of a crime in a detective story. Crimes by housebreakers and bandits are the province of the police departments — not of authors and brilliant amateur detectives. A really fascinating crime is one committed by a pillar of a church, or a spinster noted for her charities.

x 18. A crime in a detective story must never turn out to be an accident or a suicide. To end an odyssey of sleuthing with such an anti-climax is to hoodwink the trusting and kind-hearted reader.

o 19. The motives for all crimes in detective stories should be personal. International plottings and war politics belong in a different category of fiction — in secret-service tales, for instance. But a murder story must be kept gemütlich, so to speak. It must reflect the reader's everyday experiences, and give him a certain outlet for his own repressed desires and emotions.

x 20. And (to give my Credo an even score of items) I herewith list a few of the devices which no self-respecting detective story writer will now avail himself of. They have been employed too often, and are familiar to all true lovers of literary crime. To use them is a confession of the author's ineptitude and lack of originality. (a) Determining the identity of the culprit by comparing the butt of a cigarette left at the scene of the crime with the brand smoked by a suspect. (b) The bogus spiritualistic se'ance to frighten the culprit into giving himself away. (c) Forged fingerprints. (d) The dummy-figure alibi. (e) The dog that does not bark and thereby reveals the fact that the intruder is familiar. (f)The final pinning of the crime on a twin, or a relative who looks exactly like the suspected, but innocent, person. (g) The hypodermic syringe and the knockout drops. (h) The commission of the murder in a locked room after the police have actually broken in. (i) The word association test for guilt. (j) The cipher, or code letter, which is eventually unraveled by the sleuth.

Thus far thats 10 im absoultely sure can be used, 2 that probably will, and 8 that im sure cant be used.

Also (a) Determining the identity of the culprit by comparing the butt of a cigarette left at the scene of the crime with the brand smoked by a suspect.

[Renall]

What Van Dine's romance rule is saying is that a murder mystery novel is not a story for hooking people up. The detective should not fall in love, budding romances between suspects should not be dwelled on, and so forth. The murderer is still allowed to kill for a love-related reason, but by the nature of being the murderer he or she will not get a happy romantic resolution since the detective is going to expose the crime.

This goes pretty harshly against Agatha Christie; Poirot was famous for matchmaking people as he was going about investigating crimes. Technically he didn't generally get involved himself, though. Spy thrillers, a younger cousin to mysteries, are also all about the incredible deceptive power of feigned romance, lust, and seduction, and in many cases these things can enhance the mystery by making it unclear who the protagonist can trust. Noir plays this somewhat straight; there's seduction, but the detective usually doesn't fall for it or is inherently suspect of it, and as a darker genre things rarely work out well for anybody (Chandler). Late-era detective mysteries also break this freely one way or another. You look at something like a Travis McGee book, it's practically old hat (though there's not a lot of it in McGee's present). And there's a lot of "romance mysteries" of late which would drive Van Dine crazy. Umineko could be said to be one of them, though depending on where you're willing to draw the line it might still loosely conform.

[UsagiTenpura]

If they exist at all in Umineko (which I sorta doubt), I'd say VanDine 3 might be changed simply to something like "The detective's job is to bring a criminal to justice" without talking directly about love.

[Renall]

If that's so, Battler and Erika have both pretty much failed miserably at it. Ep5 was as close as anyone tried, and Erika screwed the pooch on that one bad.

[UsagiTenpura]

Complete Edit: My guesses at possible VanDine rules v.Umineko.

Spoiler for VanDine Attempt:

1. (The problem with this one is that theorically we got more clues then Battler himself did, turning the relation around). The clues that the detective have access to must not be concealed from the reader.

2. (That one is so vague and contradicts knox 9th, so I guess something like) Any tricks or deception, weither on the detective or not, must have evidence that it is a trick/deception.

3. The detective's job is to expose the truth about the culprit.

4. (I guess the idea within Umineko basically is that in arc 1-2-3-4 Bern couldn't have been the culprit either?). Characters that works along the detective as a partner in exposing the truth must not be the culprit (? maybe I don't feel very confident about that...).

5. (something like...) The criminal must be fully exposed beyond doubts to be the culprit. If a character claims to be the culprit they must not be the culprit.

6. There must be a detective. The detective is someone who detects clues and evidence.

7. (Weird, if I'm to take that within arc 5's context then Kinzo somewhat had to be murdered? Ill try it as the opposite of VD6) There has to be a culprit. The culprit is someone who comits murders.

8. (I guess to make it different from Knox 2) Fantasy and science-fiction elements must not be part of the answer nor how to reach the answer.

9. There cannot be more then one detective.

10. (maybe that's how it's applied to Umineko?) The culprit is a character who has a role in every part (arcs) of the story.

11. (ouch, okay going to stretch it) The criminal can not be the most suspicious characters who's motives are apparent from the start (Like I guess, the sibling's money problems?)

12. There cannot be more then one murderer, that murderer is the culprit. Accomplices must not be the masterminds.

13. The culprit must not be backed up by an organisation.

14. Science fiction cannot be the MO.

15. (Something like what Virgiia said) The riddles have to be created in order to be solved.

16. (If you really think about it, it probably means) Any scenes presented to the reader must be part of the puzzles. Scenes that have no roles in the mystery cannot exists.

17.(simple) The culprit cannot be someone who's occupation in life is being a criminal.

18. (If we're to leave any place to either let's try...) Suicides and accidental death must be apparent enough that no place to wonder about it's nature must be left.

19. The culprit must do crimes for personal motives. Professional motives must not exist, neither for the culprit nor the accomplices.

20. I assume, if VD exists in Umineko, that Ryukishi will make his own list of elements that shouldn't figure.

[Marion]

Why would Ryukishi rewrite the rules? That goes against the whole point of using them. He could have rewrote the 5th rule for Knox, but just omitted it. Even with Knox all he did was reword some of the rules, but otherwise stuck to the original meaning and context of said rule.

[UsagiTenpura]

Because if Van Dine is introduced exactly like it is, it cannot be applied to Umineko. VD 2-3 in particular.

Not to mention that everyones dies and accidents and suicides are absolutely forbidden by VanDine, which makes the arc's ending impossible in themselves.

[Moogleking]

Originally Posted by UsagiTenpura

Because if Van Dine is introduced exactly like it is, it cannot be applied to Umineko. VD 2-3 in particular.

Not to mention that everyones dies and accidents and suicides are absolutely forbidden by VanDine, which makes the arc's ending impossible in themselves.

I don't think it contradicts nearly as much as you think it does.
The tricks and deceptions have all been put in place by Beatrice and the meta-realm. It's not like we're being lied to and don't know it.

Regarding everyone dying, I don't think there are any accidents or suicides. The bomb is killing everyone is neither of those.

The love interest one is probably the closest to contradicting, since Battler starts spending so much time on Beatrice in 5-6. But you could say that in 1-4 there wasn't much of that.

[UsagiTenpura]

Originally Posted by Moogleking

I don't think it contradicts nearly as much as you think it does.
The tricks and deceptions have all been put in place by Beatrice and the meta-realm. It's not like we're being lied to and don't know it.

My only problem with that is we're shown scenes such as Ange/Hachijou which none of the other characters are aware of. I guess it could be argued that Ange herself is the detective in arc 6 tho.

Regarding everyone dying, I don't think there are any accidents or suicides. The bomb is killing everyone is neither of those.

It's still a bit of a stretch. There is supposed to be only one murderer, there is no mention of wether or not the motive is noble (such as stopping the culprit). That seems to prevent the idea that the culprit intended to stay alive until the end but got killed before, and that everyone left alive still dies cause of the explosion. I suppose there's probably other ways to think of it.

The love interest one is probably the closest to contradicting, since Battler starts spending so much time on Beatrice in 5-6. But you could say that in 1-4 there wasn't much of that.

I guess it could be argued that because Battler started to fall in love with Beato is the reason why he lost his status as detective in arc 5-6. I suppose inherently there are no rules that specifies that the protagonist can be the culprit or associated with the culprit while the detective, even tho not being a culprit, is the actual antagonist.

[Moogleking]

The future scenes aren't really tricks or deceptions. Really it seems like a kind of reverse backstory that tries to give us more hints and motives.

Regarding the bomb: Whoever set it, if they managed to fake their death, probably got away in at least a few games.

[AC-Phoenix]

Is there a red text stating that all the games have the same cultprint? You know because of Eva...
I have to ask this because all my prime suspects get smashed by beatrice reds...Well Even though its just a range from 1- to 3 people...

[Moogleking]

If this plays out anything like Higurashi, I would suspect there is one person who gets other people to do the killing without getting their own hands dirty.

Game 3 is pretty hard to put together, though.

In game 3, Eva is probably innocent for Gohda/Kuma/Genji deaths in the first twilight (Shannon/Kanon are likely not dead).
The scenes in the morning suggest the adults all teamed up and did something. Not sure what the plan was here. The fact they all barricade up with guns makes it seem like they know someone is out there willing to kill them.

Eva is strongly suggested to have killed Rosa/Maria. However, this could be the work of Kanon if he faked death.
The magic scenes strongly suggest Hideyoshi died from Rudolph's gun while protecting Eva. It is difficult to say what exactly happened here, especially if Kanon is running around, but Eva probably killed 1 person max, if any of them.
George then goes and wakes up Shannon, and someone shoots both of them. Since Nanjo probably told George she was alive and locked the window after he left, he is obviously super suspicious. The person who shoots George and Shannon could be Eva, or it might not. Again, hard to say.
Then Kanon seems to come along and shoot Nanjo to save Jessica.
And then Battler is shot by Eva.

It is very easy to put almost all of it on Eva, but that kind of ignores everything about Beatrice. Game 3 is pretty tough, because we can't figure out why the first twilight happens the way it does.

And I haven't even started to say how this has anything to do with the mastermind leading everybody on. If we assume game 3 is the game where "Something went wrong", then I suspect the mastermind to have died from some actions from Eva they didn't expect.

[rogerpepitone]

Chess analogues:

Various: Maria's crown resembles a black king.

Episode 3, Virgilia vs. Beatrice:
Virgilia acts like a Maharajah (powerful motion (queen), but if captured, all is lost), while Beatrice acts like a king (limited motion, Virgilia's sole target).

Episode 3, Evatrice: Eva == pawn, Evatrice == promoted queen

Episode 4, Battler meets Beatrice:
Battler == white king
Beatrice == promoted(?) queen
Siestas == Bishops (?)

Battler mentions how there's one white square on the board, under his feet. The white king starts the game on a black square.