Opinion Prone

Usually, I’m very much against spoilers, so maybe it can be considered significant that I just let my brother explain the rest of this to me in lieu of actually watching it. For a series that seems to be universally heralded as being awesome, I was kind of surprised at just how much I didn’t care for Higurashi no Naku Koro ni (+Kai). The art style and animation was a huge turn off. The characters weren’t engaging, and the setup of everything just reminded me of all the things I don’t like in anime. Even the violence and gore wasn’t very entertaining. :\ And the repeating scenarios just… struck that short attention span of mine, I guess. I wanted the explanation to be more obvious. It’s a mystery; I wanted the clues to be more there. I did not want to sit through 26+ episodes of mindfuckery stuck on repeat before knowing what the hell was going on.

There is merit in being sneaky and unexpected, and honestly, I’d say Higurashi’s story and plot is pretty unique, but it really failed at getting me to care. Because I felt nothing towards any of the characters, I wasn’t really even inclined to try and solve the mystery myself, especially when it wasn’t even obvious that it was a mystery at first. It was just, lol retcon! Is it just me? Am I just too stupid to figure things out myself or too stupidly impatient to not wait and see? Maybe, but I have a hard time imagining that anyone was really drawn to the cast. It was a generic assortment of moe girls and your usual loser guy. Who cares? Why should anyone care?

Maybe I’m just too used to characters driving the story and not the other way around.

I’m really curious though, did anyone else start Higurashi and not feel like finishing it at all?