AKA: Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, When Cicadas Cry
	Genre: Drama, Horror, Mystery, Psychological
	Length: Television series, 26 episodes, 23 minutes each
	Distributor: Relicensed by FUNimation. (As one of the redistribution deals with Geneon.)
	Content Rating: 18+ (extreme graphic violence, torture, gore)
	Related Series: Higurashi no Naku Koro ni 2
	Also Recommended: Elfen Lied, Gantz
	Notes: The red color in the title Higurashi no Naku Koro ni is in fact an official component, but is not reproducible in some input fields of the database we are using.
	Rating:

When They Cry - Higurashi

Synopsis

It is June 1983. Maebara Keiichi transfers to the rural town of Hinamizawa and meets his classmates: Rena, Mion, Rika, and Satoko. Everything seems tranquil; they spend their days playing games afterschool, and they look forward to the annual Watanagashi Festival to commemorate the local god, O-Yashiro-sama.

But this is no normal town. For the last four years, someone has been murdered, and another person has disappeared on the day of the festival. Keiichi and his friends are drawn inexorably into the events surrounding the great mystery of the town, and must figure out the truth before they are driven insane ... or worse.

Review

The first time I heard of this show, I had this series enthusiastically described to me as "Attack of the Killer Lolis". Needless to say, I was actually extremely leery of watching it, but as it came on the airing schedule for ASU's Japanese Media Society, I decided to try it anyway.

Yeesh! I thought Elfen Lied and Gantz were brutal, but Higurashi seems even more gutwrenchingly violent, largely because of the seemingly incongruous characters and setting. Cuteness is not a buffer against an excruciating onscreen death, and the events quickly devolve into something vaguely resembling lemmings being herded into a giant blender. Not just once, but repeatedly, as the characters get to relive the events again and again until they solve the mystery. It's Groundhog Day as a light, fluffy dating sim that quite suddenly turns into a slasher flick.

The effect can be horribly repellent, and I really can't recommend it to most people, but the strange thing is that Higurashi actually works at times, because the horror and suspense are just as often subtle as not. While the violence reaches a dizzying crescendo at the denouement of most of the story arcs, the path to get there is deliberately paced, and nothing seems done helter-skelter. Clues are given throughout the series as to what is really going on -- at times it feels downright clever.

On the minus side, the art is simplistic and mediocre, with washed-out colors and terribly generic designs, though this may simply reflect the supposed "ordinariness" of the characters going through these traumatic events. The juxtaposition of harem romance tropes with the murder mystery theme often feels outright absurd, but it seems intentional, as opposed to the unintentional but equally creepy backdrops of Sister Princess and Final Approach. Fortunately for us (though perhaps not so much for the characters), Higurashi is far more murder mystery than harem romance. If that's what it takes to get obsessively crazy otaku watching something other than one-stupid-guy-herding-lots-of-stupider-girls, then maybe it's fine, but on the other hand, we probably don't want to be giving people ideas on torture methods to emulate ... Yikes!

If you *like* violence, you'll undoubtedly like this show. However, if you consider violence to be secondary to a well-written plot, then you'll probably have to be extremely persistent and tolerant to make it all the way to the end, and even then you maybe won't feel satisfied. Higurashi is a hard show to watch; while it's interesting, each chapter is progressively soul-sucking and depressing, as the characters struggle desperately to avoid grisly fates, often to no avail, multiple times! While I assume from the source material that the end of the show gives us a final payoff, this is definitely a show where the journey is more important than the destination.

A lot of folks, myself included, would take one look at this concept and think it's a really, really stupid idea, and perhaps it IS, but Higurashi is interesting and visceral enough to be worth viewing by the more adventurous. Those who aren't into violence should skip this and watch some other show, preferably with a character named Haruhi in it. — Carlos Ross

Recommended Audience: ABSOLUTELY NOT FOR CHILDREN. 18 and up due to explicit, onscreen violence, torture, and some gore. While not as detailed as Gantz or Elfen Lied, the juxtaposition of this with the setting and character designs makes it arguably more unsettling. Yes, it's a cartoon, but any show involving a schoolgirl mutilating herself to death is pretty amazingly harsh stuff.