Recent reviews by Battler Ushiromiya

An insanely impressive game. The amount of stuff you can do is staggering, and the fact that it's all so well written is insane. I've only properly finished once and already I'm itching to dive back in again and see what else I can see. There's so much effort put into this game, it's insane. It is very worth your time to play.

This is a review of the whole of Umineko, not just the Question Arcs. Just so you know.

Mystery stories are, at their core, just one big puzzle. An author writes a story, gives you hints, and typically tells you all you need to know before the story's conclusion so that you have a fair chance at figuring it out if you're perceptive enough. Good mystery authors make it possible to figure out the killer long before they are revealed in the story. But it has gotten to the point that many people either don't try and figure it out, or if they do, their guesses are far more lukewarm, because they know the story will succinctly reveal everything at the end of the story and wrap everything up in a nice little bow. Umineko, on the other hand, does not do this. Umineko lays out clues for you and tells you to figure it out yourself, not directly revealing the answer to a majority of its individual mysteries, and, while giving you more hints to its biggest mysteries, never outright stating the answer. What makes the story even more difficult to solve is the constant questioning of whether what you're seeing is true or false, and whether or not the murders are truly being done by magic, not helped by the constant seemingly impossible closed room murders. Can you figure out the truth? That's up to your observational skills.

A murder mystery, however, would be nothing if it's characters weren't compelling, so how does Umineko fare here? Well, fear not, for a majority of the characters are wonderfully written. While some characters, about three or four of them, sadly get very little focus, the focus on the rest of the characters more than makes up for it. The members that get focus are incredibly well developed and fleshed out, and you will likely care about them a lot.

The music in the series is wonderful, among the best OST's I've ever heard. There are multiple songs for every different occasion. Emotional songs, high intensity songs, calming songs, you name it, it has it. The series has had three different artstyles: The art made by the author, Ryukishi07, the art made for the PS3 version, and the art made for the Steam version. Ryukishi's artwork suffers from odd proportioning, but it shows the characters emotions the best of all of the artstyles. The Steam version's artwork are far more clean, but they hurt in that the characters body movements are far more limited and they don't showcase their emotion as well. The PS3 sprites, my personal favorites, keeps the clean artstyle of the Steam version, and it has far more free body movement for the characters which allows them to express more emotion than the Steam sprites, although not as good as Ryukishi's. The voice acting in the PS3 version is top notch, to the point that I would recommend downloading the voices mod for the Steam version if you get that version. Every character sounds spot on, and their acting is phenomenal. There are also a variety of sound effects that typically fit whatever scenario they're used in.

Fair warning, however: If you don't like stories with that delve into the meta, this is likely not the series for you. Umineko is a very meta story, and it delves into a lot of meta ideas. In particular, the last three Episodes delve so far into the meta that it's a wonder the game still has a fourth wall.

Overall, Umineko is a wonderfully unique and amazingly written game. Its mystery not giving you any concrete answers, leaving you to take the pieces and see where to put them, is genius, the presentation of the game is wonderful regardless of which sprites you use, a grand majority of the characters are well developed and fleshed out, and the overall plot is very solid. I definitely recommend Umineko to anyone with a love for the mystery genre and anyone who enjoys solving seemingly impossible puzzles.

I care about shapes now. WHY THE ♥♥♥♥ DO I CARE ABOUT SHAPES NOW?!?!?! WHAT HAS THE WORLD COME TO?!