This review contains spoilers for Higurashi

I’d recommend reading my review of Gou (click here to read it) to better understand my positions on this series. Sotsu has made many areas of it age like slim milk, but it describes my general feelings of Gou and my expectations going into this.

Out of literally any piece of media that I have experienced, and even those that have been released, the existence of Higurashi Sotsu stands out as a strange anomaly. A sequel to Higurashi, which already had a perfect conclusion with the end of Kai/Festival Accompanying, would strike many people as pointless. There have been sequels to anime that have already had perfect endings before, but in the way that Sotsu does it, there is nothing that is comparable. This is the point where the marketing of the series comes in, since it is basically inseparable from the season that it's attached to. The bait and switch with the lead on that it was a followup to Higurashi Gou, the season that started the new 2020 sequel of Higurashi to continue the story ended off by Higurashi Rei. Instead it ended up being an extended recap of the first four arcs of Gou that told the viewers nothing of substance with only two episodes of an actual sequel at the end. That is it. There is no silver lining. There is no second cour to save it all. That is what Sotsu is plainly.

I really don’t want to come off as someone who hates this series just because or somebody who finds no appreciation in When They Cry. My review linked above should show that I really like Gou even despite all of its problems. Even now, post-Sotsu, I still wouldn’t change my score from what it is right now. Even if it probably defies the reasonable part of me, the second cour leaves such a lasting impression in my mind that I really can’t hate it. The expectations that I had going into this were insurmountable with how much affinity I had for both Gou and the original series. You can even see that optimism in my review.

”...the revelations involving the point of the existence of this entire season have been so well handled by the final arc of this season, that I barely have any worries about how Sotsu will go about handling the act of providing answers.”

My optimism quickly became thoroughly crushed as most of the series became relegated to recapping things that I had already seen twice before. Sotsu recaps Gou’s first four arcs with changes that are inconsequential in progressing the story or further developing characters than what is surface level. But just saying that it is bad purely because it recaps ignores the finer details. When actually breaking down Sotsu’s arcs, most of it is actually composed of new content. Recapping even as a concept isn’t something new to Higurashi. One of Higurashi’s best arcs, Meakashi-hen, recaps Watanagashi-hen for a lot of its story. In a more comparable example, Gou pulled a very similar trick for its first three arcs, and while those arcs are still questionable in terms of quality, there is still an ocean of difference in storytelling of Gou’s recaps to Sotsu’s recaps. Sotsu's recapping problem isn’t a problem of the recapping itself. Rather, it ends up being such an issue due to it being a culmination of multiple core issues that made the story irreparably broken from the very start.

The biggest positive take away from both Gou and Sotsu is the interweaving character arcs of Satoko and Rika. The deep dive that Nekodamashi-hen and Satokowashi-hen took into the two of them made a lot of what Gou does best at. After Gou though, there was only so much room that the story could take for the two of them. After those two arcs, the two characters were nearing the end of their character arcs. Gou was setting up Sotsu to conclude their arcs, but there was a major problem. With Sotsu’s 15 episode length, the series can’t stall Satoko and Rika’s growth to the point of unwatchability. Looking back on the original series, this issue seems irrelevant. While each story arc usually centered around one character, overall, it was about the people of Hinamizawa. The ensemble cast of Higurashi is part of the reason why it even works so well. Beyond all of the gore and horror, there is a unifying message of friendship and community that the relationships of every character helps to truly sell. Keiichi, Rena, Mion, and Shion along with Satoko and Rika share equal parts in what makes Higurashi what it is. With this fact in mind, it wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that Sotsu’s purpose was to justify the inclusion of the rest of the gang in the story. Sotsu does in fact try to go in this direction for most of its episodes. However, it fell completely short of justifying it.

Aside from time spent on Satoko and Rika, Sotsu’s first two arcs, Oniakishi-hen and Wataakishi-hen are dedicated to showing Rena and Mion’s descent at the hands of Hinamizawa syndrome. This shouldn’t be an immediate problem, but it does come off as unoriginal as Rena had already gone through the syndrome in Tsumihoroboshi-hen. Mion going through her fits of paranoia on the other hand isn’t something the series has dipped into before. It is in the execution where things start to falter. In Oniakishi-hen, Rena doesn’t experience a new dive into insanity. Instead, she experiences events that read like a hybrid of Oniakishi-hen and Tsumihoroboshi-hen. While this wouldn’t immediately catch a viewer as something wrong in a vacuum, where things start to become far more egregious is with Wataakishi-hen. Since Mion hadn’t gone through the syndrome, she had the most potential of having a story be something that was truly unique. Instead of something truly tailored to her character, she gets an arc very similar to Shion’s in Meakashi-hen but instead of Satoshi, Mion goes crazy over Keiichi. Even though they are twins, Shion and Mion are very different characters. The massive gap between their personalities should say that by itself. To see Mion go through an arc so similar to her sister’s shows a disregard for what potential a story where she is the one taken over by paranoia can have. The existence of Hinamizawa syndrome plaguing someone usually shows the deepest insecurities of a character that get revealed more and more as they succumb to it. This complex nature of the syndrome gets lost in Wataakishi-hen since it shows a very simplistic outlook on Mion’s character that conflicts with what she actually would be like.

Aside from the lack of respect to Rena and Mion being shown here, these two arcs don’t really reveal much in terms of new story details. A lot of the reveals from these arcs are shallow mysteries that could easily be understood by Gou’s reveal of Satoko being a villain. The reveals given are usually ones that can only lead to mild satisfaction rather than something that can carry a story. In a series previously flourishing with bombastic unpredictable moments, the series quickly becomes something that is a boring predictable slog. Up until the series caught up to post-Gou Episode 17, it only really took a little bit of thinking to what the series would mostly be made up of for the first 13 episodes. The first 56 seconds of a meme video predicting the plot of Sotsu below that released after Gou ended shows this accidentally showed Sotsu’s predictability.

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The first 56 seconds were created in a very non-serious manner. But it also provides a look into the mentality of many of what Sotsu was going to be in between the last episode of Gou and the first episode of Sotsu. While we may have expected a recap of this nature, the expectation more relied on it being something very quick. But with how the meme plays out, it unintentionally achieves just as much plot progression as Sotsu does in its first 13 episodes. While a lot of the details are incorrect, it doesn’t end up mattering by the end. Since most of the reveals in the first 13 episodes end up being so inconsequential, the end result of the first half of the meme and the first thirteen episodes of the show end up being nearly identical. The general events of Sotsu are a skeleton of a much larger story. It is easy to see what that skeleton was going to be after watching Gou. This skeleton needed flesh and tissue to this skeleton for it to even function. Sotsu ended up just being the skeleton. With only bones and nothing else. With the barren skeleton of Sotsu, it may not technically be a full recap of Gou’s first few arcs, but it may as well have been.

After Oniakishi-hen and Wataakishi-hen came Tatariakishi-hen. It ended up being more of the same as the first two arcs. In terms of every arc that came before the events of Gou Episode 17, this was probably the best one. It should be noted though, that is only on account for it primarily featuring Satoko, who at this point is one of the only interesting characters left. Even then though, her character development stalls until the end of Episode 10 where one Sotsu's actual moments of intrigue occurs. She isn’t in a position for her character to progress far ahead yet, so she stays static for the most part aside from the aforementioned end of Episode 10. Teppei isn’t that interesting compared to Gou, since most of what made him intriguing in this series happened in Gou Episode 23. With that mini redemption arc over, he doesn't exactly have much to grow past that. While I am glad that the framework set up by Gou made his turn to a good guy make sense, that doesn’t stop Sotsu from feeling dry when developing him. Ooishi suffers from a similar problem as Mion in Wataakishi-hen but to a less disrespectful degree. Ooishi under Hinamizawa syndrome is more just a surface level understanding of what he probably would do when affected rather than a new interesting direction for his character. At least there wasn’t a fundamental misunderstanding as to who they are unlike Mion. Tatariakishi-hen doesn’t introduce any more problems, but it just continues old ones. This can also be applied to the first half of Kagurashi-hen. In my personal experience of the arc, Tatariakishi-hen represented the point as to where I realized that this season was going to fall remarkably under my expectations no matter what happened. There was nothing much to do but wait for the end where something good may actually happen.

When looking at it all back, it becomes extremely hard to either justify why or explain how this even happened. Why would Sotsu slow its plot into oblivion to the state that it is like this? This can be drawn down to Sotsu’s converging priorities. With how characters other than Rika and Satoko are treated in Sotsu, it is clear that there is little interest in developing anybody else except for them. On the other hand, the series is also aiming to be similar to the original Higurashi, by being in the same general location of Hinamizawa as well as the month of June 1983 for a plurality of the runtime. This desire for familiarity is what I assume led to the conspicuous marketing of Gou as well as Gou’s first cour being composed of arcs that draw most of their plot from arcs that already happened. A familiar setting for Higurashi also will naturally require the ensemble cast of Higurashi to primarily be featured. This is where these two goals start to clash. With the apparent lack of interest in anybody except for Satoko and Rika, there would be no way for the familiar setting of Hinamizawa to work well with the story being told. Since Hinamizawa is linked to the people that live there, setting a story in Hinamizawa would mean to show the stories of those residents as well. However, the story doesn't care to do so, leaving the plot in a predicament that could only end in absolute failure. Gou managed to circumvent this by mostly setting Satokowashi-hen outside of Hinamizawa and having its first cour have at the very least, a slight allure of mystery. By Sotsu, this house of cards completely collapses in on itself. The story has to include Rena and Mion arcs, but it gives off the impression that it doesn't care enough to truly invest the effort into making those arcs truly worthwhile.

After the grueling slog of Episodes 1-13, Episode 14 actually manages to be something exciting for once. Finally the continuation of the series after Nekodamashi. This episode actually manages to capture the quality of the second cour of Gou in just one concentrated instance. But if there is one image that can describe Sotsu’s main problems, it is this one.

It depicts one of the bouts of Satoko and Rika as they clash with Onigari-no-ryuuou. As good as this moment is for both Satoko and Rika, there is nobody on screen except for the two of them. As a matter of a fact, throughout all of the fragments where they fight, other characters don’t appear in all but one. The junkyard at this point is an empty stage just to serve in this battle. As good as this episode is, it can’t save what is already here. Episode 14, and I’d even say Episode 15, were each very good episodes. I feel extremely satisfied with the conclusion for the two of them, no matter how flawed it is. However, Sotsu’s primary purpose was not to make the last two episodes good. After Gou, that became nearly guaranteed. Sotsu’s purpose was to justify the existence of everything outside of that. But it failed to do that purely because it didn’t care enough to actually do so.

I usually like to end negative reviews like these on a hopeful note, but for the longest time, the series screwing itself up this badly near the finish line made it hard to hope for this type of thing. Against all odds though, there is something to hope for.

The Higurashi Gou manga is diverging from the anime. After Nekodmashi, instead of Satakowashi, there is going to be an alternative story, called Higurashi Jun. Maybe it is just that this series has conditioned me to pray for miracles, but I have hope for this. From the little I know about the Gou manga, I know that it at least goes on a far more focused course than its anime counterpart. My hope is that the manga can provide a better resolution for what Gou had set up to provide an emphatic conclusion that a series like this needs. I need at least something to reinvigorate my passion for this show again.

But ignoring the manga, Sotsu has to be one of the most underwhelming anime that I have ever seen. It is torn between two different goals that end up ripping itself apart. It has no regard for characters other than the ones that it wants to develop. It stalls to such an extreme that any good qualities that it has get severely dampened. It was facing tragedy, and did absolutely nothing to stop it. As it stands, this series is broken. And with the high hopes I had going into this, that is very disappointing.

Thank you for reading to the end of the review if you did. If you have any criticisms of how this review was made, you are free to message me or reply to this activity to critique what I had to say.

Also, please don’t like or dislike the review without reading it.