This one is a real mess.

To preface a bit. Umineko no Naku Koro ni is a popular sound novel and part of the When They Cry series by the doujin circle 07th Expansion. It centers around the Ushiromiya family and their annual meeting happening at the beginning of October, the key date for this being the 4th and 5th October of 1986. After a series of mysterious killings it is your task to figure out what and why everything has happened, and who did it.

Umineko in it's entirity has 8 episodes, split into 4 each as arcs, the first 4 being the Question Arcs, and the latter being the Answer Arcs. As the anime adaption was produced and released in 2009, only as the first arc was finished, this is the only part of the sound novel that is present there (obviously).

If you like the premise, then here is the catch: Don't bother with the anime. Read the sound novel. Depending on your reading speed you have way over 100 hours of full reading time, if not even more of this mystery, filled to the brim with details.

That's the key here. Umineko is a mystery, and highly dependent of the details presented over the course of time. If we look at the anime from the very beginning, we don't even know who the characters really are. The anime misses the catch of giving us at least some kind of introduction, so we pretty much just start of with getting to know their names. Why that is somewhat important I'll come back to later.

Let's talk about the story for a bit. In general, I'm not doing any segmented ratings, but the adaption of the story would get a flat 0 out of 10. Granted, it is just impossible to fit any amount of that massive source material into a show with a total runtime of around 10 hours. Instead of focusing on a good mix of the rather conversational "slice-of-life" parts and the important parts for the mystery, sometimes you just end up seing a few frames flash by, blending into black and just like that you skipped several hours of key information.

Now, if it only was for skipping, it'd be half bad, but starting with Banquet of the Golden Witch (Episode 3 of the sound novel), the order of how things get presented is shifted around, so it is incredibly hard to follow up. As an example, there is a key scene which in one episode gets mentioned as a flashback, and one episode later is actually shown fully. So for people that have no knowledge of the source material, it just gets confusing from that point onwards and doesn't really recover as it ends.

Moving on to the presentation, I want to start with the art aspect. I don't know what happened to Studio DEEN here, but many many scenes just look incredibly flat. There are some scenes where everything is fine, but there are others where it flat out just looks like they forgot to properly shade the characters. Onto more things, Umineko displays a lot of gruelsome murders, and while these are depicted well, there is some "oomph!" missing with those murders that makes you really invested in them. One reason, not having to do with art however, is the missing connection to the cast. If we have had a proper introduction, this would have been different, and that's where the sound novel shines. Every action and inaction affects the reader/viewer and has some impact, not so much in the anime.

Further on, let's talk about probably the only positive aspects here. The voice acting cast is good, these are the same VAs as used for the PS3 remake version and so people already familiar with that will remember the voices. Another thing taken directly from the source is the music, where all the tracks are the Umineko original score, aside of the opening/ending songs, which were...okay, but outshined by the rest of the OST presented, definitely.

Final verdict? Please don't watch it, or if you ever plan to, please read the sound novel and/or manga of Umineko first, because you are at high risk of ruining your experience of both of those when you botch the mystery with all the presented contradicting details here. I only went through it because I heard it was bad and wanted to see myself how bad it really is.

Without love, there can't be a good anime