うみねこのなく頃(ころ)に(When the Seagulls Cry) is a multi-media franchise that started with a Visual Novel but has since expanded into a bunch of other stuff, like an Anime, Manga and Light Novels.

I was trying to get into it and I find parts of it interesting, but I honestly don’t like Umineko. Read more about it below!

I’ll note right now that I have not finished Umineko and probably never will. Thus this is an exception to my personal rule/guideline that I only review things that I finish. I’m doing so because, despite not finishing it, I did end up spending a lot of time on Umineko, writing about Umineko (for myself and to friends) and thinking about Umineko. More so than…for example Allison. Though I guess that’s also an example of something I haven’t finished…?

Anyway, the point is that I’m writing from the point of view of someone who quit Umineko early, though continually tried to get in. However…I did finish the anime, not that that matters, since that apparently only adapts the first half of the story.

More specifically, I quit the Visual Novel before I finished Episode 1 and I also quit the manga during Episode 6. This was after I decided to skip Episodes 1-4 since those were (mostly faithfully) covered by the anime.

Is Umineko bad? Yes, though I’ll get into that into the dedicated Critique section. This review will be focused a bit more on my personal feelings regarding Umineko. Though since the main topic of the Critique section is focused around the construction of the story, I will take some time here to highlight the other issues.

Umineko is excessively long. I’m using the word excessively deliberately, because it actively undermines the themes and the plotting. One of the key themes of Umineko (for whatever reason) is that you shouldn’t dehumanize the characters in a mystery story. Ignoring the reason as to why, the excessive length of Umineko undermines this by repeating events over and over and over and over and over and over again. Not only do characters end up dying (and reviving) multiple times, but information regarding them is consistently hammered in to the point you become desensitized to whatever is going on. If Ryukishi07 understood this, Umineko would have been made significantly shorter.

The other main issue is with the writing style. Part of it might be on the translators, but since I’ve experienced the same thing on a lesser scale in the manga, I’d say it’s actually just how Ryukishi07 writes. For whatever reason, Ryukishi has a tendency to write the same bit of information being repeated back-to-back 3 or more times. As in, almost the exact same thing is said 3 times in a row without much change. Another way of putting it is that the same information is repeated 3 times back-to-back. If that annoyed you, consider the fact there are over 120 hours of that. As I said before, this is also present in the manga…though, thankfully, it’s limited to the dialog.

However, repetition doesn’t just happen on a micro scale, but on a macro one too. The same plot-lines are repeated multiple times, the same scenes are repeated with slight differences and the same information is communicated again. The same-ish murder mystery ends up happening 8 times, we witness Rosa being abusive multiple times, among many other things.

Before reading Episode 6, I would have answered that I do like Umineko because while it’s objectively broken in multiple ways…it was interesting to think about how it was broken. But it’s also the case that a lot of the characters are legitimately interesting, or that character interactions themselves are mostly alright – Battler and Beatrice talking together is rarely dull. Even individual plot-lines made some sense. All of this made me feel that it was interesting.^A)

However, my enjoyment initially suffered while watching the anime – which is when I realized the story wasn’t a mystery and, thus, there wasn’t much point speculating about it. I kept speculating about it (even after accidentally learning some spoilers) with the intent of figuring something out anyway, but it didn’t really help.

It did help though that I liked the anime. I thought it was very fun to watch and the pacing was mostly fast – well, ignoring all of the non-mystery and backstory segments. It was only near the end (between episodes 21-26) that I felt the story really got bad.

But despite all the issues that I noticed (and I would continually notice more of them as I went on, or found new ways to interpret old issues), I thought it was worth persevering for two main reasons: 1. I would get legitimate justification to critique the story to my friend; 2. I still found it mostly enjoyable.

However, now that I’ve read thru Episodes 5 and 6 of the manga, I can safely say that I do not like Umineko. I’ve actually grown a little resentful towards it because, despite me specifically choosing the manga over the VN, it still felt as if it wasted my time. The fact I wasn’t able to escape Ryukishi’s writing style in the manga irritated me greatly.

But the bigger issue is that I realized how the Red Truth actually worked, plus I learned (and internalized) the fact most of the fantasy stuff is metaphorical or non-existent…and, as compared to the anime especially, there is way more of that fantasy battling and fantasy stuff in Episodes 5 & 6 than was in Episodes 1-4. I found it incredibly vexing to witness a fantasy battle representation of a legal battle in the Witch’s Game world fought amongst characters who probably don’t exist. While also knowing that the game boards themselves don’t exist.

Though what’s worse is that once you realize how the Red Truth works, you quickly realize that Ryukishi doesn’t understand the full ramifications of it…because none of the characters take advantage of the versatility of it…which just makes you, the reader, frustrated as all Hell because you can see obvious solutions to problems that none of the characters see and none of the characters ever go for.

It’s surprising to me how quickly the few things I liked about Umineko turned into extreme dislikes. At this point I really don’t care about the characters. If I want to see characters similar to those in Umineko, but happy, I’ll just write it myself.

This isn’t a literal extract from the VN, though it’s based on something that happens in it. If I actually extracted the text, it would have been significantly longer, so just keep that in mind.

This is just to get across what the writing style is like. The VN is much worse because it includes narration, but the manga also suffers from this repetitive style.

Umineko promises a mystery. Though some people argue that it promises an anti-mystery, it should be noted that that’s a very specific Japanese term and, from what I could gather, anti-mysteries are still qualified as mysteries^1)B)…so outside of mentioning that angle here, I’m going to ignore any arguments made from that perspective.^C)

As a mystery story – in order to be a good mystery – Umineko needs to present a set of clues which allow the audience to solve the mystery prior to the reveal. This is for the sake of ‘fair play’ on the one hand, and the requirement for stories to be written properly.^D)

Generally, mystery stories present a whodunit – the mystery of the story is who the culprit of the murder is. However, Umineko takes a different approach (which is presented as a subversion of the tropes) in that the central mystery is “Is the witch real?”. Tied to that are several smaller mysteries: “Who is Beatrice?”; “Is magic real?”; “What really happened on Rokkenjima?”; etc.

The story is then supposedly written in a fashion that allows you to figure out the answer. However, as I’m going to argue, the story fails to make any of the mysteries fair as a result of its incoherence, but we’ll move on from that.

Also, to be clear, Umineko definitely thinks of itself as a mystery and treats itself as a mystery. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be such a massive focus on presenting all the clues, testimonies, evidence or even the Red Truths. Even within Episode 6 we’re still having characters explaining murders. And there’s no indication that this is any different in the latter episodes either.

For those who want to argue that Umineko isn’t a mystery and never promises to be one, just remember that it goes out of its way to present itself as a mystery and Ryukishi himself described it as a mystery and strongly implied (several times) that the mysteries are solvable and that, in fact, Umineko is a mystery.

I’m intentionally repeating myself just to hammer home the fact Umineko presents itself as a mystery story.

I actually heard from a friend (who might be reading this review, in case oops) that it isn’t a mystery and never promises to be, despite all the overwhelming evidence disproving that claim.

Something to be kept in mind is that layers above reality are built off of it. That means that they contain facts/hints that help tell us what really happened. We (the audience) probably never see the bottom-most layer. That isn’t inherently wrong but…we’ll get to that.

Though remember that the Fantasy/Metaphor layers can also get layered on top of each-other.

I may also be missing something because I’ve read some stuff that implies the existence of more stuff.

You’re reading a debate between two witches^F) about a metaphorical representation of a fantasy representation of an incident that occurs inside of a game that is meant to reflect – and hint at – events that happened in the real world.

And if you think that’s simple, there’s also a fantasy representation of a debate^G) about that metaphorical representation of the fantasy representation of an incident that occurred in the game which is meant to reflect and hint at events that occurred in the real world. Also, the debate that is represented fantastically may or may not have actually happened.

At this point Umineko’s fans will protest that there are at least two ways to tell what’s real. Those are anything Battler witnesses and the Red Truths. Let me explain why neither of those actually help.

The reason Battler can’t be trusted is because he witnesses things that are obviously non-existent. Also, which of the Battlers has a trustworthy perspective? Because we can’t be sure that many of the Pawns are real (and thus their perspectives are dubious) and we also can’t trust what the Narrator/Witch’s game Battler sees because…he’s witnessing magic.

Now, let me elaborate on that “one of any possible interpretations” thing because it trips people up.

First, I’ll quickly note that the story itself makes it clear that this is how the Red Truths work. Not only does the official solution require the Red Truths to be interpret-able, but there are moments that don’t make any sense unless you consider them to be interpret-able.

At the end of Episode 4, Battler wins an argument against Beatrice by suggesting that ‘Kinzo’ (who is meant to be dead in that game) could have appeared before the rest of the family because…sigh…somebody called themselves ‘Kinzo’ and was acknowledged as such by the rest of the family.

In Episode 5, Lambdadelta states several Red Truths back-to-back to elaborate on what a ‘Knock’ is, which would be unnecessary if Red Truths couldn’t be interpreted multiple ways. In fact, this is done specifically to prevent Erika from suggesting several solutions to who may have “knocked” on a door.

There are probably more of them, by the way.

Most people would assume that that means that Rudolph was killed by Jessica, right? However, because a Red Truth is fine as long as one of any possible interpretations is true…heh.

Who is ‘Jessica’? Does it refer to the person whose name it is? Does it refer to someone pretending to be Jessica? Does it refer to a persona taken up by another person? Is it a fictional character? Is it even a person?

What does ‘killed’ actually mean? Does it mean that someone was literally killed? Does it mean that someone was killed metaphorically? Is ‘killed’ hyperbolic?

Who is ‘Rudolph’? We already went over that.

Now, you may be tempted to argue that an individual statement doesn’t tell us much, which is why we have multiple statements to help elaborate on things. However, this only really applies if a Red Truth explicitly refers to something in another Red Truth or otherwise helps elaborate on something.

And the majority of Red Truths are independently interpret-able. As in, even if Red Truths seem to refer to the same thing…since they can be interpreted any-which-way, there’s no guarantee that they actually do. You can interpret them as referring to the same event or referring to separate events.

So…Janet and Katie are the same person. Katie didn’t literally kill herself, she simply discarded the alternate identity. This is how Janet died in the ‘room’. While the room and the kitchen are not the same room, Katie did relocate to the kitchen which is how it’s possible for ‘Janet’ to be dead in the kitchen.

Because Janet is a persona of Katie and Katie didn’t actually kill herself, the death of Janet wasn’t a suicide. This death occurred at 12:00^H), so how could ‘Janet’ have made tea an hour later? She was, after all, dead at this point. Simple. Katie resurrected the persona of Janet. Until that point, Janet was dead.

What does the murder refer to? It’s obviously unrelated to any of the events mentioned up to now. Aren’t you paying attention?

So what is it that makes Umineko incoherent?

The fact it’s so deeply layered and has so many alternate representations of literal events and no way of telling what is or isn’t actually real. Every character is an unreliable witness. The one way of telling what is or isn’t true – the Red Truths – can be interpreted in so many ways that they don’t tell us anything either.