I was exactly waiting for you to talk about Umi, ha. Everyone does, okay, let me explain.

I've read a lot of books, many of the ones considered literary masterpieces, but for me Higurashi is still one of the best works of fiction ever released. I don't really know why I like it so much, honestly.

Then I played Umineko. The first arc looked, to say the least, exactly like And Then There Were None, which I had read the day before. And when every one of the main characters started dying, I knew exactly what was gonna happen. 'Yeah. Timelines.'

And each arc kept playing the detective game, admittedly differing from ATTWN, but so goddamn close to Higurashi most of what happened was completely predictable. Oh no, I TOTALLY didn't know about how Sayo would play out, how there obviously was no magic, how the whole Ange situation was going down, among a few others.

Not to say Ryukishi was plain bored and didn't want to create new characters, so he just changed Takano, Rika and Hanyuu's (and arguably Satoko's, too) design slightly and slapped them there. Getting the mastermind villain to appear in Erika and having me say 'yeah, that's the MC from that other game' is just cheap.

And last of all, together with me not being very familiar with books from that era admittedly, the story just seemed unnecessarily long. Sometimes the descriptions and inner monologues got WAY too big for no real reason.

The game was still pretty damn good after all that though, and if one day i play it a bit less salty I'll probably like it more. But since it takes more than pretty much any RPG around to play from start to finish that'll take a while.