Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Rei #02 — Twisted Mirror

March 13th, 2009

 

Not a promising start to the serious side of Rei.

Impressions:

What an abysmal episode. Maybe it’d be better if you knew absolutely nothing about the plot of this particular arc, but the entire thing was spent on setting the premise. 30 minutes of "nothing went wrong," closely followed by Rika saying "this isn’t right… nothing went wrong!" Everything in this episode could have been covered in about 5 minutes instead of six times that. Hell, I covered the contents of this episode in the previous sentence. The remaining 29 minutes and 45 seconds of the episode are just listing the bullet points and reminding you why each little bit was important to the ‘real world,’ but can be summed up as "no Hinamizawa syndrome." You can safely skip this episode now and wait for the next one which will hopefully have something a little more interesting than "They’re alive in this world! Gadzooks! Nii-paah!"

Sadly, after the rather well done silly episode, the production for the more serious side was horrible. I can only take so many closeups of Rika’s eyes before flipping on the TV and wondering which crazy person Jack McCoy is prosecuting this time. Endless parades of talking heads are bad enough, but most of the dialogue here was Rika monologuing, so it was just watching unmoving heads. Re(i)na and Rika walking through the field also got dragged out far too long for my tastes with absolutely nothing of note happening visually. Hopefully next episode will get at least a little more interesting as Rika loses her mind a bit more instead of just narrating the premise.

Preview:

Rika and her mother.

Posted in Higurashi | 10 Comments »

10 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • æ½® says:

    Oh ho ho, I didn’t even know Rei was a continuing series. Glad Seiha is around to clue me in. 萌えの少女達の目を見るとつい笑っちゃうw

  • Anonymous says:

    …and then Rika kills herself because she can’t live in a world without people dying all around her.

    The end, now on to Umineko…

    • Justtv says:

      I seriously hope you’re wrong. Not just because that would be lame, but because it’s an actual possibility, and you would have ruined it for us if it was.

  • æ½® says:

    Nah, I think I’ll keep watching this.

  • Counter Arts says:

    I think they really did have to detail “exactly” what didn’t go wrong so you can realize the natural consequences of each.

  • Amerrii says:

    I think that detailing what didn’t get wrong will be important to lead up to the future events. :D

  • shio says:

    Nothing happened? Isn’t that kind of the point, Aroduc? In every arc there has been a chain of murders, a damn war, someone psychotically ill, and impending doom for Rika. But this world is different, and that very difference is what makes this episode interesting.

    Still, Reina (Not Rena^^) freaking out about a mangled corpse spells out some lurking trouble. It sounds like Reina still had to kill someone for some reason.

  • geo says:

    Mind blowing. Noouuu…. She was in the perfect world and now she has to start the game over again. damn, where is that save file. Start over in a world you know nothing about. Rika must of pissed off fate for foiling it’s plans.

  • kevmangas says:

    It’s so silly and so stupid that Rika died because of that accident when she was biking.
    I mean come on it’s obvious that when you’re on the road you gotta watch out for cars..but no Rika thought that she was immortal since she was saved from takano’s crazyness and just rides off like a rocket on the roads.

    It doesn’t make any sense, Rika finally avoided all that murdering and found the perfect world,no way that she’d just take that many risks on the road..it’s stupid and silly.First episode that really got me mad

    for me this didn’t happened, for me the anime stopped at higurashi rei 01