>>1203405>I've seen the anime. Should I still drop 80 hours into it?The first season of the anime adapts the first six chapters of the VN. Simply put, they tried to condense 60 hours of pacing, build-up and suspense into 9.5, so by comparison it comes across as rushed and lacking subtlety.
The tone is different too. Higurashi the anime is like a slasher movie, it's bloody and scary and the emphasis is on that aspect of the story. Higurashi the VN has that, but it's less about that as a spectacle and more about what it
implies. It's a tragedy that transforms into a story about hope and friendship and victory against overwhelming odds.
Take the last episode of the anime's first season, for example - it's the one where
Rena takes the entire school hostage. Both the VN and the anime stay very tense right up to the part where
Rika tackles Rena to buy Keiichi time to stop the school from exploding, but where the anime stays very tense and scary afterwards, the VN immediately cues
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdEwKBM7jsw (which is royalty-free music the author got from a random Japanese website, by the way), which both draws attention to the fact that
Rika is wholeheartedly fighting for a future with her friends for the first time in god knows how many cycles and flips the tone into something that mirrors the kind of light-hearted one-upmanship the cast's typical club games have (albeit with an undercurrent of
'Rena has gone nuts and is about to blow up the school and kill everyone'). And that whole atmosphere, and Rena remembering it and realising she's
not past the point of no return, is the entire reason the overarching plot of an arc is resolved in a way that
isn't tragic for the first time in 60 hours of VN. The author even cues
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR0SvgLy_D8 (also royalty-free music from the same group) for the fight proper, which is the same music he cued for the water gun fight at the start of the chapter, to further dr
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