Higurashi When They Cry Hou – Ch. 5 Meakashi Review

7 minutes of reading / By /

Meakashi is the fifth entry into the Higurashi series and returns to being part of the main plot, unlike the pseudo side story that we experienced last time. It takes place one year before the events of the first three titles while changing up who we play as. This time around, we perceive the story through the eyes of Shion Sonozaki. She is the twin sister of a successor belonging to a very powerful family, who have for all intents and purposes banished her from the main household and the town of Hinamizawa itself. We start off in a high-class Catholic school that Shion is being forcibly kept in. Being a person that is hard to control, she has been planning to escape from her confinement in order to return to her hometown near Hinamizawa.

Whether or not her plan goes off without a hitch, I’ll leave it to you to find out, but she does eventually return to the city of Okinomiya. Given how much influence her family has around the area, it becomes impossible for Shion to freely roam around. This is where her twin sister Mion comes into play, and the relationship between the two of them becomes far more fleshed out than we have previously seen. It was both heartwarming and surprising seeing how well they get along after all their interactions seen from the eyes of the previous protagonist, Keiichi. Shion herself also grows to be more than a slightly cockier pallet swap of Mion. She is a fascinating character whose relatively insensitive nature has you questioning if you should be rooting for her as she is often in the wrong.

As Shion is picking a fight with a group of hooligans one faithful day, she encounters Satoshi Houjou. That is a name that should be very familiar to all of us by now. Up until now, he has been a very mysterious figure who we knew little about outside of his role as the older brother of Satoko and a person that suddenly disappeared. It is pretty interesting seeing what life was like for the main cast of characters while he was around and witnessing the type of person he was. Satoshi even has his own character sprite. That last bit is a strange thing to even mention, but if you read my review for the third chapter, you’d know it was kind of immersion-breaking to me when his uncle didn’t possess one.

The first couple of hours are rather peaceful, yet not what I’d call a slice of life like the first three title’s openings. By this point, it isn’t much of a spoiler that Satoshi has a pretty awful family life that is full of abuse and neglect. However, Shion has taken quite the liking to him ever since they met, so seeing how she handles Satoshi slowly but surely cracking under pressure adds more drama to that already tense situation. Her heart is in the right place, yet she’s a character that reaches very peculiar conclusions to things and damned if anyone can ever change her mind. I would love to talk about Shion’s thought process and character growth in further depth, though I’ll have to leave it at that as a huge part of this title’s value is understanding things from her eyes.

You can see a good chunk of the characters grow throughout and behave differently than they do just one year before Keiichi arrives. Around the halfway mark is when the inevitable happens and Satoshi disappears. This causes Shion to try her hardest to find him. As we all know from playing the prior games, he remains missing. It is the part where she uses her Sonozaki name and privilege to get closer to pivotal characters. Much closer than Keiichi could get. Eventually, Keiichi moves into Hinamizawa and bumps into Shion as he was shopping around its nearby city. Shion was still picking fights with people, and due to that, Keiichi steps in to “defend” her in much the way Satoshi did. By that point, she had all but given up on researching Satoshi’s whereabouts. Feeling the pain of his loss once more thanks to how similar Keiichi is, Shion once again ramps up her efforts to get behind the disappearance.

This second part of the story is weaker than the first in some aspects. While we did know Satoshi would disappear, that was just the ending. Everything prior was new content. With the second half, it reuses a ton of the same dialogue. Sure we witness it from a new perspective as Shion works behind the scenes of events where we didn’t even know she was there, but it is a retread of old ground nonetheless. I found myself power reading my way past a fair bit of text instead of absorbing every word like I usually do with the excellent writing in this series. There is new content, of course, but revisiting these situations again causes a feeling of the story really stretching out these events. We’ve had dozens of hours invested to reach this point, and with the main focus being Satoshi, this chapter nearly felt like filler with the shoulder shrug of an ending they give us.

Meakashi doesn’t really advance the plot. It uncovers quite a bit of interesting things that happened behind the scenes and explains how previous events occurred, but don’t expect anything mind-blowing like where the syringe comes from or the curse/killings. This entry mostly suffers from the expectations they implanted with the outro in chapter three, making it sound as if most of our questions would be answered and it would be our last chance to embrace our theories. To further increase expectations, they made chapter 4 into a side story to increase their time writing this entry. I’m not going to shoehorn it and say I wasn’t disappointed, though calling it a bad read is a massive stretch. It is the weakest title so far, in my opinion, yet one that still manages to retain one’s interest with its intrigue and subject matter.

This chapter introduced a considerable amount of new music to coincide alongside the old tunes. It was a nice injection of content to breathe in more life to the world they’ve created, which can range from happy & cheeky to incredibly oppressing. As you may have noticed from that picture a few paragraphs back, Keiichi has finally received his own character sprite, so we finally have an idea how he looks like. In terms of new content, this entry has added far more than any of the previous titles. For the first time, however, it is lacking the Afterparty outro where all characters recount the events of that chapter like some kind of book club. In its stead, we got a message from the developer asking us a rather philosophical question and how we perceive the actions we took throughout. I enjoyed it, though I hope the Afterparty returns in chapter 6 alongside the developer’s messages.

In total, this took me sixteen hours to fully complete. It is as long as other entries, though not as impactful due to knowing what will happen from finish to end. You will likely not be able to guess how they happened, but the main plot points are set in stone, and the answers to crucial things remain unexplained. It is more of an emotional journey than one that sets out to unravel the important events. Meakashi is the chapter that is most consistently unnerving. When things rev up, they really go full throttle on the darker aspects of this franchise, and Shion has the most interesting character growth out of anyone so far. It also contains far fewer grammatical errors in its script than chapter 4, which was a concern of mine as mistakes became more common as the series progressed. Meakashi offers a first-hand view of many events we’ve wondered about. It feels like the beginning of the end as it wraps some things up, though it makes little progress to the overarching mystery. Seeing there are three more chapters to go is a little worrying as they may seriously bloat out this otherwise compelling mystery, yet as of finishing this chapter, it still retains my full attention.

Rating:
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