Umineko: When They Cry - Episode 2: Turn of the Golden Witch - Visual Novel Informal Club

[fallynleaf]

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Finished a chapter, so here’s another post.

Thoughts on 18:00 'Furniture' and 'People'

The Gohda stuff in this one was interesting to me. The dynamic between him and Shannon and Kanon became a lot more clear. It’ll be interesting to learn more about him after he barely featured at all in the first episode.

Shannon’s “resistance” to Beatrice was also interesting. I’m curious to see if she makes a different decision with the ring this time, because…

We appear to be fully in an alternate canon! I was pretty sure I remembered something like that from Higurashi, so I was expecting it a bit here, but I doubted my own memory so much, I just couldn’t be sure… It’s pretty undeniable after the open conversation about Beatrice during the dinner, though. That was 100% different than the previous episode.

It’s fun to have everyone openly knowing about Beatrice though. Makes for a totally different dynamic this time around with solving the mystery.

But they sure did tease us by cutting to another scene right when Genji was getting grilled about Beatrice…

I haven’t gotten very far at all yet in the next chapter, but there was one small thing I wanted to comment on that has nothing at all to do with Umineko:

Started 22:00 Wedding Ring

The word 鵜呑みにした stood out to me because I actually learned this one from, of all things, a gimmick quiz wrestling match in Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling where they asked the wrestlers “elementary school level Japanese, arithmetic, science, and social studies questions”, and Miyu Yamashita got the question about this word wrong, HAHA.

Here’s what it was (sourced from this fan transcript):

Q.「彼は話を鵜呑みにした。」さて、「鵜呑み」どういう意味ですか？
A.山下「『彼』ってことは男性ですよね……。丸飲み！丸飲み！」
（正解:そのまま信じること）

It was just really funny seeing this one in the wild after seeing it come up as a difficult vocab question for elementary school level Japanese, which an adult pro wrestler totally failed to understand dfjkghdfjkg

[Daisoujou]

Furniture and People chapter

Yeah Gohda is in an interesting position, low on the hierarchy here but he feels (probably rightly) that he’s better at his job than the younger servants. When I think about it it’s pretty much the impression I have of Eva relative to Kraus, too.

I was thinking a lot about Shannon’s resistance and what exactly that means for Beatrice’s power/existence in a literal sense and what she’s here to do, too. Definitely seems like Shannon is onto something. The 黄金郷 talk and what that means for them as furniture, how it’s going to “free” them feels like something to come back to that we can’t fully solve til we get to what the ceremony and 黄金郷 REALLY are or even what there is to the furniture vs person thing. Though clearly by having real human relationships and volition they graduate beyond furniture.

Another little scene where Kinzo is showing that occasionally he can be nice to a person! Someone needs to get him on those chess turn timers, though.

@fallynleaf

But they sure did tease us by cutting to another scene right when Genji was getting grilled about Beatrice…

Yeah that’s cruel, and I’m over here the whole time like “Hey what about the notes though! Read the notes!”

God every time Kraus just responds to everything Natsuhi says telling her to stop talking. . I did “enjoy” the dinner argument a lot, their characters are so well expressed in how they react to these things. I like how Eva just flies into a rage as soon as something unexpected is introduced. She’s really good at controlling things and beating people down until the moment it’s not going exactly how she intended.

[fallynleaf]

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It’s happening…! The Real Umineko… 2!

Gonna put a bit of a content warning for this one, actually (for “Halloween” specifically): there’s a kind of gnarly description of vomiting, though we don’t actually see it, and the audio is basically just dialogue and not super realistic sound effects or anything. But it got to me a bit, so maybe make sure you’re in the right mood for it before starting that chapter…

Finished Wedding Ring and got a decent chunk of the way through 6:00 Halloween

I don’t have many comments from Wedding Ring, though George was starting to annoy me, so I was like, “Can George PLEASE get murdered this episode?? Beatrice please I’m begging ” and then right after I said that to a friend, Shannon might’ve just sealed his fate by accepting the ring, hahaha.

Also, the chapel suddenly getting introduced feels like kind of a huge detail to suddenly just drop into this story?? Like, I feel like it’d be really easy for someone to hide out in there…

Getting to the important stuff, though, we now have a totally different tableau of murders: Krauss and Natsuhi, Eva and Hideyoshi, and Rudolph and Kirie. Time for famously bad mother Rosa to have to step up…

It’s interesting that Beatrice pointed out to Battler that she left their faces undamaged this time so that it left no room to doubt their identities.

As mentioned above, I had a bit of trouble (for emetophobia reasons) reading the description of Rosa finding the bodies, though I do ok with just text descriptions now. But one thing that was kind of interesting to me about this was the use of onomatopoeia in that scene. There were multiple points where it was a bunch of them just smushed together without actual grammar or real vocab or anything. It gave it a more visceral, instinctual revulsion feeling, like kind of tapping into the part of your brain that only processes sensations, not words.

Of course, for me as a language learner, I don’t have that same instinctual awareness of onomatopoeia developed at a young age, so I had to take a bit of extra time to parse it all, but it’s a neat property of onomatopoeia that lets them do that, describing physical states as sounds, basically.

I’m curious how they adapted that in the English translation. I suppose if I ever do replay the whole thing in English, I’ll try to remember to pay attention to that part and see how they describe it. I don’t think it’s really possible to capture that same feeling with English, because even if you try to replace the onomatopoeia with equivalent sound words in English, I don’t think they have that same descriptive power that they do in Japanese.

The meta interactions between Beatrice and Battler are interesting.

Also, it’s kind of funny how the vibe of this murder is so different from the previous episode. Last time, the characters immediately started pointing fingers and doubting each other. This time, it’s just, “yep, it’s definitely Beatrice!”. Though I’m sure the doubting and finger pointing are going to happen in this one, too.

[Daisoujou]

@fallynleaf

I’m curious how they adapted that in the English translation.

It’s been a while since my half finished attempt at reading this in English originally, but as I recall, I wouldn’t expect too much. IIRC the English translation is a little too direct and definitely feels translated. I forget if it literally does this but it’s a real “仕方ない means there’s no helping it” type experience. Which, to be fair I see why it’d end up that way. The whole VN medium is still pretty niche which will already limit the resources put into it, and Umineko having this sort of length on top of that… it’s not hard to imagine someone probably not being paid nearly enough just being glad to reach the end of translating this thing at all.

Same sections

遺産分配 solved! Rosa wins! Hooray!

@fallynleaf

Also, the chapel suddenly getting introduced feels like kind of a huge detail to suddenly just drop into this story?? Like, I feel like it’d be really easy for someone to hide out in there…

Very true. I suppose there was always a whole rest of the island (with the woods the kids were warned away from and etc) so hiding places were never scarce, but yeah, it’s surprising suddenly learning this place has always been there, heh.

The hard information denial is so frustrating (in a good way). We never see anything that happens with the adults after they’re questioning Genji about Beatrice’s identity, then we cut to them all in the chapel for who knows what reason, all having changed their minds so hard they are acknowledging her as a witch and surrendering. So much for Eva’s master plan of saying no to everything. And everyone died in that same place, except Rosa, who somehow slipped out of the group alive. Actually, with her being confused about the use of the chapel as a whole… is that a lie, or was the previous scene we saw not literally happening as presented?

Very interesting when Kinzo says “私の守りは完璧だ。前回のような無様は晒さぬぞ。” as if he is referring to chapter 1. I do wonder if it’s something totally different from his past, though. I’m also very curious why the chapel is said to be so important to Kinzo. He’s not really the type, which definitely means there’s some attachment to it from long before.

I like how we see Rosa’s genuine concern and immediate running off to check on Maria’s safety, followed by a lot of description of how much she hates what Maria keeps in her bag and fought over it. There’s pretty much the microcosm of Rosa in one tiny section, not so inhuman she doesn’t care but she still turns awful pretty quickly.

Anyway it’s very interesting how much more dramatic and showy these deaths are. The others were just smashed up and piled in a room but here there’s a whole big presentation for the bodies. I also have to wonder where all the candy and decorations come from (besides magic ). This one requires way more preplanning than the previous, and there’s even the way it lines up with Maria’s Halloween fixation.

Also, if you haven’t thought of it yet, remember the lines written on the character screen change a little for the dead people! There are new messages there.

@fallynleaf

The meta interactions between Beatrice and Battler are interesting.

I really like them, the way these new murders are designed specifically around some of Battler’s past objections. And from the impression I’ve had in my past read, this is in fact the REAL real Umineko

[fallynleaf]

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Finished Halloween, and don’t think I have any more comments on that.

Small comment a little ways into 6:43 Jessica and Kanon that doesn’t have much to do with anything at all in this chapter

I dunno why this only just now occurred to me, but I looked at the epitaph again to see if I had somehow acquired new relevant information or something that would make it make more sense, and I looked at the “sweetfish” part, and it made me think of Kumasawa’s mackerel jokes with the desserts… I guess maybe that stood out to me more this time around because that detail came up a second time in this episode, which made it feel like it was being repeated for a reason.

If there is a meaningful connection there, I don’t know what it even means, lol, but I thought I’d throw it out there.

Since according to my friend, it is possible to solve the mystery after episode 2 (albeit extremely difficult to) I figure all relevant information must be included somewhere in here…

[fallynleaf]

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Finished Jessica and Kanon

Wow, lots of new mechanics introduced here. Beatrice summons a goat demon of some sort, and then it turns out Kanon has a sword he can summon at will?? I’d kind of wondered when we were going to see the servants using some sort of powers, because Shannon seems to be doing something like that in the opening song for the VN… Guess we’re finally starting to get some of that now!

Also noooo I wanted George to be one of the people to die tonight… Now we have to put up with him for longer .

Kanon did manage to save Shannon, though, come to think about it… for now, at least.

Started 6:50 New Rule

Interestingly, the first thing I did when this chapter started was attempt to check the character list to see the new notes about Kanon and Jessica, but it hadn’t updated yet with any new information. I wonder if Battler has to discover the bodies, first?

Kinzo showing no emotion whatsoever in response to hearing that the first six people (including almost all of his children!) had died… oof.

This part made me laugh because my first thought when Kinzo talked about 42 being the answer to the universe was to wonder if he was a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fan. Surely not, I thought!

I looked up 42 to see if Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was what started all of that (and to double check the publication date, which, yes, Kinzo could have actually read it, though it strikes me as quite a bit different from his favorite ameriboo genre, the humble western), and I found out that it’s apparently a whole thing in Kabbalistic tradition. So that’s probably where he actually got it from lol and not the nerdy sci-fi novel. Alas!

Kinzo deciding to write his will just now is really interesting… I suppose with only Rosa left, the infighting among his children over the inheritance is basically solved, as you mentioned earlier, Daisoujou. Though knowing Kinzo, he wouldn’t even leave it to his children anyway lol.

I guess we’ll find out (?) at some point, though not right now because the VN loves to tease us, so we didn’t get to see the rest of that scene.

[Daisoujou]

I remember finding that 42 line odd when I first read as well, haha, but I didn’t look into it at the time. Thanks!

I keep just reading back basically everything you did when I see a post here, but things kept coming up so I just read the Jessica and Kanon section and had to stop, today’s been a mess.

Jessica and Kanon

Yeah I couldn’t recall exactly when the goat showed up, haha. So much is just taken for granted as normal and presented out of nowhere here. Goat demons and anime girl demons exist in this world, now.

There certainly are differing ways one could portray Asmodaeus.

Anyway a lot of this is the conclusion of the arc we’ve seen this chapter with Kanon and Jessica – they don’t have the same formal relationship as Shannon and George, but despite ending in tragedy, it allows Kanon to indulge in real human desires and transcend being furniture… however literal or what exactly that actually means.

Mostly it has me wondering, the way that the “two who are close” die trying to protect one another and how much Beatrice enjoys that – what really happened in that closed room with Eva and Hideyoshi in episode 1? Their bodies were presented as if they were caught off guard, not even in the same room, but were they actually fighting… maybe not “like this” strictly, haha, but similarly defending each other?

We also know, at least here, Beatrice is summoning others rather than directly killing by her own hand. Dunno if that means anything, but feels worth remarking on.

[fallynleaf]

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Finished New Rule

Don’t know if I really have much insight to share or anything, but I’m enjoying Battler and Beatrice’s game, haha. The new rule with the red text is interesting, and it was fun how Battler managed to turn it around and use it to get Beatrice to actually reveal stuff, like the fact that the letter she gave Maria was tampered with. It’s neat, too, how she can come up with creative ways to word things so that she’s still able to answer in red.

Maybe the high scrutiny of specific words and such is extra fun to read as a language learner because I feel like we already do a lot of this in the process of looking things up…

[Daisoujou]

End of New Rule

Yeah I really like the existence of the red truth. One of the many things this VN is doing is playing with mystery novels and how they function, and the whole unusual structure here turns it on its head in interesting ways. For once things can be said to be the objective truth, no tricks if you pay careful attention to the exact wording. And Battler isn’t even trying to find the exact truth, just any possible explanation.

It also is indeed a weird contradictory position he’s in, as they touch on at the end. He’s going to deny magic, but he doesn’t want anyone to be the culprit either. I guess the ultimate good outcome for Battler is some mystery person he doesn’t know doing the murders, or Beatrice but as a normal human.

This is all ignoring how he’s in the magic dimension while a witch “talks in red” and, as we saw at the end of Episode 1, does things like magically show him replays of the murders while he denies magic, which I’m not actually hung up on for the sake of rolling with the story in good faith but it is pretty funny.

[fallynleaf]

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Been pretty smooth sailing for a while now. I haven’t been adding very many new words, so I have to read a lot more to keep up with the flow of Anki cards.

Got a decent chunk of the way through 7:30 A Suspect

Some interesting things in this! The other characters finally discovered Jessica’s body, but Kanon’s is nowhere to be found. I actually checked the character list immediately after they found Jessica (before the text had revealed that Kanon’s body was missing), and sure enough, Jessica is now marked dead, but Kanon is greyed out, and it says he’s “missing”. The next line tells us: “The witch erased his corpse for fun.”

So Beatrice absolutely has the power to just totally manipulate the crime scenes like this, huh… It makes me wonder about Kinzo’s death and such in the previous episode (actually, it seems like this time a golden butterfly sneaked into Kinzo’s room on Rosa’s back, so I wonder if maybe something similar to that happened last time with Natsuhi, and that’s how Kinzo got killed).

Also, Beatrice manipulating the actual details of the universe by changing the number of master keys… It’s fascinating to me that she’s so concerned about creating these locked room scenarios, yet seemingly is actually magically incapable of actually making them for real (as Battler managed to prove with the chapel one).

This chapter introduces a new frustration, which is seeing the characters reach a conclusion that we the reader knows is totally wrong because we saw what actually happened, but being totally powerless to do anything about it, just like the ghosts of Kanon and Jessica…

I’m a bit surprised that no one brought up the point that the master key could’ve extremely easily been taken from Kanon’s body after his death and then used to lock the door, but maybe Battler is about to bring this up right where I stopped reading lol.

[Daisoujou]

Congrats, super glad to hear it’s going well for you! The long term reading is paying off I’ve felt pretty good about my ability to pick it up and basically read the 15 or 20k characters needed to catch up in one session, too.

Roughly where you are in A Suspect

I know everything about Kinzo with his kids is always the worst, but when Rosa was thinking about how he’s probably freaking out… because the 礼拝堂 was dirtied, yeah, she knows his priorities. It’s nice that Rosa has this moment of thinking she has to stand in as parent for Battler and George, and also I recoiled at the moment she said it, knowing what we’ve seen of her parenting so far

You know, I guess we really don’t know if the culprit of episode 1 and 2 are the same or not. It’s one of the fun/frustrating things about how this VN is structured. It’s unusual and we don’t, so far, get very clear answers about what exactly these alternate events are. The keys can change, what else can?

I believe I mentioned before from my reading (up to a ways into episode 5) that there was basically one big reveal I had seen. Mostly all that time just piled even more mysteries. Well there’s one thing about this episode standing out to me based on that, and I hope I remember to mention it much later, heh. I haven’t solved anything but it’s just a weird detail.

I like how suspicion being thrown all around leads to silly discussions where Gouda and Kumasawa are both trying to explain that Jessica didn’t like them enough, haha. Rosa turned into a tyrant pointing her gun around way faster than Natsuhi did! And Rosa is having way more fun being the one with the power. I guess that tracks with the way she was always the youngest child in the inferior position. Battler is great though, the way he wants to believe in everyone being good. There’s a lovable naivety to him, talking about how Kumasawa and Gouda care too much about making people happy to be the culprits.

[fallynleaf]

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Finished 13:00 Wolves and Sheep Puzzle

Battler managed to clear Kanon’s name (and his meta self got Beatrice to say it in red), though the construction of this one still leaves me a bit baffled…

I feel like unlike how my estimation of Natsuhi grew over most of the last episode, my estimation of Rosa is only worsening lol . Natsuhi definitely made her mistakes (even some similar ones), but Rosa seems really extreme about all of this… Definitely does not give me a good feeling for the children’s safety…

Then, the scene in the kitchen… Oh boy, I feel like this one turned a lot that we think we knew on its head.

Kanon came back, only we knew already that he was dead so it couldn’t be him for real, and sure enough, he turned out to be a bunch of butterflies that were impersonating him.

Well, my earlier thought about the theme of doubles turned out to be on the money! I guess this means that we can’t really trust that anyone is who they appear to be at any given moment.

It seems like “Kanon’s” main goal was to attempt to sow discord by getting the servants to plot against Rosa, which likely would’ve fed Rosa’s own suspicions and made things go very badly for everyone… I guess that explains the reason for the simulated locked room murder in Jessica’s room, since that planted the seeds of Rosa’s doubt, with seemingly the intent being for “Kanon” to then incite the servants against her.

The first thing I did when “Kanon” showed up was check the characters list, haha, but his description was unchanged the whole time. Interestingly, Nanjo’s and Kumasawa’s did update without needing Battler to see their corpses, so I guess something else is determining the timing of when that updates…

Nanjo’s character description says that he “died in the servant room, his throat slit by a sharp blade or something similar.” And then it says “but this alone isn’t enough”. Kumasawa’s description has the same first paragraph, and then it says “finishing touches yet to come”. I imagine that’s because their deaths don’t match the next ones listed in the epitaph? Which should be “gouge the head and kill” and “gouge the chest and kill”.

I don’t imagine that reporting these deaths to Rosa is going to go particularly well…

Another question I have in all of this is Kinzo. What did that butterfly that hitched a ride on Rosa’s back do??

I gotta say, seeing all of the overt magic is definitely making it a little hard for me to believe in a human murderer… I don’t think I’d have Battler’s stubborn fortitude in resisting the urge to acknowledge Beatrice’s powers lol. All the deaths we’ve directly seen were definitely accomplished by the use of magic. It’s kind of interesting because it seems like the actual crimes themselves were “yep, definitely this was done by magic”, but the crime scenes are constructed by curiously mundane means, like by covertly swapping out Maria’s key to pretend like the chapel was totally locked the whole time.

Actually, I wonder if Shannon’s or Genji’s key got stolen/swapped out while they were in Kinzo’s room? Like maybe that’s what the butterfly was in there to do, or something. I dunno.

This chapter definitely introduced more questions than answers, lol.

[Daisoujou]

Wolves and Sheep

ダンボールにでも隠れながらコソコソと近づいてきて

We’ve got Metal Gear references, haha.

I like how Gohda wants to arrange their canned food the best he can; him still being all about food presentation is cute.

@fallynleaf

I feel like unlike how my estimation of Natsuhi grew over most of the last episode, my estimation of Rosa is only worsening lol .

Yeah Natsuhi got pushed to the extremes but felt like she was trying to save the maximum number of people she could consider “safe” and she was also, like, fair about it given the circumstantial evidence? It’s not exactly virtuous that she felt ready to shoot Maria but it shows she’d turn on anyone (other than maybe Jessica) if the evidence pointed that way, hahaha. With Rosa there’s some logic to her suspecting the servants but it’s also gotta be intentional how it’s replicating the master and servant dynamic here. She does begin by pointing out everyone in the room is a real Ushiromiya once she gets rid of the servants. And you can’t help but think she would prefer, or at least absolutely doesn’t care, if more deaths happen among the servants. Once they do, that narrows down the suspect list. And the way she points the gun at Battler when making her point feels very unhinged. Like I said last time; she’s been in the inferior position of the family her whole life, and she herself comments on having power now.

@fallynleaf

I gotta say, seeing all of the overt magic is definitely making it a little hard for me to believe in a human murderer…

Yeah especially on my first time through this stuff I remember finding the structure kinda confusing. I find it kinda compelling in how odd and vague it is, but it’s like… people talk a lot about solving this but what am I even meant to be solving? In a sense we’re watching what happens, coming up with a solution would first involve choosing at least some scenes to be misleading/untrue in their presentation. And maybe they are? At a point I feel like part of the mystery is figuring out where the mystery even lies, haha. If we deny magic, how much of that scene happened? As written there were multiple witnesses to that murder, but they witnessed butterflies and are certainly just acting as if it was magic, so…

Whatever it is with the spiders and how much Shannon knows is very curious, but not much more I can think to say beyond that.

I’m glad Gohda gets to do more than last time. I found his punching sprite really funny. And while everyone else is doing some magic or Genji’s crazy knife handling, he just tackles the witch/demon/kanon. Love it. Speaking of, I actually wanted to comment on that line when they’re in the kitchen and it says 源次はそれを、慣れた手つきで袖の内側に隠し持つ when he’s handling the knife, but the fight draws more attention to it. I have to wonder what’s going on with his history. Kinzo’s personal stabber, I guess.

[fallynleaf]

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Starting to approach jpdb’s 248,507 character count for episode 2… After I’m done with this current set of TJPW translations, I might try to make a push to finish the rest of the episode, or at least finish the main portion of it, as I’m sure there will be more extras at the end. Maybe if I have time/energy, that’d be a good readathon activity, though I’m not going to commit to anything.

Finished 13:17 Devil’s Proof

I dunno if I have much to report on here. I was a bit surprised to see Battler kind of give up and decide to just pin it all on Beatrice after all. I suppose he probably doesn’t give up permanently, or otherwise the VN would probably all be over, haha.

I’m not really sure what to make of the key situation. I can’t think of any more possible explanations besides the ones already considered.

I’m curious about whatever’s happening with Kinzo, since it’s been quite a while since we’ve heard from him. Also curious about what is going to happen to the missing bodies.

I also started 18:00 Fleeting Resistance, but only really got through the very first scene.

[Daisoujou]

Read up to the same point. We’ve hit a good pace now; reading more really has helped speed this up over time. Excited to see how that keeps developing.

Spoilers Devil's Proof + that first scene a little

Yeah ultimately I think Rosa has gotten too crazed for Battler to really have any answer other than magic, haha. That scene with the group splitting up mirrors the way Natsuhi kicked people out, except Rosa can’t even feel bad (or even act like it) about the collateral damage anymore. It’s all “who would trust furniture” right at the end, even though even if she believes that, there’s George leaving too.

The way they have to constantly assert that it’s doing their servants a favor that they get to be servants (and servants plucked from an orphanage? ), so frustrating haha.

Yeah I’m light on mystery solving theories too; I guess a witch did it. It’s sweet seeing Battle finally protect Maria from Rosa this time when he joins her side.

We even get some better George here it looks like. Setting aside the relationship itself, I do think he’s putting himself in more danger to stay with Shannon, and the way he’s leading them around now might be kind of fruitless but it’s way more productive and better handled than anything Rosa has done, heh.

Yeah Kinzo hasn’t been shown in quite a while. Given the ritualistic nature of the murders, I think he’s theoretically not dead? It’s been looser about following and displaying the pattern cause bodies keep disappearing, so I’m less confident, but…

Everything about how over the top Beatrice’s gloating is this chapter is fantastic for me. We got the red truth YOU ARE INCOMPETENT in Japanese this week! Battler objectively factually is 無能! And triple Beatrice!

Oh! And Shannon hearing about the spider thing from Kumasawa really caught my attention. Kumasawa has never played a very big part, and I’m really curious just how much she knows. We already know she has a tendency to stand back and watch things while saying there’s nothing she can do about it; it would not surprise me if she has some sort of important information about this stuff that she doesn’t share.

[fallynleaf]

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I have reached the end of the main content of episode 2! Hey, jpdb’s estimate was pretty close! I have absolutely no idea how long the extras are going to take, though, and I learned my lesson from last time, so I’m saving them for another day. I’ll share my thoughts on the episode overall and my best guess for who did it after I’ve completed everything the episode has to offer.

Racked up a pretty good amount of new words in Anki (currently have 160 new cards in there, which is 16 days’ worth), so I might take a short break to work on other stuff before finishing off the extras.

Here are some thoughts, split up by chapter as much as I can remember:

18:00 Fleeting Resistance

A lot happened in this one! Shannon did the thing she does in the opening song!

There were 6 goat demons; I wonder if that number is significant?

Also, I noticed it mentioned that the butterflies couldn’t move as effectively in the rain. That made me think about Hideyoshi’s shower… I wonder if he was trying to ward them off with the water?

This made me laugh because Beatrice is literally invoking the “would you still love me if I was a worm?” meme:

Yay I finally got my wish and George is dead now!

21:00 Surrender

Natsuhi’s room once again appeared to have been warded, or at least it had the marks on the door again. But the demons were able to get in nonetheless.

Also, seeing as we saw one literally phase through the door and also prevent the locking mechanism from working, these locked room mysteries don’t feel like much of a mystery… but then that begs the question of: why did Beatrice need to cheat the mundane way with the chapel?

My leading theory is still that she needs people to believe in her magic in order for it to work on them. So before she could create a legitimate locked room mystery, she had to create an illegitimate one that could make them think she could do it, first.

Also, we found out that the order of the deaths doesn’t need to follow the order of the actual nights in the epitaph! That honestly kind of surprised me. It feels more arbitrary than I was expecting…

23:30 Resurrection

Found out that おっぱいソムリエ has a pixiv dictionary entry thanks to this game… Thanks for that one, Yomitan…

Kinzo finally got his reunion with Beatrice, though it was rather short-lived. And Battler finally got some answers, which were apparently convincing enough, Beatrice was able to turn him into “furniture”… Would be great if we could hear those answers!

I was kind of surprised by this because I was fully expecting the whole game to be Battler never giving in to her despite the odds, but this one fully was Beatrice’s victory, huh?

Alright, roll credits! We’re done with another one!!

…huh?

23:59 Banquet of the Witch

Wait there’s more???

Oof, a rather degrading end for Battler… Nice of the game to kindly provide us a commemorative photo of that in the main menu lol.

Learning lots of useful vocabulary this chapter!

…IT’S STILL GOING AFTER THIS??

I feel so bad for poor Maria . As soon as Rosa took the gold ingot and then Maria couldn’t keep up with her, I kept thinking, “Why not dump the gold and carry your daughter??” But of course that thought could never occur to Rosa until it was too late…

Lots more direct supernatural stuff this episode than the last one. We’re fully outside the realm of a normal human murder. I’m curious to see where it goes from here because I can’t really think of what could happen next in either the main onscreen story or the meta-story… It feels pretty definitively dead-end-ish. But I dunno, maybe the extras will change that. Guess we’ll have to see.

[Daisoujou]

And done! Other than tea parties.

Hmm

It does feel like there’s something you’re onto about the importance of believing in the magic. After the first, more than anything is introducing the concepts and Beatrice only makes her appearance at the end, I think this episode functions to show us what happens when people absolutely lose and magic wins. By the end everyone accepts Beatrice, and even in the early deaths we see the parents all acknowledge her, and we get a very overtly magic finale out of it.

Like you noted, deaths were out of order. It could just be that they aren’t truly sacrifices that count until the finishing touches are done to the bodies, but I wonder if there’s some bigger hint to why they were out of order. Feels like there must be… I’m not sure how to doubt the order they died as we were directly shown them chronologically pretty directly, but I wonder.

There’s definitely a lot going on with whatever happened between Kinzo and Beatrice – he’s always dramatically sad about it but this time in particular before she appeared seemed a little less grandiose and more heartfelt about him having done… something awful. It’s not hard to see him doing something bad lol. Along those lines, the way Shannon talking about love riles Beatrice up so much feels connected. There is the rumor about romantic involvement between her and Kinzo, which also feels easy if there’s any truth to that to see why she has a cynical view on relationships.

The Rosa stuff hurts cause she’s still making bad decisions to the end, and then Maria is so sweet and accepts that her mom kind of sucks, and she loves her anyway. Heavy stuff for this little child. And we see a peek at how Rosa has been seemingly miserable her whole life which, yeah, not hard to see how the family position stuff does that, so it’s kind of just generational pain ruining things for everyone.

Feel like there were a lot of more little details I wanted to mention but I’ll see if more comes to mind by the time we read the tea parties.

[fallynleaf]

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Finished the first extra! It was 7,852 characters, for reference.

Spoilers

This one lays the generational trauma theme on pretty thick, huh? Honestly, I think this was the first time that getting on Beatrice’s bad side (or maybe this is getting on her good side?) felt truly, genuinely terrifying to me. Like, the murders are bad enough, but at least when it’s over, it’s over, right? Wrong! She can in fact kill you repeatedly, and also feed your family members to you, and you can spit them out over and over again, but the goat demon’s hand never tires, and they can bring the fork back up to your mouth as many times as they want.

Battler seems to have woken up, though, and I guess he’s able to retract his acknowledgement of Beatrice somehow? He’s back in the game, at least.

Though, this line from Battler to Maria… “それから真里亞。自分を食べて、何てセリフは十年早ぇぜ。ただし十年経ったら必ず俺に言えよ、約束だぞ.”

I feel like I have to be reading this wrong, but how else am I supposed to take this??

Oh, one note about the banquet: when Beatrice told Rosa she could eat as much of the salad as she wanted, it felt like a callback to me to the very first scene in this episode, when George and Shannon went on their aquarium date and were overly conscious of themselves while eating. That’s probably not really a meaningful detail, but it was an interesting way to sort of bookend the episode.

And with that, the tea party comes to an end.

Roll credits… 2!

But it’s still not over yet, of course.

I guess we might want to get the new thread up soon? Just realized that’ll be necessary, haha.

[Daisoujou]

Oh yeah – I’ll probably be a few days before reading the extras again, but I’ll put up a thread again. Kept slipping my mind.

Umineko: When They Cry - Episode 3: Banquet of the Golden Witch - Visual Novel Informal Club

Home Thread Here! [Banquet] Pace Everyone is welcome to read at their own pace and post any impressions, theories, or questions at any time within this thread. Those of us starting together may loosely informally stick together, but please feel free to chime in any time! Guidelines Please use spoiler tags or collapse where needed and describe, indirectly, what point in the episode they are a spoiler for! We’re collapsing a lot of writing into one thread. When asking for help, do your best to…

[fallynleaf]

(261,270 characters in (542,398 total))

Finished the second extra! This one was just 4,266 characters. I had a busy week last week and didn’t have time to sit down and play the VN for the unknown amount of time it would take to finish off the episode, so I was putting off finishing it, but I finally had time tonight, and it ended up taking me under an hour to finish, haha.

jpdb has episode 2 at 248,507 characters, so there is once again a discrepancy between their count and the texthooker’s count.

Crunching some numbers, I have added 5,115 words total to Anki from Umineko. Checking back after my episode 1 update, it looks like 3,476 of those are from episode 1, so I added just 1,639 new words from episode 2, which explains my speed working through it, haha.

5,115 is roughly 21% of the 24,738 total unique words in the VN (according to jpdb).

Thoughts after the second extra

I guess we see here how Battler got revitalized in order to make his grand entrance in the tea party extra.

It’s interesting that another character has entered the metagame fray. We learn Bernkastel’s motivation for helping Battler, which is that she was once caught in a similar fate at the hands of Lambdadelta. Predictably, I’m intrigued by their relationship… It’s kind of cute that Lambda kind of doesn’t want Bern to lose to Beatrice because she wants to be the one to beat her personally.

The chess and rock paper scissors analogies were interesting. I’ve heard Beatrice’s chess style described as the “berserker” strategy before. Not that that really helps me out that much, haha.

Still kind of have nothing as far as real ideas go for solving the mystery. This extra hinted that the secret lies in Beatrice going overboard this time, but that’s not really helpful enough…

Well, I’ll try my best to solve it anyway.

Some interesting new menu items, too.

I have a few thoughts on those:

First, the characters: on the witch side, we have actual relationship charts now! Beatrice has the Seven Sisters of Purgatory listed beneath her in the same sense that Kinzo has Genji, Shannon, and Kanon beneath him. “Advanced-level furniture”, the description calls them.

Kinzo is now described as a “self-taught human mage”. The description says he specializes in summoning and barriers, “so perhaps it is fitting to call him a summoner instead”.

Genji was apparently created by Kinzo “to serve him and him alone with complete loyalty”, and Shannon was “created without borrowing the power of demons”, and she was “given a very rare and precious thing: a heart”. Shannon possesses an immense, “mage-class” level of power in barriers alone. Kanon is the last furniture created by Kinzo (“thus far”) and has “flawless specs” and was also given a heart, “but it was much weaker than Shannon’s”. Kinzo gave Kanon the power to fight and protect, but he “hasn’t yet matured very far and is unable to control his own power and speed”.

And now Battler and Maria are also listed alongside Kinzo on the witch side! Battler is described as “inherited the black blood from Kinzo”. He inherited the massive resistance to magical power that Kinzo was born with, and apparently it’s still on the rise. “Perhaps it’s understandable why Beatrice tried to crush it as soon as possible.”

Maria also inherited the black blood, but unlike Kinzo, she was gifted with natural talent, though her power is still weak and she’s no more than an apprentice, though she’s skilled with enchantments, which bestow magical power upon objects. There are some obvious candidates for those, like the charms she gave out, but it makes me wonder a bit about that rose…

I’m really curious about that school or institute or whatever it was that Shannon and Kanon came from, as well as what it means that they were “created”. Like, were they literally generated out of thin air, or were they actual humans at some point? It seems like probably the latter, as even Bern was a human before she became a witch, apparently.

(In the human side of the menu, try killing Beatrice repeatedly. It’s really funny, haha.)

The tips page has information about the golden butterfly brooch. “In order to mediate the relationship between the opposite sex, it favorably edits all their fate numbers and mediates their relationship. Since it is nothing more than a favorable edit, large differences can be seen in its effects depending on the individual.” It’s interesting that it specifies “opposite sex”… are gay people immune, then? lol

It goes on to say that “if there is good will from the other partner in addition, the effects will become even more dramatic. Ironically, the more dramatic the effects are, the less of a need there was for such a brooch in the first place.”

So it seems like George and Shannon were already inclined to like each other before Shannon used the brooch, which made it work even more dramatically for them. It also reinforces my theory that magic needs some genuine belief in order to work, like you couldn’t magically make love happen if there was no love there in the first place. But of course if there was already genuine love, why bother with the brooch?

I feel like there’s something else going on with Kanon that we’ll find out later on because his situation with Jessica doesn’t feel as straightforward.

Alright, now with all of the content from this chapter perused, here is my revised BIG THEORY for who did it:

Spoilers!

Alright, like I said earlier, I feel if anything further away from solving the mystery now than I was after the last episode… It feels hard to believe that any of this could have been done by a human.

It also feels hard to imagine why anyone would want to do this.

I guess that’s kind of where I ended up landing. I asked myself, “Who would possibly want to do this?” and the only answer I could reach was Genji. Not for the reason Rosa suspected him, though.

Why? Because Kinzo wants it, so he’s doing it for him. Maybe he’s trying to answer Kinzo’s wish of seeing Beatrice’s smile one last time. Maybe like Shannon and Kanon, he longs for the release from furniture-hood that the Golden Land promises.

I can’t explain any of the (later) locked room situations besides magic, and I’m not going to try to. I’m answering with my heart this time.

I guess if we’re going with chess metaphors, Genji to me feels like an early-game pawn of Kinzo’s that survived long enough that it managed to advance to the end row and became a queen. And I feel like unlike Shannon and Kanon, we don’t really see any real sense of resistance from him toward Beatrice’s plans. But that pawn vibe also muddies the waters a bit with imagining him as some grand mastermind. At the end of the day, he feels like a person who is repeatedly used by others…

My dark horse suspect is Rudolph. He and Kirie are the only two who were killed in the very first batch of murders both times, so we haven’t even seen how he acts during the actual course of the murders. My reasons for suspecting him are twofold: 1) there was that cryptic scene with him early in this episode that didn’t really come into play anywhere else that I noticed, and 2) if Battler inherited great magical resistance from Kinzo, then there is a missing link in that lineage that feels like it might be relevant…

Plus, Rudolph being the murderer would make for a pretty dramatic confrontation with Battler if we’re talking purely in terms of “which answer would be the most narratively satisfying?”

Ah, I guess my reasons were threefold…

In any case, this is kind of a shot in the dark at this point because we’ve honestly barely had any time with Rudolph. But I’m no longer dissuaded away from suspecting dead people since we already saw a magical double of Kanon (though I dunno, maybe his furniture status makes that possible in a way that it wouldn’t be for normal humans…).

I guess we’ll see how things unfold in episode 3?

Sadly I don’t have access to episode 2 of the screenplay at the moment, so I probably won’t get to watch that before starting the next episode this time! Alas!