六軒島へようこそ！
What’s this?
This is the home thread for the the visual novel Umineko: When They Cry. See the visual novel home thread if you need an explanation of visual novels themselves. Umineko is a mystery(?), or maybe a fantasy(?) surrounding a series of deaths on a wealthy family’s private island.
Why do this?
If you trust the opinions on the internet, Umineko is special. It’s consistently rated as one of the finest among all visual novels, and is the kind of work people seem to spend the rest of their lives thinking and talking about. I’ve heard several people praising it as one of the best pieces of writing they’ve ever come across, period.
Format
A few of us have been chatting about reading this together for a long time, and having them onboard is the reason I’m confident making this. This is going to be entirely informal and self-paced, perhaps people can roughly pace themselves off others if they desire, but I believe any tight structure is doomed to fall apart, because Umineko is LONG. JPDB puts it at 2,255,029 characters, meaning at the VN club’s normal 25k per week it takes just short of 2 years. There’s no sugarcoating that going in; seeing this through is likely to be the biggest commitment you ever make with a piece of media in this language.
We’ll work through the details, but threads can likely be split by part because Umineko comes in 8 parts (4 question and 4 answer arcs). If desired, because the parts are obviously individually quite long, we can further divide based on the in-game days.
Umineko’s structure
There are no split routes or choices to make. The first 4 arcs are contained in the “Question Arcs” game and the last 4 are in the “Answer Arcs” game. Note that, with the (HIGHLY recommended) modding, the screenshots on Steam are not representative of how the game will actually look.
Steam - Question Arcs
Steam - Answer Arcs
Setup
Unfortunately, to get the best experience, Umineko requires a bit of setup. The VN has had several releases over the years, some adding alternate art styles and voice acting, the latter of which is especially too fantastic to miss. If playing on the PC (steam) version, the 07th mod can be used, and walks you through its mostly automatic setup.
Texthooking CAN be made to work perfectly, but requires additional setup and won’t play nicely with the vanilla PC release out of the box. Reach out and we can help (if going this route, reach out before installing 07th mod because it requires something else) 
Discussion rules
Please hide all spoilers and do your best to indirectly describe at what point they are a spoiler for, since we are going at independent paces and collapsing a lot of text into single threads.
That aside, just be nice! Feel free to ask about the language, and please do speculate on the plot and give your thoughts about the characters, events, and themes. This work is really made to provoke thought and even this sort of discussion. The writer himself describes these works as “games” where grappling with the mystery is your goal.
Discussion Threads
Episode 1: Legend of the Golden Witch
- Yes
- No
will just have to finish ISLAND first, maybe still a month or so.
