The second first impressions post for the summer 2009 season, and this time I'm looking at Umineko no Naku Koro ni, an adaption of a visual novel by the creators of Higurashi no Naku Koro ni.Instead of a hug, can I just squeeze?Creepy loli alert! Creepy loli alert!Basic Premise:Members of a wealthy family attend a meeting an annual meeting at a secluded island owned by the family's patriarch, and people starts dying under mysterious circumstances after everyone is trapped on the island by a typhoon. And there is a witch involved in there somehow.Battler thinking: she needs a bigger rack.Brief Summary:Members of the wealthy Ushiromiya family arrive on a secluded island owned by the head of the family Kinzo for their annual meeting. While Battler Ushiromiya and his cousins hang out together and Kinzo locks himself in his room doing crazy things, the adult siblings of the family discuss about how to split the family wealth. The younger siblings wants the oldest brother Krauss to give them each a share of their father's supposedly hidden 10 tons of gold, but Krauss states that he hasn't located the gold yet.Right at the throat!I would have condoned this if it had shut Maria up, but unfortunately slapping only made Maria wail even louder.Meanwhile, Battler and his cousins playing around the island and are a little curious about their grandfather's obsession with a supposedly real-life witch named Beatrice. The cousins then go off to the rose garden where there was supposed be a rose marked for the youngest cousin Maria, but the rose is nowhere to be found. Maria enlists the help of her mother Rosa, but Rosa gets annoyed at Maria's constant wailing and tells her daughter to stop looking for the flower. When Maria wouldn't quit, Rose starts slapping Maria but that only causes Maria to become more stubborn and yell louder. The older cousins decide they should leave, and Rosa decides to let her daughter look for the rose on her own. Later in the day when it starts raining, Rosa and the older cousin go back out to the garden to look for Maria, and to their relief Maria is still in the garden with an umbrella. When asked about where she got the umbrella, Maria answers that she had borrowed it from Beatrice.I wonder who that could be.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~The first episode of Umineko was alright, but not much really happened except for Rosa slapping Maria around for her "Uuuu Uuu" wailing and maybe the odd crazy face (which I'm sure we'll see plenty of). I'll cut the show some slack though since this was the introductory episode, and sometimes intros are understandably slow. We got a good look at the cast of characters and the nice island that they are going to spending the show living on. And of course, just about everyone who watched the show received a great demonstration on how to be annoying (and slightly creepy) from Maria. It seems nothing gets on people's nerves like a kid constantly going "Uuuu Uuu!!" Someone really needs to put tape over that kid's mouth. Watching this show with a headache is definitely not recommended.On to the other aspect of the show, the OP and ED were okay, and the production quality was okay as well. Again, nothing really impressed me but that's because nothing really happened. I've heard that the introduction might take a while, so I'll try to be patient and stick around for a couple more episodes, but people had better start dying soon. To be honest, the only reason that I'm checking out this show is because it's supposed to be like Higurashi, which I've heard (yeah I haven't watched it) was quite violent and bloody. So Umineko had better deliver some gore, with some mind games, supernatural phenomena, and deductive reasoning on the side.
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