lennylips
When They Cry is a fantastic show, worth the watch, worth the buy. Revolving off a story where a curse spreads through the village at each cotton drifting festival keeps the story interesting. Each time the arch is finished, everyone is set back to normal and is alive once again. This show definitely has re-watch value, and becomes better each time you watch it. When They Cry is also one of the few horror shows that actually fits the genre, relying less on gore and blood, where instead it uses fear and story to scare the audience.
juan casado y barton
In the town of Hinamizawa, a group of young friends violently die shortly after the annual Wataganashi festival. For four episodes, these kids have been your eyes and ears into a World where paranoia and murder lurk just below the surface of a cute and loving exterior. And so the cycle begins again and again. Each time with different results. The story of Hinamizawa begins quite confusingly. As the chapters of each cycle develop, more hints as to what is really going on are dropped and it becomes more of a puzzle in which the audience has to put things into perspective. In almost a David Lynch manner, people are not who they appear to be, bizarre goings on are never fully revealed or solved (perhaps they never even happened) and a seemingly innocent act can descend into a massacre. I found the story to be a bit too kitsch for me in the beginning but it quickly finds its momentum and continues to build strength. When you first encounter the show it's all very scary and hard to understand. However, as it progresses, the edge of the show moves from violent horror to psychological terror. Knowing the fates of each of the young people from the beginning and seeing them struggle to survive or overcome their mistakes becomes increasingly depressing and tough to watch so even though the camera begins to look away when they're being murdered, it hurts even more.Truly disturbing at times and a testament to the strength of storytelling, I'd recommend this to anyone who enjoys a good story or just unfiltered gore. Because there is a lot of it. Season One is by far the more violent of the two seasons so viewer discretion is advised. I'd also recommend that you source the second season for it explains fully the mystery of Hinamizawa. Also, watch it with subtitles, the dubbing is really rather poor.
stargazer-lea
Simply put...NOT FOR CHILDREN!A lot of anime is somewhat violent and sometimes disturbing but Higurashi is something else! The violence is untamed and brutal. The story is surrounding a little village that is led by 3 families. It all starts when a young boy Keichii moves to the little village from the city in the month of June 1983. He makes friends with 3 girls, Rena, Mion (and later her twin sister Shion), Satoko and Rika. All seems well until he learns the village has a lot of secrets of murder and unexplained deaths. In a series of different chapters (arcs) the story is repeated all based around each character in turn. Each character goes mad and a lot of the time at least one of the group of friends is murdered brutally by one another. The stories explore murder, suspicion and even aliens! It's not something i would recommend to everyone but certainly one I'd recommend to those who don't mind a bit of violence!
kanegx
For those who have not watched this show yet, this anime is based on popular digital novel created by and amateur (refered as 'Doujin' in Japan)writer.Unlike other anime series, this one splits itself into several stories(arcs). Each arc consists of about 2-5 episodes. All episodes tells the story of main characters(some side characters) encountering different/same/similar events in small countryside village called 'Hinamizawa' (This feels like parallel universe setting, after each story ends, good or bad they go back in time and start again but this time something else happens with new characters, and more mysteries are created or answered).First few episode of each arc are done average to near horrible (Personal Experience: I almost decided to stop watching the series after half way through the first episode,,,thank god I didn't!). It's probably due to the way they made it very 'comedial' and some of the ways characters talk, and also how they look.However, real excitement usually starts from around mid-second episode. Everything will change dramatically! There are plenty of mystery you can try solve in each story (Later episodes reveals the answers to the mystery, so I recommend watching them in order, it is also hard to solve the mystery with anime version due to lack of details in the story compared to the original novel).Voice acting is very well done, Mion/Shion Sonozaki are personal favorite characters, but everyone else does good job of making the overall warm/dark feel of the atmosphere!I highly recommend this animation for people who likes mystery, suspense, violence with interesting plots and twists.*Added - The same author of this series has released new digital novel called 'Umineko no naku koroni (Umineko - Japanese Gull/Black tailed gull)'. 'Umineko' is not a direct sequel to 'higurashi', but has similarity to higurashi. It has better character settings in term of 'realism' (People are a lot more believable), more serious (less jokes that was less appearing to 'serious story' seekers, and still contains a lot of gore. If you understand Japanese, I highly recommend all mystery loving people to read the novel!