Story by Ryukishi07; Art by Soichiro. Released in Japan in two separate volumes as “Umineko no Naku Koro ni: Alliance of the Golden Witch” by Square Enix, serialized in the magazine Gangan Online. Released in North America by Yen Press.

With this volume we are halfway through Umineko proper, at least in terms of arcs. Most of the major issues involved have become fairly clear to the reader. Battler’s incompetence as a detective is not because he’s stupid per se, but because he can’t see past the who and how to figure out the why. I think he finally manages to grasp this by the end of the book, but by then it’s a bit too late for Beatrice, who is a character whose ‘who’ and ‘why’ define her, to the extent that her dying wish to Battler is to uncover who she is. As for Ange, she figures out what’s going on, and learns how magic works, but her lack of empathy for Beatrice means that she fails here as well, and gets a highly grotesque death. The only real winners in this arc are Bern and Lambda.

There’s also the small matter of what’s happening on the “game board”, of course, in which the rest of the cast bar Battler are quickly polished off in an almost perfunctory way. You know things are ridiculous where Krauss fights a goat butler and wins. Actually, I’d argue that the manga didn’t go far enough here – the VN framed this as a long scene, showing off the goat butler’s ‘motivation’ and framing it as a video game with cliches piling up one on top of another. It was highly amusing, yes, but more to the point it shows off how overegged this pudding is. When first Jessica and then Kyrie take pains to tell Battler “you must believe in the witch god we were so wrong being all logical and stuff”, you’re meant to raise an eyebrow. Of course, with all the special effects death, magic is hard to deny. Assuming you can trust what you see.

The most important scene in the volume, which I also think the manga gives some short shrift to, is game-Beatrice asking game-Battler to remember his sin, and her complete devastation when he doesn’t. For Battler, 6 years ago is when he walked out on Rudolf, and all his theorizing about why that was wrong has to do with his place in the Ushiromiya family. Beatrice is clearly looking for something very different and more personal, and the fact that it meant so little to Battler that he’s forgotten it is what breaks Beatrice, both in the game and in meta. It’s telling that, since the whole Ushiromiya family thing is what he remembered, she takes that away from him by removing that identity. (This is where Battler truly is stupid – he knows his dad is a philandering ass, he should never have been taken in by her word games.)

So where are we now, with half the series gone? Beatrice is seemingly killed off. Battler can’t really escape the game. Everyone on the island is still dead. And even Ange is stated to have “died in 1998”, which is quite interesting given that the last we saw of her she was having the Seven Stakes of Purgatory brutally slaughter Kasumi and her yakuza goons. (Speaking of Ange, she starts to understand Eva a little better, though I worry she goes a bit too far. It’s a very hard line to walk between explaining and excusing child abuse, and I think Umineko sometimes walks across that line a bit too much.) And to no one’s surprise, Lambda and Bern turn out to be working together, or at least having mutually useful goals.

So Battler is an awful detective. Ange tried her best, but was too caught up in revenge and suicidal tendencies. Is there not a Great Detective who could possibly tell us what happened in Rokkenjima? Is there someone for whom this level of reasoning is possible? And can they actually be unbiased? Well, now I may be asking too much. In any case, May will bring us ‘End of the Golden Witch’, in which Beatrice’s tragedy reaches its inevitable conclusion. (No, it’s not the last arc.)

Story by Ryukishi07; Art by Soichiro. Released in Japan in two separate volumes as “Umineko no Naku Koro ni: Alliance of the Golden Witch” by Square Enix, serialized in the magazine Gangan Online. Released in North America by Yen Press.

This review is a couple of months late, partly as so many others things came out at the same time, but mostly as this particular Umineko arc is so hard to read. Like Higurashi’s third arc, the Curse Killing Chapter, this arc deals extensively with abuse, particularly child abuse. Ange is bullied at school to the point where she wishes out loud for death, and the “magic” that she was once able to manipulate is lost to pure despair. Likewise, Maria can’t simply paper over her relationship with Rosa anymore, and when her mother goes too far, Maria’s wellspring of rage threatens to overwhelm the entire book.

One of the key features in Umineko is ridiculous over-the-top melodrama, and for the most part it’s been well-balanced between ridiculous light-heartedness and Grand Guignol awful violence. This volume, though, like the previous one, alters the original visual novel’s structure. The first omnibus was almost all Ange, with Battler and Beatrice relegated to the very end. Here it’s Ange’s struggles in 1998 that are missing – you’d be forgiven for thinking that she had genuinely been transported to Battler’s game, as we see nothing of her search with Amakusa to find the truth of what happened 12 years earlier. While I realize that these manga are done with the approval and supervision of Ryukishi07 (though not as much as the heavily rewritten 7th and 8th arcs), I wish that they’d kept the timeline of the original work.

Thematically we get more examination of what Magic is and how it can help you… and when it can’t. One of the most important scenes in the book is when Ange, tormented by the constant bullying she gets at school, orders the Stakes to kill all her classmates. It’s up to Mammon to state the obvious – they can’t do it as Ange is unable to commit murder. Magic may be able to hide actions in some other guise, but the responsibility remains with whoever uses it. And this shatters Ange, whose struggle to avoid crushing sadness and loathing is lost here. Likewise, once Maria faces the severed head of Sakutarou, ripped apart by Rosa in one of her angry rages (speaking of which, I wish we had a better look at Maria seeing it as a human severed head Rosa is holding up – censorship, I suspect, but another lost opportunity), there’s nothing left for her but dark magic, the magic of murdering people. And the fact that she kills her mother over and over again in the magical world shows she has the killing intent Ange doesn’t.

The other very important scene here is the one between Ange and Lambdadelta. Lambda has been shown to be cruel when it serves her purpose, and she’s incredibly cruel to Ange here, but she’s also trying to tell her the truth, which Bernkastel is avoiding in order to make Ange the perfect pawn. Nothing Ange does here can affect her own future. This isn’t Higurashi, where everything snaps back each time. Even if Ange somehow arranges it so no one dies in 1986, the her of 1998 can’t go back. This Ange is essentially doomed, something Lambda gleefully points out, before offering her own deal – keep the game going forever, with no winner or loser. It’s a sign of how much Ange has lost that she’s sorely tempted.

Of course, there’s also the problem of October 4th, and Beatrice’s game. We get a new Truth introduced here, the Blue Truth (again, colored ink is expensive, so have a different font). It allows the game to move faster, but I suspect won’t end well for Beatrice. We also get more sacrifices, and a focus on George and Jessica, who have to fight to prove they can be family head, and also for their loved ones. (For those who were expecting a focus on Kyrie, while she does get more attention here, there isn’t nearly as much as there was on the other three mothers in the first three arcs. It’s almost suspicious…) Of course, this whole volume is devoted to cruel reality. And thus, we do not end with Jessica and George being awesome, but rather with their sudden death.

We’ve got one more omnibus to go (well, for this arc – fear not, End is solicited), and at this point it’s all up to Battler. He’s been given a lot of help, things have been made more obvious, but does he really have the desire to win? And does he know what winning will cost him? As for this manga adaptation, I’ve mentioned my reservations with this adaptation, but that’s mostly as I’ve read the visual novel. For new readers, they may not notice. In the end, this is a hard arc to read, but it’s essential to understand what’s going on.

(One last whine: the manga left out the ridiculous parody fight between Krauss and the Goat. I may never forgive it for that.)

Story by Ryukishi07; Art by Soichiro. Released in Japan in two separate volumes as “Umineko no Naku Koro ni: Alliance of the Golden Witch” by Square Enix, serialized in the magazine Gangan Online. Released in North America by Yen Press.

Umineko is in many ways a dark mirror of Higurashi: When They Cry, and so it makes sense that we would switch protagonists at this point. In Higurashi, after three arcs following the POV of Keiichi Maebara, the fourth arc gave us a new character, Mamoru Akasaka, and saw how he interacted with a younger Hinamizawa during the dam wars. Umineko likewise switches away from Battler to a degree, bringing his younger sister Ange, now an 18-year-old, into the story. Ange is a lot more invested in what happened on the island, though, and is also far more biased in her viewpoints than Akasaka was. The first 4/5 of this book deal solely with Ange in two different time periods: as a teenager being bullied in her private school (the same school Shion attended, by the way), and as an 18-year-old in 1998, dealing with the fallout from Eva’s death and trying to find out what happened 12 years earlier.

The first thing that comes to mind about this adaptation is how rearranged everything is from the original sound novel. In the Alliance novel, we intersperse Battler and Beatrice’s game with Ange throughout, never losing sight of their part in the narrative. Here, we get nothing but Ange (and Maria) for almost the entire volume, only coming back to Beatrice right as Ange is joining their game as “Gretel”. It makes it seem like this has become Ange’s story. But unlike Higurashi, where switching to a story focused on Rika showed off how she was becoming the main protagonist soon, Ange is never quite going to be the star. A large part of the narrative, yes, but it’s Beatrice and Battler’s story. Unlike, say, Kino no Tabi, it’s clear that Ryukishi07 approved of the rearranging of events here. But it does mean that we approach things from a different perspective, downplaying what’s happening in 1986 in favor of the events of 1998.

Speaking of that, while Higurashi had a brief manga-only flash-forward showing a surviving Shion trying to go on after everyone’s death, the main storyline of the visual novels never quite showed off a future of “everyone is dead and you really can’t change the future easily at all” like this does. Bernkastel notes she’ll search for a fragment where Ange’s family survives, but that it’s odds are infinitesimally small. Ange and Battler are both approaching the narrative, albeit in different ways, in a Higurashi perspective: if I figure out what happened, I can fix it so it never does. Umineko being partly a deconstruction of Higurashi, it’s not going to be as simple as that.

Be warned there is a lot of discussion of bullying here, both of Maria and Ange, though Ange gets the brunt of it. It’s actually intertwined with the discussion of magic, and who has the potential to be really good at it. Much as the 3rd arc was excellent at showing us what “Beatrice” can really be, this arc delves into the actual state of “magic” in the Umineko world, and what it can be used for. Ange gets to the point where she can conjure up one of the Seven Stakes, Mammon, to float around with her and be her friend, but she can’t really interact with anything. This is in contrast to Maria, who can make a stuffed bear like Sakutarou come to life, or Beatrice, who can then give Sakutarou human form.

Aside from moving events around a bit, there are a few things I’m a little annoyed about with this adaptation. The fanservice which is never too far away from all of Ryukishi07’s works is shown off a lot here, possibly in celebration of the fact that this volume doesn’t have to deal with the adults at all. Right on the front cover we see a flash of Ange’s ass, and the stakes, particularly Mammon, are very fond of showing off their bodies to the reader. And while the sound novel has Ange discussing getting her family back quite a bit, the manga makes it seem several times as though it’s Battler who she’s really concerned with. This, of course, allows her to have a “brother complex”, one of Japan’s favorite motifs.

I haven’t mentioned the non-island adults in this volume, several of whom may surprise Higurashi readers. Okonogi is back, and this time he seems to be Ange’s ally… although, being Okonogi, he’s also Kasumi’s ally as well. Ryukishi07 enjoys playing with his readers like this, particularly as the Higurashi reader is inclined to mistrust everything he says, just as they’re drawn towards Bernkastel as “Rika”. Ange’s bodyguard was also spotted in the final Higurashi manga, though there he was working for the enemy trying to kill our heroes. Phew. Thank God he’s on Ange’s side now. As for Kasumi Sumadera, Kyrie’s younger sister, she’s shown to be almost completely insane from the get go. Which does at least lend itself to some amusing expressions.

As we wrap up this first omnibus, we’re about to start the game proper at long last, leading one to wonder if this one will finally let us see Kyrie the way the other three arcs focused on Natsuhi, Rosa and Eva? Will battler, with the addition of Ange/Gretel, be any better at figuring things out from the hints Beatrice drops? Will Beatrice and Battler continue to be an adorable love/hate couple? What the hell does Bernkastel want here? And can Ange, Maria, or Beatrice manage to escape the situations that have left them in despair? We’ll see next time around.