Okay so what's the whole deal with Umineko, the time I got to ask someone they only made it seem like an overly pretentious trip that required an absurd ammount of time investment for an extremely small amount of answers and closure, if any at all. And I'll refrain myself from complaining here on how generally obnoxious the guy was.
“an overly pretentious trip that required an absurd amount of time investment for an extremely small amount of answers and closure, if any at all” is uncharitable, but not entirely inaccurate
The tl;dr plot summary is that an obscenely rich and awe-inspiringly dysfunctional Japanese family are trapped on an island for a family conference when a typhoon hits, and over the next two days people start turning up messily murdered in convoluted locked room setups. At the end of the first arc, a witch (Beatrice) shows up after everyone dies and challenges the main character (Battler) to a game where they’ll play through various ways these two days could have gone, and she’ll argue that she did the murders with magic and he’ll try to prove that the murders could have been done by a human. There’s very obvious Ace Attorney influence in the way their meta-world arguments play out, a lot of gory death, multi-page philosophywanks, some of the most unflinchingly accurate depictions of abuse I’ve ever seen in fiction, and an ever-escalating amount of Magic Bullshit™ anytime the narration isn’t first-person and through Battler’s eyes.
It gets steadily weirder and more complicated from there, but that’s the starting setup.
Episodes 7 and 8, which I haven’t played but have encountered most of the spoilers for, give you the biggest pieces of the “magic and witches had nothing to do with this” solution, and there’s a manga called “Confession of the Golden Witch” that spells it out even more clearly. But it still doesn’t directly tell you what “really” happened in scenes you only see as over-the-top magic battles or anything like that. The series is very open about the fact that it wants you to have to think to understand the mystery it presents you with, and it’s dense as hell and rewards close reading, even if you already know the solution.
Or, to put it another way, it’s frustrating, deeply pretentious multilayered-storytelling porn where a lot of what you’re reading is totally irrelevant because it’s just there to distract you and you can practically hear the author patting himself on the back for his own cleverness. It’s very much not everyone’s cup of tea, even putting aside the child abuse, gore, and squads of demon girls in terrible fanservice outfits. :::PPP
It also has really, really, really good music.
