June 1 9 8 3. Keiichi (16) lives for a year now in the village of Hinamizawa. Years ago the government wanted to build a dam in the area, but the villagers, led by the powerful Sonozaki family, rebelled against the idea. Each year, several people are mysteriously killed during the festival of the village deity Oyashiro, which allegedly curses anyone for trying to leave the village. Keiichi's high school friends, girls Mion and Rena, start acting strangely and forcefully give him a syringe, causing him to go mad, use a bat and kill them in his house. Keiichi later kills himself by clawing his own throat... Reset. Keiichi starts a relationship with Shion, Mion's twin sister. Mion turns out to be half-possessed by demons and holds Shion captured in a dungeon. The police intervenes, but later Mion appears and stabs Keiichi near his house... Reset. Upon hearing that Satoko's uncle molests her, Keiichi decides to kill him, but the corpse disappears. Keiichi wishes the death to the village, and indeed, swamp gas kills everyone... Reset. Tokyo Inspector Mamoru arrives to investigate the kidnapping of the son of the Head of the Ministry of Development, rsponsible for the dam project... Reset. Angry that her parents divorced due to Rina, a "gold digger" who cooperates with Satoko's uncle to extract money from Rena's dad, Rena kills Rina and the uncle... Rena discovers that an alien virus infected the village, which was thus placed under quarantine, and the newly infected are killed with their intestines to make an antidote.
Despite its suspenseful and unpredictable story, "Higarashi When they Cry" season 1 is at the same time a mess that overstuffed too much in its narrative that is a blend of "Outbreak", "Village of the Damned", "Zodiac", "Groundhog Day" and "The One", leaving too much of its plot points unanswered, all left erroneously for season 2. Several first episodes show a perplexing shift in tones: it starts off with a scary silhouette of a teenage guy killing two girls with a bat in a house at night, and then there is a switch to a more "uplifting" and "happy" segment where the protagonist Keiichi goes to school in the village and even experiences comical misadventures with girl Mion (he loses a bet in a card game, so the girls draw cat features on his face with a marker, which he has to leave there the entire day). The story quickly drifts away into the crime genre, as mysterious murders (sometimes very bloody ones) start happening each year during the village summer festival.
However, it seems the authors made the error of investing everything into just setting up the mystery than in actually resolving it and explaining to the viewers what happened at the end of the season, leaving it incomplete. There are a few suspenseful moments presented here (at his home, the paranoid Keiichi talks with Inspector Oishi via the phone about how Rena was sent to a psychiatric institution because she broke windows at school and injured some students, and all of a sudden Keiichi is visited by his dad in the room, who brings him drinks for two because he recently let Rena go to him upstairs, but she evidently never showed up; the classic "switcheroo" involving twin sisters Mion and Shion where one is normal, the other one is the killer). Another bizarre addition is the "time reset" subplot, where every four to five episodes the story goes back to the beginning, and the characters play it out differently. This becomes stale and annoying because no explanation or context are given, while the dialogues become rather routine. It is thus left up to the viewers if they have the time or interest to go watch the next season for more "illumination", yet in this edition these absent threads are obviously missing, and thus come inevitably as flaws.
Grade:++
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