Expect­ing Ookami Kakushi to be like Higurashi/Umineko would almost be like expect­ing Sora no Woto to be like K-on, just a smaller mag­ni­tude of wrongness…

How dare you com­pare me to Rika or Beato!

I remem­ber how, at the begin­ning of win­ter sea­son, many peo­ple were look­ing for­ward to Ookami Kakushi being one of the bet­ter ones of the sea­son, as it was the adap­ta­tion of a visual novel crafted by the sto­ry­telling bril­liance of Ryukishi07 (Higurashi/Umineko) and char­ac­ter designs by Peach-Pit (Shugo Chara). Then, once the series began, peo­ple began to dis­like it because it wasn’t what they expected: the mys­tery was shal­low, the story was slow, and not to men­tion that series of ques­tion­ably dis­turb­ing scenes with Issei and Isuzu’s cling­y­ness. Also, peo­ple weren’t dying left and right, or at least the main and sup­port­ing char­ac­ters weren’t.

Must every­thing Ryukishi07 writes be dri­ven by mys­tery and blood and yan­dere lolis? I don’t think that was the goal of Ookami Kakushi at all. Both Hig­urashi and Umineko had a com­mon approach that defined them as a mys­tery series: we know very quickly what hap­pened, what we don’t know is how or why it hap­pened, and hence most of the series was spent piec­ing together infor­ma­tion to under­stand that. It’s drama dri­ven by the quest for infor­ma­tion. But Ookami Kakushi isn’t that way. Even some­one who doesn’t really like mys­tery series like me real­izes very quickly that this isn’t a mys­tery series, not when an ama­teur could guess very early why every­thing is the way they are. No, this is a much more stan­dard­ized ver­sion of drama, one pro­pelled by the esca­la­tion of mood, by the forg­ing of rela­tion­ships, by a desire to know what hap­pens next and how will they resolve this. It was meant to be a grad­ual approach, and not one full of sud­den sharp turns like Hig­urashi was.

This may not be what you were look­ing for as a viewer, but it’s what it is. From this per­spec­tive Ookami Kakushi did an admirable job. It’s nowhere even approach­ing being per­fect, but it has been nev­er­the­less very enjoy­able. At least a grade of two above aver­age I’d say.

Read the rest of this entry »