The one true motive.
Creative Staff
Story: Ryukishi07
Art: Kei Natsumi
Translation/Adaptation: Stephen Paul
Lettering: Abigail Blackman
What They Say
Umineko WHEN THEY CRY Episode 8: Twilight of the Golden Witch Vol. #02
After over a decade spent searching for the truth, Ange has sifted through every slander and scandal hurled against her family as an explanation for their murders. What she cannot accept are her brother’s saccharine versions of the people and events she has been so desperate to know. Her rejection, spurred on by Bernkastel, begins to rip apart Battler’s game board at the seams, and the happy reunion of pawns quickly becomes a battle of life or death!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
I grow tired of this bloody play of witches and ghosts. I shall keep this brief as I don’t want to go deep into spoilers for the entire mystery. I’ll save that for a review of the final volume. This triple-wide volume is firmly split into two parts, before Ange learns the truth and after.
Everything before the halfway mark follows the same game of monsters and witches that we’ve watched again and again. Peppered in with the theatrics are a few fun answers to riddles posed in the mysteries. Yes, Ryukishi07 did have solutions to his locked room mysteries and many of the tiny bits and bobs in the previous volumes are given solutions. As the multitude of theories try to rip apart the ‘cat-box’ of possibility, Ange is stuck in a state of neither alive nor dead. This represents the fact that the visual novel gave the reader a choice in how Ange would proceed. Would she accept her fate as a Ushiromiya or turn away from the cycle of bloodshed?
The truth, as presented, is disappointing in that we had already watched this scenario play out. It is equally disappointing in that while we feel Ange’s desperation and grief at having to face the fact that her family tore itself apart, her broken psyche at being unable to accept the truth after all of her mental steeling goes against what we were expecting from our heroine.
After the truth is revealed the second half of this book is both covering old ground and new, but with newfound clarity and far fewer tricks. It’s where the real meat of the story lies, and it’s also the part that is the deepest cutting.
The one thing this volume does with remarkable skill is to explain literally everything. It details what the witches are, what all of the strange scantily-clad imaginary friends are, and how everything fits into the narrative. Every story we witnessed is a possibility, either seeded into the ocean as floating bottles or posed as a theory by internet armchair detectives. The struggle is real in the sense that it’s taking place in Ange’s head and heart. She is assaulted with the suspicions of those that imagine the worst for her family. Eve made herself a villain to spare Ange, but at the same time, she grows to despise the girl who is the product of flawed parents.
Were there members of the family who didn’t deserve their fates? Yes, mainly all of the kids. Yet it’s hard to blame Beatrice in the end. We get to see everything they went through again free of the delusions and imaginary friends. Everything they go through makes perfect sense as a motive. They were trapped in a life deprived of the one thing they really wanted with the people they wanted to share the future with, surrounded by a family whose sins lie so thick they are impossible to escape.
Yet some did escape. One, in particular. We saw in previous volumes that a single man seemed to have escaped the carnage, but to what end?
In Summary
The second to last volume of Umineko retreads familiar ground, but only to clarify the motives not only of the killer but of Battler in showing Ange a sugar-coated version of the family. Connecting the dots in this murder mystery has sometimes been confounding and often annoying, but this volume lays out the culprit’s motivation in clear terms which really drive home the cause of the disaster. It’s been a long journey to this point, one which was often unnecessarily bloody and cruel. Yet this volume is satisfying in that it confirms some of the worst fears and greatest hopes for a conclusion that will be worth the torture. There is only one major question left at the end of this long, meandering journey to answer and that is what becomes of those unlucky enough to have witnessed it.
Content Grade: A –
Art Grade: B +
Packaging Grade: B
Text/Translation Grade: A
Age Rating: Teen +
Released By: Yen Press
Release Date: August 8, 2019
MSRP: $30.00 US / $39.00 CAN
