While I'm sure Umineko ni Naku Koro ni does as poor a job at grasping the work's potential as the Higurashi anime did, the first episode of the anime is simply astonishingly bad. So bad I am utterly unable to perceive what little hint of quality that actually made me bother pursing Higurashi to the novel format.
First of all, just because you set your story in the 80s does not mean you can do tit-grabbing lech jokes, which haven't been acceptable since then, and weren't funny at the time either.
Indeed, the tone of this fucker lurches so wildly I expected the cast of Torchwood to put in an appearance. Some bullshit about a witch is clearly the driving force behind the plot, but a good chunk of the episode is devoted to psycho rich adults snarling at each other in soap operatic displays that reminded me eerily of that flash game about rich women slapping each other.
The hilariously odd clothing designs and suitably fucked-up-sounding opening and ending songs are probably the high points of this first episode.
The low points - or rather, the cratering-thundering-inescapable-pits-of-pain points - entirely derive from Ryukishi07's aforementioned unfortunate predilection for bizarre vocal tics, which here manifests itself in the show's one obvious moe bait, a goth loli yandere (I think she's yandere, but forgive me for not keeping up on my bullshit trends) who spends the bulk of the episode making the most annoying sound in the universe over and over until not only are you ready to kick the little shit in the face, at least one other character ACTUALLY DOES, and you feel fucking happy about it.
When the high point of your episode involves you cheering on child abuse, it's a good sign your show is a worthless piece of shit. Unless you meant it to play like that, but that only happens in Jason Statham movies.
