Hi, I read the entirety of Umineko as it came out and I feel like I'm being generous when I give it a 4/10. It's a convoluted mess that reads like it was written by a 12 year old. The Japanese fanbase refuses to so much as give Ryuukishi the time of the day nowadays for good reason. Honestly, I find the extent to which the western fanbase is obsessed with Umineko to this day to befrighteningin a sense. I have no idea how you guys can drone on about it day after day nearly six years after the final episode was released; Ryuukishi is a hack who has no idea how to actually tell a story that does anything except continually bait the reader with red herrings and empty promises of greater themes. He's been like this since Higurashi and will never improve, either on a technical level or as a storyteller in general. Like I said, almost no Japanese fan cares about Ryuukishi nowadays, and it's more than people just being pissed off about episode 8 of Umineko (people were pissed off about Minagoroshi and Matsuribayashi long before then, anyway). It's because they've had enough exposure to him to see through his tricks and stop falling for his brand of spectacle and sophistry. And yes, his terrible, childish text is part of the problem too - there are parts of Higurashi that have such embarrassingly poor writing that they're used as copypasta on 2ch. I don't know how the western fanbase continues to put up with Ryuukishi, and I honestly feel that it's damaging to the community as a whole to continue to obsess this much over a single work so long after the fact.