As a fan of horror media, it would only make sense that I’d search for something similar when it comes to anime, manga and video games. While the survival horror genre is well established within video games, I find horror surprisingly difficult to find when it comes to the other two, anime more so than manga. Regardless, there is a franchise that spans anime, manga and video games that is heavily associated with horror. Having only just watched the first three seasons of the anime recently, I thought it might be interesting to provide an overview of the Higurashi franchise and see how this series ended up becoming surprisingly expansive.
The Higurashi franchise began in 2002 as a series of independent visual novels that were created by Ryukishi07 and the doujin circle 07th Expansion that were distributed at Comiket. These are set in the village of Hinamizawa where mysterious events occur and a looming sense of threat hang over the cast of characters. Despite the original artwork proving to be quite crude and the lack of interactivity, the games proved to be popular due to the numerous theories that people developed about what was happening and there ended up being eight main entries alongside several fan discs.
This popularity eventually led to, in 2005, a manga series being produced for Square Enix’s Gangan imprint of manga magazines. For its manga adaptation, there were numerous decisions made that I find to be very interesting. Running for six years, the manga ended up having 38 volumes released with several different mangaka covering different arcs. Most interesting to me though was the decision to produce several manga original arcs, some of which expand on the stories of the main arcs and introduce new perspectives to the world of Hinamizawa.
In 2006, the first anime adaptation was released which was animated by Studio Deen and adapted the first six game arcs over the course of 26 episodes. The second season, consisting of 24 episodes, was released in 2007 and adapted the last two game arcs as well as an original arc written by Ryukishi07 to help establish more story elements for the other two. An OVA series of five episodes was released in 2009 and adapted two stories from a fan disc as well as a story from a light novel that was included as a bonus as part of a game release. In 2020, another anime titled Gou was released, this time animated by Passione, and ran for 24 episodes before being followed by Sotsu in 2021 which ran for 15 episodes.
Finally, it’s interesting to note that there have been several live-action adaptations in the franchise. In 2008, a live-action film was released in cinemas which adapted the first arc of the series while a sequel film was released in 2009 and adapted the sixth arc, albeit more loosely. A TV drama aired for six episodes in 2016 and adapted the first three arcs while a sequel series of four episodes aired later that year and adapted the fifth and sixth arcs.
Let me know your thoughts on this overview of the Higurashi franchise, whether you’ve played the games, read the manga, watched the anime or even seen the live-action adaptations and, if you have, what you thought about them and any additional information you might have on the topic.
Thanks for reading and if you wish to seek any of the titles I mentioned, don’t hesitate to use amazon.co.uk or amazon.com for all of your needs! Also feel free to follow my curator page on Steam “JRPG Reviews” for thoughts and opinions on any JRPGs that I play and my YouTube channel “Victory Achieved Gaming” where I guide my friend through challenging games.