When you think of anime, most people would think of Pokemon, Naruto, Bleech and others. However, I myself are quite fond of some more obscure ones, the best example would be the When They Cry series.

The series started as a visual novel franchise in Japan, spawning two diferent series: Higurashi no Naku Koro ni (When the Cicadas Cry) and Umineko no Naku Koro ni (When the Seagulls Cry). In 2006, Higurashi was adapted into an anime, and in the begining of this year, I just happend to watch it. That had no exeptional motive but I was really glad that I did.

Higurashi tells the tale of 5 (latter 7) students in a small japanese village known as Hinamizawa. They live normal lives, but the village has a dark secret: every year, on the local "cotton festival', one people is killed, and ones goes missing. This is known as the Oyashiro-sama curse, as he is the local deity. In this specific year, the main characters get involved in the curse. This will be as far as I will tell now, since every single detail would be a spoiler.

The main characters are Keiichi Maebara, Rena Ryugu, Mion and Shion Sonozaki, Rika Furude, Satoko Houjou and Hanyu (latter). This way, you can see that the anime is kind of a harem, since it has only one male lead, but thankfully it never falls into harem sterotypes. The cast is diverse, and every character is likeable in their own way and has an interesting (and always sad) backstory.The anime is divided by arcs, each taking about 4-7 chapters each.

Okay, spoiler time (IF YOU WANT TO WATCH IT, STOP IT NOW AND GO TO THE END)

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The big thing about the anime is that each arc has the same basic premise, as in taking place in a spawn of 2-3 days, and the curse taking place, since everytime the arc end, the events reset, and the characters have to go to the same days again. This may seem a little far fetched, and it takes a long time to understand, but in the end, you are impressed with not only the creativity of the creators but also the inteligence: the first 4 arcs only raise questions, and the 4 latter answer them. So many people can get frustrated by that, but the conclusion is well worth the effort.

In the end, all the events of all arcs become clear, and you will be just amazed at the logic, since you will be really confused at the begining. The other big thing about the anime is the amount of violence it has. In every arc, characters are killed in gruesome ways, and some very sick and disgusting. The amount of blood it also huge. The sorrow of the characters is also heavy, since they often try to survive, mostly failling. Their backstory is also unbeliveably sad, and at times very depressing, so it can be incredibly unpleasant to watch.

This is as much as I can say with mild spoilers, but I don't want to say much.

Other notable elements of the anime are the music, which is not only fantastic (mostly the opening themes, which I love with a passion), but as well as the sound effects, which really give a great mood and atmosphere to the series. It also isn't exactaly scary, but can be really tense and give your blood pump at times. The animation is good, with nothing really standing out, but is good nonetheless.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

Higurashi When They Cry has an amazing story, fantatic music, interesting characters and a moody atmosphere. So what is my recomendation? It depends. You will have to endure 50 episodes to fully understand what is going on and have a satisfying conlusion and stomach some brutality. I myself love it, and continues to be one of my more favourite anime of all time.

The whole concept is just incredibly creative and well put together, so I was always curious to see what would happend next. You probably will be a bit frustrated watching it with out knowning what to expect, but it is undoubtely worth watching, and you and a friend who has also seen the series will be able to get really crazy after watching it and philosophing about it.

FINAL GRADE: A

The good:

-Amazingly original and well put together story
-Tense and moody atmosphere is really unsetling
-Really good music
-Satisfying conclusion
-Great cast of characters and main idea

The bad:

-Can be incredibly sad and violent
-You will have watched about 35 episodes before understanding most stuff

Tomorrow, I will post a review of its spiritual successor, Umineko no Naku Koro ni

Well, I've been a member of GameSpot for a little over one year and I think I should reveal a bit about myself, since other members do it a lot. So, here are some facts about myself, both about my personal life and about video games:

1- My favourite game series is Pokemon. It got me into turn based RPGs, which is my favourite genre today and the gameplay has always been addictive and fun to me.

2- I think FPS and sports games are very overrated

3- I have only played Minish Cap and Majora's Mask of the Zelda series. Looking forward to Ocarina of Time 3D and Skyward Sword though

4- My favourite RPGs (besides Pokemon) are Persona 4, Persona 3 and Paper Mario 2

5- I'm 15 years old and am in the second year of high school

6- I'm brazilian; born, raised and living in Curitiba, Paraná

7- I have the same birthday as Daren Criss who does Blaine from Glee and Neymar, a football played from Santos (Saints), a brazilian football team

8- I think Mario Galaxy is by far the worst Mario game, but Galaxy 2 is by far the best

9- My name in english would be something like Peter Henry Oak Coast.

10- I have completed the FCE (the first of the Cambridge engligh tests) and got a 71 out of 100, when I was 13.

11- I have skiped a grade in kindergarten, so I'm one year younger than most of my friends.

12- I love my PS3 and Wii and have little to no plans to get a 360

13- I have joined GS because I have always loved writing reviews and exposing my opinion

14- I have plans to do Law (Direito) in college, as I plan to be a prosecutor

15- Wheater you think this is stupid, my main inspiration for doing this is the game series Ace Attorney. I know its representation of the rights system isn't that faithfull, and specially since it is different from country to country, but it made me interested in knowing how it works here in Brazil, and it got me interested

16- I don't watch much TV, but love the TV series Glee

17- I plan to start studying german in the next semester

18- I love animes and manga, due to one of my best friends being an otaku, and made me one too.

19- My favourite anime would be a tie between Cardcaptors Sakura and Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni

20- My favourite video game franchises besides Pokemon are: Shin Megemi Tensei, Mario, Ace Attorney, Silent Hill and Resident Evil.

21- I have tried twice but never got into Okami. Does that makes me a bad person? Will try the sequel though

22- I think BioShock is very overrated. See my review of it

23- A friend of mine got me into Assassin's Creed and I got him into Silent Hill

24- I love watching Let's Plays. My favourite LPers are probably Chuggaaconroy, ProtonJon, ClementJ642 and the Braiscratch crew

25- My favourite Pokemon is by far Eevee, followed by Porygon.

26- I think the best systems ever are the PS1, N64 and PS2. Runner-ups would be the Wii and PS3. If counting handhelds, the DS and GBA would be in the bests too

27- My most played systems are my DS and PS2.

28- I have two dogs. A engligh cocker spaniel and a brazilian terrier. Once had another cocker but he fled

29- I am 1.65 m high and 80 kg weight. Normaly am the chubbiest person in my group of friend

30- Am really waiting for the 3DS, mostly for the Professor Layton and Phoenix Wright crossover, OoT 3D, Mario 3DS and a few others.

Okay, these are 30 facts about myself.

Ever since I was a child, RPGs were some of my favourite games. Well, mainly Pokemon, but still. And as I grew up, I played a lot of different ones, such as Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts and such, and liked them in different way and amounts. And one damn trend of the industry now a days is that turn-based RPGs are basicaly gone.

This, nobody can argue. Looking at the most popular RPGs here on GS, we see that they are almost all RPG shooters, such as Mass Effect and Borderlands; live-action RPGs, like Final Fantasy XIII; or MMORPGs, like DC Universe Online. These are the most popular kind now a days on home consoles, but why? What makes them so popular?

Games like Fallout 3 blend seeminglessly shooting and RPG mechanics; Fable gives you a lot of side options to the story; Mass Effect presents a solid story with solid shooting. My theory is that turn based RPGs were just becoming tiresome for most players, and the huge popularity of FPS made the RPG genre pass though a metamorphosis. Now, I don't mean to say that any of these games are bad. In fact, I love Fallout 3. But what I mea is that we recive the product of the opinion of the mass: if FPSs are the most popular genre, other ones have to sucumb to this too. And since action RPGs give more freedom with the battle system, putting shooting as the battle system was much easier. Thus, the new genre, the RPG shooters are born.

Some turn based ones blended shooting as the battle mechanic, such as Resonance of Fate, but it didn't recive the same amount of popularity.

Now we come to the other side: action and active time RPGs. The franchise that created the active time was Final Fantasy, with FFIV, and few games on the franchise post-IV used the classic turn based. Other gems, like Chrono Trigger, used the game system flawlessly, and I myself quite like it, but its main strenght can be its biggest flaw. It makes you pay attention to what is going on; you can't sit back and play the battles more laid back. Ones say that it makes the battles more interactive and fast paced; others, it makes them less enjoyable, since you are rushing so that the enemy dosen't kill you.

The bad part of them is that active time RPGs nowadays use a system where you yourself have to manualy more the character to the enemy to induce a battle and, consequentialy, you can only control one character. Final Fantasy XIII and White Knight Chronicles are guilt of that, and you feel like an idiot waiting for your metter to charge so you can attack again.

For last, action RPGs. When talking about them, I mean the ones that aren't shooters. Popular examples are Kingdom Hearts and Tales of Symphonia. Slashing you enemies in those games can be really fun, but the big problem is that they involve little strategy, since the rapid pressing of the same button normaly is enougth. Since I'm mostly familiar with Kingdom Hearts, I will adress a big issue with it, and that is that the games are too similar, with little additions to the combat.

Oh, and a quick coment of MMOs. Ones like WoW and DC Universe can be fun, specialy since you can play them forever basicaly, but they aren't specialy engadging, since most don't have a compeling story to maintain you playing.

I seems like it is taboo to make a simple turn based RPG is the modern days. They are mostly made for portables only, like Dragon Quest IX and the Pokemon series, and they are awesome. The best RPG series for me is the Shin Megami Tensei series, which compasses the two best RPGs I have ever played: Persona 3 and 4. They are turn based RPGs with incredibly addictive battle systems, where you can think on what is best to do, and make different monsters that have different abilities. They are of really high quality. Why can't something like them be made on a console of this generation?

This is my view on RPGs nowadays, and I would also like some suggestions on turn based RPG on the PS3, if you know any.

I have recently jsut seen an episode of GameTrailers Pop Fiction segment, and this time, they discussed the controversial Fire Temple theme from the masterepiece known as Ocarina of Time.

On the internet, it is popularity known that the first versions of the game (the gold cartidge and the first grays) had a Muslim chant in the Fire Temple, and was removed from other versions.

On this episode, they proved using debug menus in the game that the music without the chanting was put in the game about a month before its release in any place in the world.

However, even though they proved how it couldn't have been altered due to backclash from the Muslim comunity, I've seen a lot of versions of walkthoughs and such that contain the chant, plus a lot of people in the internet claim that they have it too. People claim that these version do in fact contain the chant, and prove it. Since I don't own any version of OoT (plan to get), I wanted to know from people who own it: do your version contain the Muslim chant or not? And if it does, is it the gold or gray cartidge?

Thanks a lot for your help.

Today (5 of february) is my birthday! Hurray! I'm now 15, and am pretty damn happy. Curenty, I gained 2 games:

Castlevania:Lords of Shadow (PS3)

Resident Evil 4 (Wii)

And I am currently waiting for Mega Man X4 (PS1) and Kirby Super Star (SNES) which are coming from the mail. So yeah, just wanted to say that and have to go now to my birthday dinner. Toodles.

Okay, let's go. I couldn't think of a runner up since most games i've played have nice protagonists, but there is one that bugs me.

AND THE WINNER/LOSER ISSSSS....

Henry Townshend from Silent Hill 4: The Room

For all the things this game did right with the story, it did have one gapping flaw: its main character. The big problem with Henry is that he is presented with such little personality that is impossible to feel anything for him. Horror stories need to have characters that are deep, not necessarily with troubled pasts, but that relate with what is going on. Henry seems to be just a random guy the just happend to get caught in everything. We also don't know anything about him besides him being a photographer, but we don't even know if this is his job or only a hobby. A common criticism of him is that he shows no emotion, and while he has some moments of really caring for the characters, he has such little dialoge and character development. Also, there are a lot of scenes where he is just silent, whereas he could have said something.

While he could have been a nice but forgettable protagonist in any other game, the fact that he is in a horror story makes him a bad and forgetable protagonist.

I just wanna say that the next post I will make, of the Most INteresting characters will take a while. KTHNKSBAI

I once reviewed Mega Man 7 and gave it a 4 out of 10. Damn, that is pretty rough, adn does it really deserves it? No, I was unfair. I played though it once again, and had a lot of fun, so I re-wrote my review and gave it a propper rating. Check it out.

I will also reveal the Worst Protagonist tomorrow, but on the meantime, I want to list my favourite Mega Man games in order, from the main series.

-Mega Man 8
-Mega Man 2
-Mega Man 5
-Mega Man 9
-Mega Man 7
-Mega Man 4
-Mega Man
-Mega Man 3
-Mega Man 6

Yeah, I haven't played 10 yet. And I would say that the only ones I quite don't really like to play are 3 and 6. The other ones I have a lot of fun with.

I was originaly going to post Best protagonist, but it would only be a mix of the best female and male characters. So here is the most overrated villain.

THE WINNER/LOSER ISSSSS....

A tie between Dr. Wily from the Mega Man series and Dr. Eggman frrom the Sonic series.

These two characters have a strong following for their stupidness, as they are said to be incredibly inteligent scientists, but they are some of the stupidest characters ever. They never learn how to give up and make the same strategy over and over. This mostly aplies for Wily, since he thinks the can destroy Mega Man by using 8 robot masters all the time, and if there is a Mega Man 11, he will try again, despite having failed 10 times. Eggman is said to have an IQ of more than 200, but he seems to have more an 50, since on the 2D games he always does the same thing over and over, and on the 3D games always have silly plots and he normaly is destroyed due to his inability to contain Sonic. If he was really that smart, he would have destroyed him at this point. Hell, in Sonic Unleashed, he had the chance to kill him, but as all stupid villains, he dosen't. These are cool characters, but dosen't deserve the respect and fame for being great villains they have.

AND THE MOST OVERRATED HERO ISSSSS....

Mario from, well, the Mario series

Yeah, I belive the face of gaming is really overated. I will say this: I love Mario. The series, but lets be honest: has mario shown any kind of personality in any game? The fact he is silent is somewhat to blame, but still, he could have been replaced by anything, since his job is to rescue the princess. What I loved in the oldest games in the series is the novelty of playing as a fat plumber, an unlikely hero, but as the series progressed, he became much more "normal", and his design was becoming "cuter". Again, let's be honest: if you saw this guy was going to save your princess, you would laugh out loud, wouldn't you. Considering what he does in the most recent games and his design, his novelty has worn off.

Also, I would also like to say that the entire cast of the series is rather overrated, and has some really annoying characters, but I will say more of that latter.

Yeah, I should have posted this a few days ago, but my two dogs were sick and I had to take care of them, and it was just very tiring. And my dogs come before video games. So, these are the best villains:

THE RUNNER UP IS...

Walter Sulivan from Silent Hill 4: The Room

The best thing about Silent Hill 4 is the story, and the best part of the story is its villain, Walter Sullivan. Abandoned by its parents after he was born, he was raised by the cult from the first game, and began a murder spree trying to resurect his mom, whom he though was the apartament room 302. His backstory is very dramatic but incredibly interesting. Little things that happend when he was young led to his action, mainly brainwash form the cult. He acts as sort of a deus ex machina in the game, as everything, ranging from enemies and the worlds itself, come from his demented mind, so he can be seen as the controler of everything. Not only he is a facinating character, but he is also very treatening: in the second half of the game, he chases after you, always with a creepy laugth, and the few moments he speaks are incredibly tense.

Why he's not the 1st: As much as I like his backstory and who it transformed him into an unhuman killer, it still comes off as very depressing and sad, which may put some down.

AND THE NUMBER ONE ISSSSSS....

GLaDOS from Portal

Come on! Not only GLaDOS acts as comedic relief on the game, but also as the mastermind of the evil Aperture Science, and the one that almost killed you in the game. She is one of the most funny video game characters ever created, deliverying memorable lines, a great boss fight and singing the end song, which is fantastic.

It is worth playing though Portal to listen to her lines alone, as she makes some ridiculous coments about the situations, and some hilarious remarks of what happend in the game. I won't spoil here, but you should definitely see it.

Portal would still be a great game without GLaDOS, but she makes it even more memorable and funny.

Okay, let's see who I think are the best female characters in video gaming.

THE RUNNER UP IS...

Elena Fisher from the Uncharted series.

In her introduction in the game, I though she would only be a simple sidekick to Nate who would show much personality. Boy was I ever wrong. Elena is probably the strongest woman in video gaming, showing an abrasive personality and being completely fine on her own. It is stupid to say that now a days video game female characters are only damsel in distresses, but they never are seen as capable as the main male lead. Elena is the prime exeption, being smart, capable and a devoted reporter, not to mention her beauty.

Why she's not the 1st: While I apreciate Elena's attitude, at times it seems a bit fat fetched that a reported would do that much, such as showing how to handle a gun perfectly.

AND THE NUMBER ONE IS...

Heather Mason from Silent Hill 3

The reincarnation of Alessa Gillespie from the first game, Heather, just like Elena, shows a very distict personality: she is sassy, strong witted and carrying. But what really makes her such an amazing character is how realistic she is. Being 17 years old, she really acts like a teenager. She shows anger, love, desire for revenge and all the emotions a teenager her age should show.

Also, being pretty in her own way, her design is also very realistic, with a normal body, rather messy hair for all she goes though and even imperfections on her skin.

But this is just one of the the things that makes Heather such a great character. She is also very passionate to her father, strong against the main antagonist and goes though all the crazy s*** on that game, but never fearing. Okay, she was probably scared, but she went though all that regardless.

Heather, being a very accurate portrayal of a teenager and showing a distinct and likeable personality is definitely my favourite video game female character of all time.

Tomorrow I'll say the best villain.