@ laclongquan
They aren't technically games but dynamic novels. Think of a light novel written with an emphasis on dialogue instead of descriptions or narration, and then add images for all places and scenes of importance, sprites for all important characters reflecting their emotional states, professional voice acting, a very good soundtrack, etc. It's a weird thing from Japan.
The "dynamic" part of the name comes from they moving on their own, basicaly. Contrary to other such games which offer you choices every now and then, like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, dynamic novels have few to no choices. You are basicaly listening to a play acted by sprites and stuffies and accompanied by awesome music. Umineko itself is basicaly known for having one of the best soundtracks ever, as it focus itself on the music to create much of the mood and ambience.
There's an spin off game, Ougon Musou Kyoku, which is about to get an expansion. That one is a switch fighter with several interesting setting-based rules, like jumping between the
normal and
meta worlds halfway through the battles and the like.
Click here to watch Ougon Musou Kyoku's op.
Click here to watch Ougon Musou Kyoku's X-box version's op.
That aside, the story of the franchise goes like this: There's this stinking rich family that every years goes to the main estate in some small island where the actual ruler of the family lives and celebrate a reunion where they discuss what they did during the last year and how to advance the family during the next year, and stuffies. The ruler of the family is about to die, though, and this year's reunion will probably be about who gets to rule after it happens.
Once all the different sides of the family have arrived to the island they, as well as those already there and their servants, become trapped in the island by a typhoon, and while they all spend their time being jerks to each other and the like it soon becomes obvious something more is going on: People start dying, and it all seems to be connected to the legend of the Golden Witch, who once lived in the island and whom the family ruler, by then very dead, used always to say he knew. Or maybe someone's just killing the competition to get all the inheritance, or maybe it's all a twisted game by the family head and his obsession with the story of the Golden Witch, a picture of which is in the house main room along with a strange inscription.
That's a pretty bad and pretty shortened version of the premise. From here it goes, depending on who you ask, into either way too weird shit, way too dumb shit, or way too awesome shit. Probably a mixture of all three. The characters are pretty nicely written and their interactions, dramas, and ambitions make a good deal of the story.
Once the first chapter ends, though, the story starts repeating itself, only every single time it happens events start changing, the focus going from very rational explanations of what happened in the island to completely weird versions of it. And then everything goes to hell and gets
really weird/dumb/awesome.
That's the gist of it, more or less.
@ malko_sundervere
The anime and the manga are indeed horrible, and the way they did the plot is a total mess. Kind of reminds me of Chaos;Head, another awesome visual novel which got turned into an incredibly bad anime.
Anyway, have some actual gameplay videos of Ougon Musou Kyoku:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYP3Ddlas5U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yO_IzZgzTvM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne0gq5Yb4ag
It's pretty fun, I like it quite a lot. Hard to play with a keyboard, though, without a mod that changes how some thingies work so that you never need to press more than two keys at the same time, as most keyboards can't recognize it. It plays perfectly with a pad, though, and the X-Box version has some extra characters (though they will be in the expansion too, along more new ones).
Also, every pair of characters get their own dialogues, scenes, and story, or version of the story. Is pretty cool.
titles) arcade fighter it was perfect for my needs and abilities. Some musical rearrangements were quite good too. I liked how it captured the wacky humour of the franchise.
