I was scoping around looking for a nostalgic anime to purchase and was disappointed that Yuru Yuri was released on Blu Ray only. Then I noticed a little group called Sentai Filmworks and they redeemed themselves in my eyes by having picked up and re-released Higurashi.

This is a strange series, both for me and in general. I get a lot of remarks when I mention that I like this show, considering my usual distaste for dark, depressing shows and even I'm surprised.

I'm just gonna skip the introduction and assume everyone knows what this show is, as it's reputation "Killer lolis" should at least be common knowledge. 

There are several reasons why I actually ended up liking the show.

One is the pacing. While I do find myself rolling my eyes at the show's more comedic moments, it does a good job building up to the creepy factor, instead of trying to whiplash the viewer for shock value. It starts off light-hearted and silly, then when one harmless joke about a dead body turns out to be coincidentally true and things start getting more and more eerie until it snowballs into the scene shown at the beginning of the first episode. I would have said remove that scene since it doesn't do anything other than say "Prepare for things to get messy in about five episodes". It's not like Ace Attorney where the opening scene provides foreshadowing or highlights the theme of the story.

Secondly, the characters. In shows of the psychological mindscrew genre, the characters tend to have emotional issues that make them... less than endearing. Evangelion being the prime example. To be fair, those characters's lives started out sucky and stayed that way, while in Higurashi, things are kinda rough for the characters in the past, but in general they can be pretty optimistic until everything goes to heck in a hamster ball. The lighter moments give you time to get to know the characters, and care about them before things go down.

Third, the kind of mindscrew stuff I dislike is typically Ikuhara symbolism overdose type stuff. In this case, Higurashi is more about paranoia through the perspective of the characters. What the character is experiencing may not be the truth, which makes it a lot more intruding than trying to decipher the meaning of some abstract thing that flashed on the screen for a second. The show doesn't use trippy visuals for the sake of being artsy, and instead makes the show mindscrewy through it's admittedly convoluted plot and the unreliable narration.

And one more thing, pertaining to the ending.

Spoiler:

There's another concept that I've repeatedly mentioned my distaste for, that I don't mind in this one, but it's a major spoiler of the series so...

Spoiler:

I like your viewpoint on it.