A little Higurashi visual novel project I worked on.

[Cless]

So, in the early summer of this year, I read through the Higurashi visual novel series and basically loved the hell out of it (The anime adaptation however, is insufferable trash. Avoid it!). Definitely one of the major highlights of the year for me. I enthusiastically recommended it on this very forum here a little while ago.

MangaGamer, the company that licensed the series for official English release, had trouble licensing various assets for it, so the first game had its entire soundtrack, including ambiance and sound effects replaced, while the second game retained around 70% of its original soundtrack and none of the sound effects.

Well, the loss of the first game's BGM wasn't really much of a...loss. MangaGamer's replacement was actually an improvement in my view, but very lacking in variety and track length. It was clear they didn't have much of a budget to do this, with single tracks replacing as many as four of the originals.

After completing the second game, with its original soundtrack mostly intact, I felt like something needed to be done. Atmosphere is a really, really big part of this series, the soundtrack being absolutely essential. The second game's soundtrack was very good, even though it was butchered. The first game really needed an upgrade.

So, simplifying things a lot, I set off to carefully mod the soundtrack of the first game. I wanted to give it a similar feel to the Japanese version of the second game and the series fandisc, so I started importing tracks from them, using the tracks used in similar, if not identical situations. With those, a few of MangaGamer's original tracks, one of the few usable tracks from the Japanese version, and all the ambiance/sound effects from the Japanese version, it was done. I created a patch that should enhance one's experience with the game.

Then I went and did pretty much same thing with the second game. Since most of the soundtrack was already intact, I just re-encoded the recurring tracks from a better source (the OST) and in a higher bitrate. I replaced as much of MangaGamer's original music with originals as I could, and made some other small changes to make it as consistent as possible with my first game patch, like using newer appropriate tracks from the fandisc.

And with all that said, for anyone who's interested in this visual novel series, I really urge you to try reading it with my patches. Here are the goods:

Higurashi: When They Cry soundtrack, sound effects, and font mod
Higurashi: When They Cry Kai soundtrack and sound effects mod part 1
Higurashi: When They Cry Kai soundtrack and sound effects mod part 2

Just replace the .arc files with those in the install folder.

The most inexpensive way to legally acquire the series is here. Or you can pay more for the digital copy at the source. I don't believe this patch will work correctly with the trial on the site, though.