I'm not gonna lie I anticipated this anime for a long time. Higurashi Sotsu is basically the sequel to Higurashi Gou. Of course since it's considered an "answer arc" season, we get to see who was the secondary culprit of each arc, and how they came to be and the way each murder was made is explained (because the primary antagonist was revealed towards the end of Gou). There are some unpredictable stuff hapening in some episodes and the penultimate episode does feature something new for Higurashi standards which will attract your attention. Though, My first problem with this season, is that while the answer arcs of the original series explore different worlds and give off clues as to what happened in each situation of the question arcs, in Sotsu we get all the explanations about what happened in the same worlds' the question arcs of Gou took place. As a result we have a lot of re-used footage and lots of recap that kind of bugged me to be honest. There were some scenes that took me by surprise but one of the mains reasons I watched this season, was to finally see how it ended. I expected this moment since episode 18(??) of Gou where there is a cliffhanger and basically shows why and how the events of Gou happened. And of course the cliffhanger is resolved badly by the writers. But the biggest elephant in the room is the ending which honestly felt rushed and forced. I believe they should have made Sotsu as a 24-26 episode series as well, to give extra backstory on some characters and perhaps make a better build-up a different ending. As with Gou, the references to 07th expansion's other works such as Umineko and Ciconia are good fan service but don't expect from Ryukishi to explicitly connect each series with each other. It's true that Ryukishi is making a these references as a marketing gimmick but on one interview, he said, he makes some of those characters look similar because he imagines his characters as actors taking different roles, such as Rika looking Similar to Erika Furudo and Bernkastel. It's a very meta thing that ties your brain in a knot, because you don't understand who is the "real" person and who is the character. So yeah all in all, if they had made a better ending, animated from scratch the re-cap scenes (at least) , utilized some of the characters better (Satoko never meets with Satoshi and Shion has very little screen time) I'd rate it higher and it would be a less disappointing experience. So yeah I prefer Gou, because of the way it engages the watcher to the mystery, and the motives of the culprit. It's slightly inferior to the two first seasons of the original series by Deen but I believe it can still be re-watched. Sotsu on the other hand.... Not so much because you basically watch the same things again from a different angle. Now I want to wait to see how the Higurashi Jun manga finishes the story because it will have a different ending than the one of Sotsu.