To be honest, I cannot really buy his reasoning. Higurashi and Umineko had complicate and dark themes too (child abuse, fights because of inheritance, identification problems towards ur own gender, the unsteady relationship between russia, china and japan etc) so what exactly is the issue here?
Maybe he lost his spirit for writing WHC-Titles, because the pressure to maintain the level of quality is immense; or maybe he just isn't allowed to write about specific themes because of political issues in the background.
I don't know. But I think, there is more than that.

There is truly no point to buying a work that is going to suffer from this level of self-censorship. Even if it comes out, he'll have just written milquetoast garbage where he had to veto every interesting creative idea he came up with.

Genuinely, I gave his other works the best and most my mind had to offer. But even should it come out, I will not give phase 2 any attention.

He keeps coming with excuse after excuse. First Covid and now this. In actuality, there are wars going on in the world at all given moments, even when he first started writing. But now one of them gets a bit of media attention and he feels the need to stop? Who is going to buy that?

Say it all loud in purple:
Ryukishi07 is a coward and a hypocrite.
The American "snob" otaku culture doesn't have to exist.
And the current ruling government of Japan is made up of fat dumb idiots.

R07 predicted the real life world events in Ciconia

Originalmente postado por Kris:

There is truly no point to buying a work that is going to suffer from this level of self-censorship. Even if it comes out, he'll have just written milquetoast garbage where he had to veto every interesting creative idea he came up with.

Genuinely, I gave his other works the best and most my mind had to offer. But even should it come out, I will not give phase 2 any attention.

He keeps coming with excuse after excuse. First Covid and now this. In actuality, there are wars going on in the world at all given moments, even when he first started writing. But now one of them gets a bit of media attention and he feels the need to stop? Who is going to buy that?

That's a lot to assume. When has he ever done that?

And in any case, he's already left such a huge corpus of high quality works behind him, he could just rest on his laurels at this point. As spoiled greedy consumers, we feel entitled to demand an uninterrupted stream of satisfactory entertainment from those who'd given it to us once, but really, many of our greatest cultural products were the author's only great one, and most of us will never even make one of those. Higurashi, Umineko and Ciconia Stage 1 are more than enough to deserve applause forever. Nobody owes us anything more.

I honestly cannot agree nor respect his reasoning here. I can understand COVID-19 having an impact on the ability to continue churning out stories (even though Ryu07 was perfectly fine with Higurashi Gou and Sotsu airing during COVID...), but now that the pandemic and lockdowns are behind us and most of the world stopped caring about the Russia-Ukraine War (which Japan has no part in whatsoever), this feels like a massive cop out by an author who isn't motivated to finish a story that was obviously made with real world parallels in mind.

So what, do we have to wait for WW3 to start and finish before we finally get Phase 2? Does Ryu07 thinks that he lived in a perfect harmonious bubble before 2020 when he wrote Higurashi and Umineko? The highly publicized Iraq, Afghan Wars, Ebola outbreak, and the (previous) Israel-Palestine conflicts didn't stop him from writing those stories.

I want to give him the benefit of the doubt and believe he isn't this naive about the real world. So in my opinion he's simply stalling, either because he's lost the will to finish a multi-chapter story epic or because he thinks he can make easier money off more Higurashi adaptations.

And if he ends up cancelling Ciconia altogether after taking everyone's money from Phase 1 and delaying this long, that would make me lose all respect for him.

Originalmente postado por Anto:

As spoiled greedy consumers, we feel entitled to demand an uninterrupted stream of satisfactory entertainment from those who'd given it to us once,

We aren't demanding this, we're demanding that he stop making stupid excuses for not completing an original work that he started out of his own agency nearly 5 years ago now.

Also, Ryu07 is already perfectly content with giving us an uninterrupted stream of Higurashi slop that no one except Higu otakus ask for.

Asking that he focus on something actually high quality and thought-provoking like Ciconia is hardly entitled.