Personally, I never really cared about why Rika was stuck in this loop, or honestly even what her life would be like after she got out. As others have said, the high points of this franchise come from it being a character driven mystery, but it's the in-loop mystery that grabs me, not the out of loop stuff. The original unpacks in a brilliant way; you get this seemingly idyllic, slice-of-life style country village story, it ends in a tragic, hyper-violent, out-of-nowhere way, and then it picks back up into the idyllic summer dreamland again but now you are on edge the entire time. All of a sudden every pause in dialog, every shot that holds for just a bit too long, every character that pops up in a place they didn't before freaks you the fuck out, and you are taken on this rollercoaster where it's very confusing and misleading due to the missing information, but just as your head starts to spin, the answer arc kicks in and you not only get the missing pieces, but whole new context for the previous events which can totally flip your perspective on not only the plot but the characters themselves.
Gou and Sotsu do this, but...wrong? Poorly? We've tread this ground before, but it feels like we're making the same recipe but with knock-off ingredients. If answer arcs are all about filling in the missing jigsaw pieces, Sotsu does that, but so far it's less like an amazing series of revelations and more like "well Gou left us with a missing square here, and Sotsu shockingly reveals that the missing shape was....a square!" What did Gou leave us hanging on and what was the shocking or intricate answers that Sostu provided in these last few episodes?
- Gou: Rika has gone missing! Keichi finds that the outhouse door is locked! Mion isn't acting right! Oh no, Mion and Satoko are dead! How did this happen?
- Sotsu: Rika was killed by....Mion, the one who was acting strange! The door was locked because...that's where Rika's body was dumped! Mion and Satoko were killed...because we've already established Satoko is pulling the strings and is batshit crazy! Mion's acting strange because...uhh...Keichi gave her a doll and now she has a crush on him and wants to protect him, I guess? And Satoko injected her and must of played it off as a big ass mosquito or something, I don't know.
It's a waste! We learned how Satoko got a gun (she literally has infinite time and apparently perfect recall along with a Machiavelli-level brain, this is one plot point we didn't need fleshed out), and everything else that was "solved" could only be considered a mystery if we are grading on a Blue's Clues curve. No shit Mion snapped because Satoko juiced her, jabbing people and then standing around menacingly is Satoko's whole MO at this point. Unlike Rena who at least got some additional motivation, Mion got zilch. Hell, I think I agree that she actually is worse off as a character thanks to this answer arc, as she veered into Higurashi parody territory. I can't believe you can boil her whole plotline down to "a boy gave me a doll so in order to protect him I will murder my sister, my grandmother, the mayor, and a child."
If the goal of this sequel was to show how Satoko breaks Rika down and they both become witches, they really should have changed the focus to just the two of them. I'd bitch if everyone else got sidelined, but if this is the kind of character "development" we're going to get, it would have been better if they left well enough alone. I don't like the idea that the rest of the cast are simply getting used as pawns in order to get Rika and Satoko to their destiny, but if that's how it's going to be, then shove all of this shit into a montage like they did earlier so we can move on and actually develop the two of them.
TL;DR: We don't need to be in a question and answer arc format if the questions have obvious answers and the answers reveal information that makes characters
worse.