The Way Ep 4

Introduction:
Episode 4 of Lun Casari's famous RPG Maker 2000 game series ''The Way'' is not only the longest, but also the weakest episode up to that point. If you have played the episodes in the chronological order (which everybody who likes great stories should of course do) this one will surely be a big disappointment to you, because episodes 1-3 are all a lot better.

Story:
After Rhue has reached the city he is trying to find Dancing Violet and to free her who may be his lost girlfriend. But it is not that easy since the city is full of challenges and pre quests until he gets to see her.

While the first episodes had quite nice landscapes and some different areas you play on, the plot of this one mainly takes place in the huge, confusing and not very beautiful designed city for the biggest part of the game as well as in a mine area under the surface. You have to read a lot of dialogues. Nearly no action, no gameplay.. The only interesting scene is the killing scene at the end. That was quite a nice and dramatic point in the storyline, but in the game you really see that coming. So we have a lot of storyline here, but without many interesting scenes.



The music fits very well to the atmosphere and as always most of the musics are original. New original themes are used besides already known typical musics from the former episodes. There is also music from other games in this episode (e.g. from Chrono Trigger), but it was fitting in my opinion.

Graphic:
The graphic is as average as we expected it. Mapping and chipsets are really nothing special. But what was missing this time were the amazing panorama backgrounds we have seen in the first episodes and which are typical for the series. But the facesets and sprites are still very nice 2k RTP edits... most of them. Unfortunately some of the charsets were already used in the former episodes for the NPCs. But of course the stadium scene needed a lot of people and therefore it is not that bad, I think, because the stadium scenes are quiete great all in all.

Gameplay:
The main gameplay looks like this: Reach a specific point in the city, talk a little bit and then reach another point and talk. You have a map in your inventory, but it is no real help, because the city is that complicated and you can't step into some areas anyway. Later you have to do a lot of fights which are all boring, because the standard battle system which is used hasn't improved. It's the same boring stuff as in the first parts. In addition to that you have to fight against the same bald headed guys all the time which makes the fighting even more boring and they are also very hard to avoid (Thanks god you can deactivate fights in all episodes of The Way). Thank god there weren't random fights. The battle animations are still standard stuff. The music is always the same. So the gameplay in this episode is really extremely weak. The whole game seems to be made to continue the storyline only. The gameplay was ignored completely. But there are also plunge fights in this game too which are nice as always, but those are really not enough to higher the lousy gameplay. Although there are mini games in the game as always. But nothing great. The dancing game e.g. is lame, senseless and frustrating.





Conclusion:
I think when this game came out people had expected more. It is quite ironic that this episode won more Misao awards than any other when it was released in 2004. Of course the characters, the plunge system, the music, the story and dialogues are still great, but the award for best graphics is a joke.

Episode 4 still seems to be an unimportant middle part of the whole story focusing only on writing, but not on gameplay. Nothing new in it, even some good things from the former episodes are missing. Maybe this was intended to be that bad to make the incoming fifth episode (which is claimed to be the best one) look more awesome. I don't know it.