The Way EP 5

Introdution:
In 2005 Lun Casari continued his famous series of The Way (which has started in 2002) with part 5 which leads to the final showdown of part 6. ''Everyone Must Bleed'' is considered the best episode of them all and won 12 Misao awards in 2005 for its dialogue, emotions, storyline, 3 tremendous characters and many more. As all the other episodes it is made with the RPG Maker 2000 by ASCII. In addition to that it is the longest episode up to that point. Only episode 6 is even longer.

Story:
The game of course starts where the quite lame episode 4 ended, with the end of the tournament and the fight between Traziun and Strata. Rhue soon gets the chance to free Cetsa and he takes it which unfortunately summons a big catastrophe destroying the big city. Some manage to flee, others don't. And you play Rhue trying to reach the mysterious end of The Way where he hopes to find answers about his maybe already dead girlfriend.
A lot of characters from the previous episodes are met again, some of them have to deal with their own serious problems like Traziun searching for his father to take revenge for his mother's death.
All in all the story keeps very interesting. I would even say this is the most interesting story part of The Way, because you can feel the final showdown coming closer and closer. All characters involved. A lot of deaths at the end. An obvious ''change'' of Rhue's character (?). And finally a dark secret of him to be revealed while keeping some questions open for part 6.

In comparison to the other episodes this one is the first to have an ''armageddon'' like atmosphere which starts from that point the city gets destroyed and keeps on for the rest of the game while the whole game has some kind of ''tension'' which is only broken by a few short parts like the one Rhue is waiting for Cetsa's execution.




What is new is the from time to time switching between reality and some kind of ''dream world''. So you play Rhue's ghost or mind or whatever it is and search for specific information in the burning city. That part is really great done since you are unhurtable, safe and calm while running around directly inside of the warzone.

The atmosphere is underlined quite well by the original soundtrack and you will remember a lot of themes from the previous story. They may fit, but some musics are taken from commercial games (e.g. Final Fantasy) and are quite well known. So it kind of destroy the 'indie touch'' of the game. Unnecessary. I would have preferred more unknown musics at some points. I also missed the main theme from episode 1 which so far appeared in every other episode.

So in my opinion this part of The Way includes the best storyline part. Although the beginning is lame you get more and more interested since some parts of the character's past get more and more revealed and you begin to set the truth together like a puzzle. The story is linear as always, but I personally prefer that and since The Way focuses on its story anyway, it is absolutely the right choice for this game. At one point at the end you have the option to fight somebody or to run away though.

Graphic:
After episode 4 did offer you absolutey no eye candy since all the great panorama maps were missing in the city, episode 5 gets back to The Way's old strength and uses a lot and different of those great panoramas. You have green landscapes again, but also snow, ''magical'' or technical areas.
There are also ''normal'' chipset maps and it is really a pity that they are mapped that weakly since some of them do have really good looking tiles e.g. the Tales of Phantasia forest set. A lot of styles are mixed though (RTP, Refmap, ...), but that would have been no big problem if the mapping would be better. But it isn't which gives the game a very unnecessary minus point.
The panoramas have nice shadow effects again, on the other hand the chipset maps have no light effects or using of screentone. I don't think the panoramas are selfmade, but they still look amazing.



It seems that the author put all his graphical effort into the panorama maps and it was really a good thing, but he put absolutely nothing into the other maps. So the graphic is all in all part of awesome and part of outdated. I don't mention the original RTP style facesets or the charset animations, 'cause they should be already known from the previous parts. They are well done, but at this point nothing special anymore.

Gameplay:
Since I was that disappointed by episode 4 and I heard that episode 5 should be the best one, I of course expected a lot. Unfortunately the very beginning disappointed me again. The standard fights were lame as always and offered absolutely no special feature to me, no great battle animations, not many interesting opponents. It would be still no problem to fight from time to time, but this episode's fights are often damn disturbing, because you simply encounter too many of them with the same opponents again and again. Here the author should have stayed with the episodes 1-3 which have a more pleasant amount of standard fights (although even there they sometimes started to disturb me as hell).
The plunge fights are still awesome and for the first time you feel satisfied about them and do not have the ''want more'' feeling from the previous parts. Good job done here.
You are also confronted with a few mini games. You may consider them extremely old school and definitely ''outdated'' (e.g. the very lame key searching game or the dull forest maze), but they are a)not too hard and b)a welcome alternative between the fights and the ''run around and search something'' passages.

The custom menue is also still the same and does not react immediatelly, but after all you don't really need it anyway (except for placing the notches).

So I would describe the gameplay as acceptable, but nothing special, and sometimes a little bit disturbing.

Conclusion:
The ''darkest'' episode of The Way started weakly but fullfilled my expectations at the end. While playing the game gets better and better and the story will catch you more and more and you can't wait to play part 6 to experience the final showdown. The sometimes disturbing gameplay breaks the fun from time to time, but that's really the only important weakness which lowers my conclusion.