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The End Of The Way - 3 Different Endings Hide The Truth

Introduction:
After 4 years of working Lun Casari finally reached the very last part of his series about The Way in january 2006 when he released it. This episode got high expectations, not only because it's the last part and should give all the answers about the characters and the story, but also because episode 5 was that great and the 6th one was supposed to top it. And is that the case? Well, yes, but only if you consider the length of the game. Part 6 only received 3 Misao awards which is quite disapppointing in comparison to the previous parts. The author kept using RPG Maker 2000 by ASCII for this episode as well.

Story:
This may be the main reason to play it for everyone. You think you finally get all the answers you are expecting. Who is Serena? Who is the Shadow Slasher? What is the past of Gaius and Kloe? Or the one of Slade, his sister and his aggressive badass mother? And how the hell does Scatha's face look like? If you think you will get all those answers, you are mistaken. You will get some of them, but not all of them. And this is main disappointment about this final episode. You fought through 6 episodes and one half-open ending is all you will get. There are 3 different endings possible to unlock. It is said that it depends on the way you behaved/the decisions you made while playing the series. Unfortunately there is no hint or readme file or anything in this game which lets you know about it. So I myself recognized it after hacking the game.
Don't get me wrong. Just because you feel disaapointed about the endings, does not mean the story itself is bad. This part starts lame again. You run around in the destroyed city and try to collect information to find your way. After some time you explore the ''lost city'', the city's sewer, the mine under the city's tower and some more places. There's even at least one forest side quest. The story gets really interesting when you meet Lyrra again and visit the party and finally try to climb the top of the tower which contains all the answers they searched for. But after all the dialogues are good as always.
I myself received the ending which is called ''the regular one''. But there are 2 more and at least one of them includes Lexus. I am really no big fan of different ending, especially not if you have no clue how to unlock the others without playing the whole game again. So I found out that I missed about 50% of episode 6. And this is my main criticism about this episode: Too much optional stuff that gives the player the feeling of having missed a lot.

I liked the atmosphere in this one since it changed a lot of times. The city itself still has the ''after war'' feeling, the canalization is quite spooky, you also have very happy moments like the Alan's play or party afterwards., and also fantastic scenes like those before the final showdown and a lot of fantasy ''mindfuck'' stuff at the end. The title screen once again brings up that quite well since this is the most ''fantasy like'' episode.



The music contains more known tracks now and only a few original The Way themes. It's quite different from all the former episodes in this aspect again. But it wasn't bad, because I myself liked the new songs like ''The bright side of life'' for example.

Graphic:
It is mixed. It lies between episode 4 on the one hand and the other episodes on the other. There are again some of the infamous panorama maps in it, but lots of them are optional and I missed many. Some of them are new though. The normal chipset mapping did unfortunately not improve.

New fantastic panorama maps


What was very bad were the light effect in the Lost City which is tso lousy that it destroys part of the atmosphere. You think you are looking through binoculars knowing that it is intended to be light in the darkness like in e.g. ''Zelda - A Link To The Past'' (and Super Nintendo does not even support as many colors as RM2k does.)

poor MS Paint light effect


Gameplay:
It is really not the best, but that's not new if we look at the previous 5 parts. It is once again not as bad as episode 4, but still not as good as the rest. In this part you have tons of standard fights which can be avoided, but they are still disturbing as hell. Do yourself a favour and use the game's option to turn them off.
As said you have to reach certain place at the beginning a few times. Yes, like in episode 4, but this time there are still the teleporters from episode 5 which makes the whole stuff more pleasant.
Plunges are very rarely, unfortunately. But after 5 episodes of the same gameplay I did not care anymore, because there's nothing new about them after all.

I enjoyed the quest with the mine carts. It wasn't too hard and fit into the story. There weren't many mini games in this episode since it is focused on the sequences.

weak mapping, but interesting mini game


Conclusion:
Since I heard before that a lot of people considered this episode a disappointment I hadn't that big expectations. I wasn't surprised in a positive way, but also not in a negative one... until I reached the credits and asked myself ''Was that really all?''. Why didn't I get all the answered I wanted to have? THAT was one big disappointment for me, yes. I don't know the other endings, but I was told none of them gives you all the info you want to have. The game itself was okay. Nothing special, nothing bad. Its length is superior to the former ones, but after all I would say it is on the same level as the episodes 1-3 although it is quite different, not only because of its atmosphere, but also because of its different main gameplay.

The Whole Series:
Of course this game series is a classic. It may be quite old fashioned in some points like mapping or gameplay, but for people who play RPGs mainly because of its story The Way is a must. You can just deactivate the disturbing fights if you want to, but sometimes you will still have problems to go on. The atmosphere is great too, as well as some landscapes and of course the lovely panoramas.
Part 5 is the best in my opinion followed by the parts 1-3 on the same hand, part 6 and finally I consider part 4 the weakest point of the series.
The series as a whole won more than 25 Misao awards, a lot of them are absolutely deserved, some of them were a joke (e.g. the one for ''best graphic'') and a few categories seemed to be invented just to be able to give The Way even more awards (e.g. the award for the ''most expected'' next part of a series).

I give the whole series 4 out of 5 points considering all its high and low points, mainly for story and atmosphere, as well as for characters and length.

Posts

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"complete all side quests"... very helpful. -_-
author=Deacon Batista
nobody could tell me how to do so


author=LunCasari
The guide is like 499/500 Incomplete, I'd like to fill in for that last part of Episode 6.

Somehow find your way through the cart puzzle, ask on the forums if your stuck. After you reach the end of the track, go up into the next screen, then right into the next screen. Open the nearby chest for a notch item. Go up and take the left fork, not the stairs. There will be another notch item. Take the stairs, left, then down the stairs. There will be a patch leading down. Follow it into a room containing notch items. Exit, back to the stairs, take the right and pick up the nearby notch item. Go into the next room.

Follow the patch to the next screen. Follow the path into the next room again, where you will be lectured. After that, there will be three doors on the bottom of the room. Take the rightmost one (make sure you save) stand in the middle of the Pentagram for a minute to fight a lesser. Win this and you will get a series of notch items.

Exit, head into the left most door. Climb down unbelievably long double set of stairs and into the next room. Then in the next screen, down the LONG flight of stairs into the next screen. Go down, a little bit left. There will be a place to jump up into a piece of parted land. Jump onto it, follow it to some notch items. Jump back, fight your way through to the next screen.

Down the flight of stairs. There will be two fork options leading to down and right. Take the down fork, and get the notch items. Back, follow the right fork into the lower section (getting the incredibly obvious notch item before going). There will be a save point and a notch item. Save, and try to walk through the little squeeze. You'll fight a boss. Mince technique will utterly destroy this boss, if you have it.

Into the next screen. You get to choose between the Endings.

Reaches Ending â€" Complete the four Shadow plunge tests, go into the top hole and beat the two bosses with the last one being super difficult, but not impossible. Basically, get every notch items possible, get all techniques possible, get the best auras possible, best companions, get some luck charms and a couple of tries.

Lexus Ending â€" Complete all side quests relating to her almost perfectly, go into the leftmost door at the final choice.

Normal Ending â€" Not do one of the Lexus sidequests, go into the leftmost door at the final choice.

Try to get all the endings.
I really tried to reach all the different endings, but nobody could tell me how to do so.... :-(
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