https://lparchive.org/The-Way/
It's a great read if you want to relive a lot of The Way without having to replay the whole thing. I started reading it at 1 AM and it's past 4AM when I started writing this, because apparently thinking about The Way at absurd hours is just something I do.
My retrospective gets mentioned a few times, and it made me realize the fact that I wrote that retrospective 7 years ago as kind of my final thoughts about The Way... but here I am, still thinking about it. It's still slightly surreal. But this is in particular caught my eye and gave me a good laugh:
Also, when this scene didn't get the "Best Cutscene" (or moment or whatever) Misao award is when I finally, FINALLY came to my senses and fully stopped giving a shit about those stupid awards. I'm pretty sure it went to Laxius Power again. Fucking Laxius Power. Goddamn it.
Despite what he says, the blessed, beautiful game known as Laxius Power 3 DIDN'T get that award. Instead:
"Best Cutscene:
Bmage's Entrance, Pokemon: The Evil Inside 2
The Way fanbase always had a real stick up their ass about the Incredible game series known to us mere mortals as Laxius Power. They saw themselves and The Way as so far above it all and most other RPGMaker games in general.
Anyway EmperorJeramyu was one of the regular beta testers for The Way, and even was made forum admin. And to this day, he hosts last remaining copy The Way walkthrough on his site. He also hosts the compilation of stuff from the code but you can -largely- find that stuff on The Way forums still. EmperorJeramyu will even get a cameo in Episode 6, along with some other forum regulars.' So, I guess, despite his bitterness towards Laxius Power, he's ultimately a good boy.
Now I don't want to make this all about me, but if Fleshwit or anyone else reads this, I'd like to make an extremely flimsy attempt at defending myself here that will probably backfire.
Yes, we kind of had a stick up our asses, yes it was childish, and yes it was mostly my fault. But... c'mon man, if you were around back then you KNOW that The Way wasn't just a diamond in the rough, it was a diamond in a toxic bog, and to claim otherwise would be to ignore the CEASELESS AVALANCHE of crappy, barely legible demos that piled up every day on GamingW and elsewhere. As it is in mainstream gaming, the attention back then was ALWAYS on looking impressive rather than having any substance, hence the comical overload of demos that had more lighting effects than minutes of gameplay, so much so that the Misao awards specifically introduced a category for "Most Pointless Lighting Effects" or something like that one year. Now the blessing of hindsight makes even the good RPG Maker games seem bad (have you actually tried replaying TTHW or ABL recently?), but context is important! Also with how GamingW ended up, I feel pretty vindicated for how I got that site portrayed around here, although what actually happened to it mostly just baffles me more than anything. Also I hate to actually try and use this defense, but almost *everyone* had a stick up of their ass back then, and there were more than a few people who were bitter and just downright spiteful towards the success The Way had, including some bigger names.
As for Laxius Power, in its defense, and if we put on our hindsight glasses again, no RPG maker 2000/2003 games that included any sort of combat had good combat gameplay (The Way included) because the combat math in RM2k/3 is complete shit and basically unsalvageable (I could go into this for a while, but basically individual stat points are so meaningless, than even differences in the hundreds barely even matter sometimes), so for the most part, the characters, stories, and aesthetics were basically the only possible saving graces. But... Laxius Power 3? The game looks nice from what I remember, but otherwise... look, I like my trash too, and if schlock anime pablum is your trash, I get it. I can't claim I've never gotten enjoyment out of it. And as the years go on, I've come around on a lot of criticisms of The Way that would've made my fanboy blood boil decades earlier (hell this LP has a lot of them). Looking into the thread, Fleshwit seems to have genuinely fixed on the Laxius Power series as some sort of inadvertent masterpiece of a borderline surrealist auteur stream-of-consciousness sex fantasy, and hey... I can dig that level of abject framing-a-big-mac-in-the-Lourve insanity, but really this all comes down to which game to give an award to for "Best Story", Episode 5... or Laxius Power 3.
That being said, the reason I had such a specific beef with that series actually goes back to when Don Miguel's forums were pretty much the main RM2K community, and the sleazy way the creator tried to advertise their games. Maybe the creator has matured since then, but by pure happenstance during my travels through various internet communities, I ran into a bunch of RPG Maker community expatriates who were apparently way more kept up on that series than I was, and they told me some insider-y things that did not improve my opinions on it at all, and I'll leave it at that. With some of the stuff said in the thread, it looks like nothing ever really changed either. The concept of deification of stupid schlock is not unfamiliar to me, but it when it's some otaku's weird self-insert sex fantasy, that's a lot less whimsical.
Honestly I always felt like this scene was weak and didn't fit with the rest of the game. Traizun as a whole doesn't fit with the rest of the cast. It's like a generically cool anime swordsman who wants to kill his dad wandered in from somewhere else.
One of the things I appreciate about the game is how violence is portrayed. For the most part it's unglamorous and there's weight to the killing. It's more about the circumstances that made our protagonists murderhobos than a capacity to dispatch hordes of ninja.
*sigh* Yeah, I get it, I get it. My last attempt at defending it is this: the way the explosion sends all those blood lyn flying is like 900 times more well animated than almost anything anyone else was doing at the time. People just didn't put that much effort into animating RM2K/RM2K3 games, and they arguably never did after. Mostly because it took a fair amount of effort. And let me reiterate what was in the LP, that this scene lost to... ahem, "Bmage's Entrance, Pokemon: The Evil Inside 2". Also I think this is selling Traziun a bit short. He has an important role as kind of a mentor/guide to Rhue, and explaining some stuff to the audience. A lot of people in the thread were bashing him as a generic "cool anime swordsman". I'm going to assume these people have never ever played any serious volume of other RPG Maker games, because what was so refreshing about Traziun in comparison to, say, what you would find in xXSSJsePhiRoThXx's Final Fantasy fangame was that yeah, he was powerful and a badass, but was also an actual character with actual depth and subtlety (again, by RM2K standards), and had a fun dynamic with Rhue as sort of this buddy cop duo, and ultimately proved himself a selfless friend.
From the thread wrote:So basically the fanbase for this kind of game was not impressed by anything that actually set it apart from the pack when there's Anime Cool on the menu.
If I can make a genuine criticism, I think the LP kind badly misled a lot of people on the thread in these kinds of regards, and conflated the opinions of the community at large with my histrionic ranting. I'm guessing a lot of that was because I was the only one stupid/insane enough to try and make some sort of enduring thesis on the whole thing with that retrospective.
For the record, and I know this is probably not very convincing given all the stuff I just said above, but ALL of this stuff is ancient history to me. I seriously do not care about Laxius Power, or am genuinely bothered by it winning the Misaos at all any more. I played it up in that retrospective thread as more of a running joke than anything.
...Also again, the actual winner was, again... "Bmage's Entrance, Pokemon: The Evil Inside 2". A slow, dramatic, moving scene was not going win this, ever.
Other stray observations:
- I completely missed the Sorya-Traziun connection. She doesn't seem to react to him at all, so I'm not sure.
HARBRINGER: This is a surprise...
What the hell, did Lun learn to spell it this episode or did the testers finally fucking start noticing.
lol, look man, we were beta testers, not proofreaders or editors. There was only one piece of wording I was insistent Lun got right, and we all know what it was.
The Reaches ending:
I don't know how to fully parse that ending either narratively or thematically, but "holy moley" indeed. The "walk with me" segment and then the one after it seems as close as you could get to expressing a thesis for the game. I think it's suggesting, and this is even kind of subversive from within the context of a cliched JRPG setting, that the grand quests and tragic destinies etc are all just shitty window dressing that gets in the way of people connecting with each other. That's a pretty novel punchline to put in a game like this.
- This is a neat interpretation, but I'm not sure anything else in the games really supports it. Lun's interview doesn't really lead me to think that's exactly what he was going for.
NOTE FROM FLESHWIT: Kyle B. Stiff is a huge idiot.
- I'm not sure if this is referring to his interview questions or what, but when we had lost the interview text for a while, I tried looking this dude up and found some very confusing, bizarre things. Maybe there's more to this story that I just don't know.
What's the deal with the Blana Sera? Was Kalmar one of the Blana Sera or a servant of theirs?
- To quote Traziun at the beginning of E5:
"Well, I'll tell you straight up.
The Blood Lyn are after me because
the Blana Sera and myself have
personal issues with one another.
Actually, it goes way beyond
personal."
To me that sounds like he's explicitly referring to Kalmar as a Blana Sera.
I feel like it also doesn't get discussed very much anymore. Which is sad, since for all the flaws of The Way, there's a bunch of things it does pretty well.
Even most of those flaws are more a problem with Lun's execution of otherwise good or novel ideas. The only exceptions are the pacing and, at times, particularly shoddy dialogue. Though I still don't know what possessed him to make all three of the plunges in Episode 1 unwinnable. Goddamn lunatic.
- So I guess I'll walk back what I said earlier and get a bit defensive about this. I realize that RPG Maker games, especially old ones have this bad reputation, and that mocking all their shortcomings is a big pastime especially when it comes to stuff like SA threads (and believe me, even now I instinctively cringe when I see an obviously RPG maker game on Steam), but again I need to stress context. As a mostly single-young-person effort on a completely free, mostly unfunded series of games that took years to complete, on a dated, very limited, buggy piece of unofficially translated software, long before any sort of resources or even a playbook on indie games were written, I will still contend that what The Way achieved is impressive, especially compared to its peers. Now whether one thinks that means it deserves some slack on its flaws up to them I guess, but I found some of the more mean-spirited jabs in the LP kind of failed to communicate that context, which lead to a lot of comments that were making kinda uninformed occasionally bad-faith criticisms. The Way's quality relative to other games of its era gets brought up kind of dismissively near the start, but I think it's pretty important. Reading some of the replies in the thread was pretty frustrating because everyone seemed to act like the game had just come out last year or something. It's like trying to explain to a bunch of Gen Z kids what made Earthbound so special when they played Undertale first.
That being said, the early plunge stuff... yeah I got nothing.
Very early Christianity, we're talking when St. Paul was alive, was called "The Way." See Acts.
The games are rife with mostly subtle and some not-so-subtle references to Christianity. Slade's (to be seen shortly) skill, Outer Darkness, is in fact one, but you would never notice it being one until later. Most people would think it is just a cool attack name until they start noticing other references, many of which are, again, subtle.
- There are a a few instances of this kind of thing being pointed out, and though I used to think, it was a bit tenuous a best, this LP has convinced me there's more of a link than I thought there was. But again, it doesn't actually seem to be the main theme or point of the The Way, which in Lun's own words "Rhue's story is the central story of the game." and "Rhue's character is largely about the obsessive pursuit of an unattainable ideal. [...] By the end of the game, Serena, the ideal love, Rhue's supposed soul mate, is vanquished, and Rhue is confronted by the Phantom Slasher who tells him that people aren't perfect and that no matter what they do they will fail him in some way. Rhue accepts this and tells the Phantom Slasher that he doesn't care. He just wants someone who will keep trying, and that he will keep trying too. The most obvious interpretation is that he wants someone who will choose to love him and continue working at it with him despite various challenges." None of that seems very strongly tied to any sort of religious commentary.
It is something I'd like to hear from Lun himself, I suppose. Given Fwacho's degree in Christian Studies, I think there's something going on, but given what's discussed in this LP and what's actually in the games themselves, if The Way is making some sort of statement on Christianity, it's very faint endorsement of kind of unorganized, non-denominational very personal... uh... hippy-ish... sort. But it takes a number of leaps to get there, though the thing with Slade's pre-suicide ramblings was pretty eye-opening.
- It never occurred to me to see what happens when you lose to the shadow man in E3, for reasons the LP makes pretty clear.
I do remember in the years before Shadows of Adam, Lun posted on his site about it occasionally. Towards its release, he said something along the lines of "Don't expect the weird kind of writing I did in The Way." or something like that. I haven't played it yet myself, though I did buy it.
- Oh boy. So I contributed highly to its kickstarter, and did play through Shadows of Adam. It's... fine, shall we say, I don't regret pitching in, but I'm glad I didn't give more than I did. I do have a lot of things to say about it, particularly as it pertains to the concept of retro, throwback RPGs, but I'm really just not sure where to say them. But something did strike me as a bit off, and Lun himself chimed in with this on a topic in the General board:
I know some fans of The Way may feel let down if they were expecting something more like The Way. Someday, I will talk at more length about how I got involved in this project and how the story got written. There was a lot that was already decided before I got involved and I just hope I made the best of it.
I'm still waiting to hear more about this, because I have some pretty detailed guesses on what went on. The story/writing in SoA definitely gives me a vibe of a better story by a better writer pushing hard against the constraints of someone else's edict that it needed to be a simpler, more arch... oldschool throwback story, I guess.
A Blurred Line is one of the all-time classics of the RPGMaker community but yet it infamously ends on a cliffhanger on all things. Lysander86 used to come around promising he was still working on the sequel every couple years, but beyond making a 2.0 version of ABL with a couple hours extra content, nothing is yet to materialise.
Three The Hard Way is another classic game, and it's creator iishenron is actually the same guy who started the Misao Awards. He promised a sequel to Three The Hard Way called The Queen's Court with NO combat, for years as well.
...
The lessons we take from all this are:
1. People on the internet SUCK!!!!!!!!!!
2. Don't take games like Exit Fate, Last Scenario and Master of the Wind for granted. Even The Way, as unpolished and... unfinished, as it may be, is still a finished story, all things considered.
Anyway, I'm going to try this new game now. And maybe I'll talk more about what I -remember- and can dig up about RPGMaker community history, in the future. That's part of the reason why I decided to do this LP, and hopefully LPs of more RPGMaker games. Anyone, of course, can feel free to chime in with what they know, especially if I say something flat out wrong. It's ancient history and I was just a teen in the 00's.
- Yeah this stuff makes me sad. Because man, if the cliffhangers at the end of episodes of The Way make you upset, for me TTHW is like if you combined all of them into one game. And when I said the entire community was mostly assholes back then, this is what I meant. GW and GGZ died very well deserved deaths, and though I long stopped keeping up with it, how rpgmaker.net flourished into something different was probably the best of a bad situation.
For some reason I still clearly remember that Jeramyu once drew up a little comic about him constantly correcting Lun during testing on badass only being one word and the mistake still kept slipping through because Lun would be more concerned with adding more status effect inflicting moves to enemies instead.
- You remember correctly.
But I will admit it's very possible The Girl isn't Serena or... anyone important at all. She might just represent, say, the possibility of Rhue actually finding Serena. That's another mystery we have little to go on.
I still think people are seriously overthinking this, but if I'm going to entertain the idea that The Girl isn't Serena, I guess this is how I'd interpret her.
Lun Calsari.
After the release of the 2.0 versions of The Way episodes in 2006, Lun became pretty quiet. He's never talked about the unexplained mysteries, not even so much as cheeky little hints or 'You're on the right path, but-' type comments. He also has never elaborated on what he was going through while making the second half of the series.
- So I obviously respect Lun's stance on this a lot. That being said, the answers I'm actually interested in hear aren't the ones involving the game's world/story. I'm more interested in the story of how the game got made itself, like what the original plan was with the number of episodes, how far things deviated from the original story, what the days of "Driving through Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado" were like. And honestly I feel like it's been long enough that discussing this stuff isn't going to ruin the magic for anyone. But Lun has the right to disclose what he wants. Hell I really have no clue if he even read my retrospective, or anything on these forums in general. It sure would be neat, though.
Emperor Jeramyu.
I think, besides myself, he's probably the best example of how this series has somehow... lodged itself deeply into the psyche of people who have played it, and stayed there for over a decade. He dedicated a lot of time to writing a pages long retrospective on the series in 2013 after all. And I decided to do a LP of it, and not because it's funny or easy to make fun of or... anything like that. But a genuine love of this strange, badly designed, yet inexplicably compelling game.
- If my ultimate legacy as Emperor Jeramyu is being known as this nutty Way fan... hey, could be a lot worse.