Part 89: The Coda
The CodaI've spent a while thinking of just what to say at the end of this LP, but the words still escape me, so I'll stick with something simple.
Microcline" post="496493948 posted:
There are parts that you have to put together yourself, but I don't think the core plot is much of a mishmash. It's the story of those scarred by phantom slasher, and every one of them gets their backstory elaborated on and a complete character arc. It doesn't resolve the Guided civil war or go into detail about the nature of The Way or the battle between the Illuminati and the Lord Below, but those are only relevant in the ways in which Rhue's smaller story intersects them.
I do fault Episode 6 for telling this story through a mass of janky minigames though.
Episode 6 of The Way was considered a disappointment, even among (or especially, Lun seems to think) the fanbase. To this day people are unsure whether to rate it as one of the best or worst episodes, or if they should even rate it at all since it was so different in style to what came before it. (??)
And ever since its release, the series has declined in popularity, I think, over time. You might look at the pinned threads RPGMaker.net has up on its forum where people vote on the best RPGMaker games of all time and see that across three threads it's maintained a high position... until you notice that's because of the crazy system that those threads use where you vote for TEN games, and the one you rank #1 gets ten votes, #2 gets 9 votes, and so on like that down to #10 getting one vote. Most of The Ways votes tend to come from just a relative few #1-3 votes and it's otherwise completely unlisted by the majority of players.
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.
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.
For a couple years after The Way 6's release, he tried to get his graphic novel published. It was another story in The Way setting but he said Rhue was not the protagonist, and refused to reveal what it was actually about.
He was rejected by all publishers last I heard of that project.
In 2009 he was interviewed and said with the current tools that existed for indie/amateur game development that he felt like 'anything is possible.'
Then he never made anything else, and dropped off the radar for over half a decade, until 2015 when he returned with news of joining the Something Classic team on their Shadows of Adam game. I think most if not all of theSomething Classic team are also RPGmaker vets (Though Lun was the only one with a popular release under his belt). Even the basis of Shadows of Adam is an unfinished RPGMaker demo a couple of the team members worked on.
The game released to minor success, and was recently ported to the Nintendo Switch where it found a little more success. Hopefully they'll keep on making games. Maybe even a ground up do-over of The Way. HINT HINT.
Fwacho.
Fwacho is credited as helping his brother, Lun, with the story design. In the years since, he's self published a bunch of books like Grass and The Shadowed of Gilead trilogy, the last book of which was released in 2015. Don't ask me how they are.
While searching for his books, I discovered that among other things, he has a Bachelors in Christian Studies: Practical Theology/Philosophy. HMMM.
Jabbo Kaldra.
The saint who spent so much time and effort making a walkthrough for a game no one plays, disappeared into the rolling mists of the internet, where hopefully he continues to make more mistake laden walkthroughs that abruptly stop five minutes before the ending. As a friend of mine said, it was only fitting that he made us walk the final steps alone.
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.
His full retrospective can be read here:
http://www.crestfallen.us/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=6301
I'll quote Jeramyu one last time as I bring this LP of ~The Tragedy of Alanthreonus Phillipe Straphachar~ to a close.
quote:
Above all else though, I feel like I didn't experience The Way so much as I did experienced one man's attempt at creating something called The Way. The story gave me plenty of pause to think, but more than that I found myself thinking about the process of writing, designing, imbuing emotion, and all the blood sweat and tears that went into a man taking an idea from his mind and showing it to the world. What an odd and peculiar thing that it would be channeled through a piece of dated, buggy, poorly translated Japanese software and yet somehow still let me experience that process.
And God Bless The Hero, Don Miguel.
The End