Original Release: AliceSoft, 1989, PC-88/PC-98/Sharp X68000/MSX 2/FM Towns
Other Releases: PC port (1997), PC remake (2013)
The first of what would become the most popular eroge series of all time, Rance sets out in an adventure-RPG hybrid to find out why girls are going missing in a nearby kingdom.
Rance: Quest for Hikari (PC, AliceSoft, 1997)
Where to Buy: Freeware – download English version here
Review by: Master-B
This is the first of the Rance games, and the first of my experiences with his legally and morally dubious adventures, but my understanding is that the series went on from this 1989 release to be extremely long-running (exclusively in Japan) and to lean toward RPG-strategy hybrids (like a pervy version of Suikoden). This opening entry plays more like the first Phantasy Star if it didn’t have overhead-view map segments, instead conducting the entire game in a first-person menu-controlled style.
So it’s basically a bunch of adventure game with some very basic RPG battles thrown in. The Phantasy Star resemblance also extends to the game world, which has modern architecture and technology yet the world is made up of monarchies and everyone is packing medieval weaponry and armor. I assume the later Rance games clarified what sort of time period this is supposed to be, but here it just seems like a random jokey mishmosh.
One of the things I like about the game is that there’s a digital equivalent of “liner notes” in the Alice’s Manor option on the main menu, in which the developers actually go into pretty extensive detail about the conceptualization and development of the game. What they tell us is that they wanted Rance to be an asshole and anti-hero to stand out, and the game outright calls him a “violent criminal” right from the jump. So you should have some warning as to what you’re getting into here, if you somehow blundered into this one without any prior exposure to hentai games or anime.
Still, the game has an extremely permissive attitude toward sexual assault that may be shocking and disturbing to some, even those familiar with the horrors that hentai can wreak. I mean, you literally have an “assault” button as one of your omnipresent menu commands, and you’re free to at least attempt applying it to any female character that you run across.
So that’s the big sticking point for playing a Rance game, it would appear. And while I’m certainly not defending this one’s attitudes (you did notice the 1/5 score, right?), Rance does muddy the waters at least a little bit. The tone is arguably not as bad as something like a Rapelay, as the whole thing is played as comedy. About as insensitive and tone-deaf as comedy can get, sure, but it doesn’t have the same brutal edge as a “sexploitation” or rape fantasy film. Rance doesn’t beat or kill women and there’s no lolicon (at least by Japanese legality standards), so you can say that much for the game at least.
Of course, a humorous tone and bouncy music doesn’t excuse the fact that Rance is learning spells by non-consensually diddling his “slave” assistant Sill, or extracting retribution on women who attack him by raping them, or groping unconscious or tied-up women, or extorting sex out of women he catches in vulnerable positions every chance he gets. And perhaps it’s even more evil for painting all this in a coating of cutesy graphics and nerdy jokes. But it comes off as the product of socially unaware and sexually frustrated college kids, rather than something created by a serial rapist exhorting people to go out and adopt his lifestyle. In poor taste? Yep. Creepy? Oh yeah. But ultimately just fantasy in a fantasy world. You get the feeling these kids probably started feeling embarrassed about this once they got out in the world and got laid. Probably spend their days now hoping that their wives never find out they were involved in it.
So I don’t give it the 1/5 because I feel like that’s what the Progressive Social Justice P.C. Playbook dictates you do in these situations. I give it the 1/5 more because it’s balls to actually play. There’s actually a solid fundamental structure here, but the small details are all diddled up. Puzzles are stupidly obtuse, the worst of that “click on every possible object and action 800 times for no logical reason” style often employed in visual novels. One key item that you need to negate powerful attacks that later enemies throw at you can only be obtained at level 12 (you start at level 10) with no indication anywhere this is even a thing, and if you shoot past 12 without getting it it’s gone for good. And some requisite level/money grinding you need to do to survive later battles is literally a matter of clicking the left mouse button as fast as you can, just because the combat system is bone-simple (at least it doesn’t take very long).
It’s a shame that Rance had to lean so rapey, as it often delivers some legitimate sensible chuckles in the non-sexual moments. But between the bad structure, tedious combat with monsters literally looking like they were scrawled in MS Paint, and the creepy sexual overtones, it’s real tough to recommend to anyone but the same hardcore pervs who probably bought it out of the back of the closed-off section of the video store two-and-a-half decades ago.
Links
Rance’s lore makes more sense than any religion
Videos
Gameplay Video
Rance: The Desert Guardian OVA (uncensored)
Rance: Quest for Hikari OVA (censored)
Rance 01 (PC, Alicesoft, 2013)
Where to Buy: MangaGamer
Review by: Master-B
I personally love the unique rough charm of the early Alicesoft games, particularly with the manky fan-made English translations over top of them, but they’re not something I’d recommend to just anybody. Now, I DO recommend the Rance series as a whole to anyone who doesn’t mind some H content, but the general advice for newbies to start somewhere between 5D and Sengoku has always been very sound.
The Rance 0- games were an attempt to rectify this, overhauling the original NEC and MSX computer releases to a more smooth and modernized form acceptable to contemporary gamers. Alicesoft started releasing these in 2013, with an official English translation from Mangagamer in 2020, and Rance 01-03 are now available with word of Rance 04 being in development as of this writing.
Honestly, I’m still not sure I’d recommend Rance 01 to a newcomer. It’s really pitched more to provide more lore and immersion to existing fans who probably already know the game’s story, with the gameplay improved but still seemingly not a priority concern for the developers and still headache-inducing at times.
It hews pretty closely to both the story and structure of the original release, in that it’s primarily a visual novel with the RPG elements kinda bolted onto it. Of course, it now looks much nicer and is accompanied by an entirely new soundtrack, and has a slick (sometimes seemingly Persona 4 aesthetic-inspired) interface that makes it much easier to navigate. It’s also expanded with some new elements of the main quest and lots of new sidequests and little bonus things to hunt down.
If you’re totally new to the series, we accompany the horny adventurer Rance in a send-up fantasy world that parodies the conventions of Japanese RPGs of the latter half of the 80s (with Ys and Dragon Quest as particular targets). Rance takes a job from his guild to track down a missing girl from a wealthy family, which leads him to the kingdom of Leazas and a simmering plot to gradually be uncovered. Which was a matter of a few hours or so in the original release, but is probably now 15 to 20 hours if you want to delve into all the side stuff.
While the first few Rance games were fairly stock visual novel & RPG stuff, the series eventually became known for radically changing the core gameplay between entries in unpredictable ways, and often with experimental new systems that aren’t really comparable to any other games. While most of Rance 01 is a fairly straightforward visual novel, the combat and dungeons are another of these “Now For Something Completely Different” events.
The dungeon areas present you with a set of cards to choose from that represent your next steps. Some are visibly enemies or traps or treasure or a key story event needed to progress things. Others are “hidden cards” that might have any of those things, you won’t know until you click on ’em.
Keeping with the card theme, combat requires you to carry an assortment of different weapons and shield types that are represented by poker chips you “bet” (use) on each turn. Weapons and shields both have cooldown periods in which they cannot be reused, generally 2 to 4 turns, so it’s important to have at least several of each to survive multiple dungeon battles. The rub is that you have limited inventory space, increased slowly as you gain levels (which don’t grant anything else except for more HP and an increased chance of landing critical hits). You need to maintain at least a few spaces for key items, healing and the stuff you pick up in dungeons.
The game’s main problem is that neither of these systems is particularly compelling, or even all that well thought-out. The “hidden cards” in the dungeon are always placed the same way, so navigating your way through is really just trial-and-error and memorization (or using an online map). And the combat is just kinda half-baked. There is some strategy to it in that you can see the general attack and defense type the enemy is about to use on their next turn, and thus be prepared accordingly with appropriate weapons and items and such. You also have to keep in mind how many potential future battles you have before you get to your objective. The “betting” system never really fully made sense to me though … I got all the way to the final boss and still didn’t fully understand it. You can seemingly use as many chips as you want per turn with no penalty (other than them all being unavailable for a little bit) … Rance has quotes about periodically getting more tired as the battle wears on, but it’s never clear what the effect of that is.
All-in-all it basically leads to knowing what temporary items to buy to get through your next challenges in tandem with having a good enough core set of weapons and shields. That translates into Grindan For Cash, a not-infrequent activity. The worst bit is one of those blueball final bosses that suddenly requires so many expensive weapons and shields that I just quit and watched the ending on Youtube (you suddenly have to hang in long enough to do like 20k damage when no previous enemies went above 6k or so). Rance games sometimes have this issue, most notably the “real” final boss of Rance VI.
You’ve got a spate of side quests to flesh things out, and that’s where a lot of the game’s H content is found. But these are often at least a bit obtuse, if not full blown requiring a guide to figure out before you unwittingly flag your way out of them. Pretty typical visual novel stuff.
In the end Rance 01 works more as a palatable way for people already interested in the series to check out the lore of the initial game, rather than something I think would be particularly good at getting people into it for the first time. The dialogue, characters and game world are as well-done as you would expect for the core Alicesoft team (soundtrack too), but the actual gameplay is wanting in several different ways and does start to wear on you as the game goes on.
Links
Videos
Anime (censored and SFW)