Original Release: AliceSoft, 2002, PC
The fifth game in the mainline Rance series takes an unusual new gameplay direction as Rance and Sill continue their adventures in a pocket dimension.
Rance 5D (PC, AliceSoft, 2002)
Where to Buy: Mangagamer
Review by: Master-B
Rance 5D is, to my knowledge, the world’s only fusion of roguelike and slot machine. This odd little title is the end result of six years of Alicesoft beating their heads against the wall trying to make a “proper” Rance V, eventually settling on making a budget game with unique mechanics to re-introduce the series after its long hiatus.
This adventure abandons the plot developments of previous title Kichikuou Rance, banishing that game to non-canon “what if” territory. Instead, it picks up from the end of Rance IV (I guess technically from the end of side game Rance IV.2) with Rance and Sill adventuring in some random cave. Unfortunately, the cave is actually a pocket dimension in which they are now trapped.
You’re thrust pretty much immediately into the action, which is initially confusing as the game doesn’t even bother to explain its new mechanics at all. After a little experimentation, however, you’ll at least get the broad strokes of it.
Your movements in the current area are determined by a spin on the ol’ Wheel a Fortuna. At the top of the screen you’ll note a time bar; there are five chapters (the cave being the first), and you’ll get a new bar for each of them. Every action, including wheel spins, eats up some time. When time runs out, a horde of crazed penguins (“NIS are biters dood“) puts a swift end to you.
So you’ll need to plot your moves out carefully. The overall goal of each chapter is to land on the five Event Tiles that play out the story, but there’s a whole lot of Random on the way there. And you don’t want to buzz through each chapter hitting events as fast as possible, because a number of those events contain tough boss battles and you need to prepare for those with fights by tuning up on normal monsters and acquiring treasure chests.
Though the game is dizzyingly weird at first, it really doesn’t take long to get the broad strokes of it. The devil is in the little details, with all sorts of things left unexplained until you experiment with them. And, aside from spoiling stuff online, there’s not much way to figure it all out but just try things and see what happens.
Fortunately, the structure of the game is very gentle for this – much more so than the typical roguelike. It auto-saves after every spin of the wheel but before you take action, so for example you can opt to flee from a tough combat instead of getting shredded. There are additional automatic “checkpoint saves” at the beginning of each chapter and each of its five events. So even if you do wedge yourself into a bad position, you don’t necessarily have to go back very far. And the game doesn’t really have any “you missed Item X in Chapter 1 so we’ll unexpectedly kill you five hours later in Chapter 4” shenanigans; the most you might ever have to go back is a couple of checkpoints.
Considering that it’s both a roguelike and a Rance game, on the whole it’s really not that difficult in spite of all the random dice rolls determining your fate (which kinda make it feel more like a tabletop D&D session than most computer RPGs). I buzzed through it in a couple of days of casual play; my biggest tip is to actively try to get the better Gal Monsters that you can capture, I stumbled into a couple of the stronger ones and riding them to victory was key (especially considering you lose some of your main companions for long stretches of the story – and none of them ended up being better than the stronger Gal Monsters except for Sill).
It’s unique and fun enough for one playthrough, and the 2002 aesthetics actually hold up well enough that this could pull off being a modern mobile phone game (if all the major app stores wouldn’t ban it for the porn). Composer Shade returns for another delightfully weird yet melodic soundtrack.
I only had two real issues with it. One is that while it’s worth one playthrough, I didn’t really feel like it would be worth doing again. There’s a lot of randomness in the particulars of surviving the game’s battles, but the actual content is pretty linear. That’s true of pretty much any roguelike you could name, of course, but you’ll complete this one much more quickly and easily than most.
The other issue is the porn. I could care less about the rape themes, but it’s just the most boring and tedious part of each Rance game. Each scene is a couple of stock hentai static pics with dialogue that just drones on for way too long, as it has been with all of the previous games. The most interesting bit of it is hearing the new version of My Glorious Days.
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