Original Release: AliceSoft, 1995, PC-98 / FM Towns
Other Releases: Windows (2003)
This interstitial side story that bridges Rance 4 and 5D is a small dungeon crawl with strong resource management elements.
Rance 4.1 (Windows, AliceSoft, 2003)
Where to Buy: Freeware, download English version here
Review by: Master-B
People sometimes question how much financial trouble Alicesoft was really in before being bailed out by Kichikuou Rance being an enormous success, but to me the existence of Rance 4.1 and 4.2 pretty much confirms the whole story. There really was no reason for these games to be made except for desperation, and they smack of it right from the title screen which begs you to not sell the game second-hand and offers some sort of weird paid Alicesoft fan club membership scheme to which you were supposed to just mail them cash in an envelope.
That’s not to say Rance 4.1 doesn’t have some good qualities, but it’s clearly on a much scrimpier budget than usual and it’s really only half of a small game. The overall length isn’t a whole lot more than you would expect from a free shareware teaser episode in the ’90s.
Alicesoft was big on their gimmicks to differentiate from the straightforward JRPG dungeon grind at this time, and that continues to be true here to spice up and pad out what would otherwise be a pretty short dungeon crawl. The setup is that Rance has blown all his reward money as usual, so his next gig for quick cash is to help the Happiness Pharmaceutical company (makers of the health-restoring SethRogen drug ubiquitous to these games) with a little monster problem they have.
The hub world is the little town Happiness is headquartered in, and the dungeon is a cave extending beneath the facilities. The framework is a throwback to the style of the first Rance game, with the town portion handled like a visual novel and the dungeons having you automatically move between points on a map with the chance of being attacked each time.
The big change here is that you are extremely limited in your ability to restore your health. Though you get a dorm room with a bed, you can’t actually use it to rest until the plot progression calls for you to go to sleep for the night. Each character has two different health bars to manage, in a style similar to what Kichikuou Rance would use – your main health in battle is a pool of Stamina, but you also have 10 core Life points. Most enemy attacks drain stamina only, but some also chip off a life point. Your only opportunity to restore stamina is 20 SethRogens that you start out with; you can’t get any more, but you do get stamina refilled during the two plot points where you sleep for the night. However, it is impossible to ever restore Rance’s life points except for one optional healing item you can get by talking to the company president at the beginning of the game (companion Athena 2.0 occasionally gets the random ability to recover life in battle, something you should spam to the hilt when it happens to show up).
So it’s all about resource management, and not wandering around wasting too much time in the dungeon getting into combat (which you can’t run away from). It turns out your SethRogen stash is actually quite generous to keep your stamina up through the game, but keeping Rance’s life from being chipped down too much is more of a challenge. However, combat is entirely random and not that frequent, so you can also just save-scum your way through … in fact, outside of maybe four or five mandatory battles I think you might be able to avoid fights entirely this way (you can level up but it takes forever and doesn’t seem to do much, also doesn’t restore your life).
The main draw is the usual AliceSoft shenanigans and writing, but getting to them isn’t entirely fun. In addition to the resource management, the game challenges you by going back to its “visual novel” roots and having a number of points where you progress only by walking through some random area at the right time or repeating actions senselessly in a menu.
And the game ends on a cliffhanger without the story really resolved, so I guess we’ll see you for Rance 4.2 if you’re still interested.
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