H Scene Count-129, 21 non h
Created by Alice-Soft, translated by Arunaru. Is currently freeware.
Length- 25+ hours on the first playthrough depending on amount read and if you don’t skip through fights.
Kichikuou is the if story of Rance that asks the question, what if Rance took over the whole world? This is kinda like the Final Fantasy of Alicesoft, as this game’s success was the deciding factor on if Alicesoft would survive as a company. Luckily for them, it was a major hit. This is also the first Rance game with fun gameplay, and for those introduced to the series through Sengoku this game’s combat is very similar.
Story
The story is actually fairly simple. You start as Rance being a bandit. Due to pissing off a military general, your entire crew gets destroyed and in the confusion, Rance loses Sill, his slave. She gets sent to jail along with another bandit, and Rance is forced to run. Rance makes it to the border of Helman(Russia like country) and Leazas(German like). There he is picked up by a Kanami from the previous games and brought bakck to health at Leazas Castle. He tries to get an army and ends up marrying Lia, the Queen of Leazas to get an army to take Sill back and conquer the world.
From their you play the game and each major area gets its own plot. Zeth(China like country) gets the least with the Monster Realm getting the most. You go through conquering each area with very little overarching story, enjoying the game and some random character stories provided by either your harem girls or your commanders. Though I will say some major events don’t really get the recognition you would expect. Overall what plot there is works and makes the characters unique enough that player should be able to recognize most of them at the end a playthrough.
Gameplay
This game has a lot of content. An example, there 66 girls in this game with clear endings, but they all have both good and bad ones. This leads to a game where you cannot possibly see all the content in a single run, an you can still see new things on your third or fourth run.
Okay, as for actual gameplay you can do a few things. You can sleep with one girl a turn in the harem mode which gives Rance xp, or talk to a commander for some short talk usually with the purpose of clearing a character. You can refill and increase troop sizes once a turn. You can call a merchant to buy a select few items from and even hire some mercenaries who will fight a single battle for you. You can explore one area, usually a dungeon, where you send a single commander to fight basically random encounters as they progress in the hopes of finding treasure. You can do one town event, which is usually going to be for clearing characters or recruiting. And finally you can attack places, and you can attack as many times as you can send a commander so long as you don’t take a new town.
Combat is similar to Sengoku but simpler. Commanders have troop numbers that decide how strong they are, along with commander stats and troop stats that improve their strength. You can send out up to four commanders a fight, with only long range types being able to attack from the back two slots. You attack by clicking on an enemy, and they die if their commander health hits 0. Usually you can’t hit commander health so long as they have troops left, so you need to annihilate all their troops and then attack to kill. Some commanders have skills(triggered by waiting and then the next turn they can select the skill from the right click menu) that allow them either ignore troops and hit commander health directly or deal big damage to troop count. Combat ends five turns after it starts, or in some fights as soon as any enemy dies.
The biggest difference from Sengoku is that when combat happens the defending side picks to fight in the field or in town. Field is just like a fight in Sengoku, all troops do damage. In towns though, you have a limited field size and only a certain amount of troops can deal damage, meaning that an enemy with 5000 troops is actually only fighting with 500 in town. This makes taking places and defending different from field battles and can make defensive battles more interesting as you choose to either fight with everyone or limit the enemies ability to hurt to.
Overall, I enjoy the combat and the overall game. Its fun and can be enjoyable to manage all the things you can do in a turn, though it can also be stressful.
H Scene and Other Stuff
The pron is alright. The scenes in general are fairly short, but there are a lot of them with a number of them having a couple variations depending on how many times you’ve repeated it. Variety is typical Rance stuff, mostly forced sex and some consensual stuff. There is also some tentacle stuff and full on rape(technically even has lesbian torture rape) for those interested. Game is unvoiced as all Rance games were.
Art wise I like it. The style fits the grandness of the game. The music is also good, but you will want to find something else to listen to pretty quickly as the world map song will drill into your brain and sap the fun out of you. Its just played so much it drove me crazy.
Verdict and Save
First, old games have got to stop surprising me with replay systems. I never expect a game form pre 2000 to have one so I put this off until now. And do I regret that, this is a good game. Way better then Rance 3 and 4 in gameplay, and in my opinion slightly worse then Sengoku overall. I actually think Kichikuou has more overall content then Sengoku does, but Sengoku’s pace, endgame content with the points store and difficulties, and more limited scope makes it more memorable. That and it was my first Rance game.
Anyway, this is worth a play, though you should play or at least read the events of the previous games first. It just feels more complete knowing who is who and why things are like they are. It also helps the player figure out some stuff, though there is a wiki that can guide you through the entire game. Also note, this game does giveaway some spoilers for the rest of the series, do to essentially being the quick end for the series. Those spoilers are redone entirely in the series proper so its not like you know exactly what will happen, but just noting that you will learn about future stuff by playing this.
Save contains every cg and destiny gotten. NOTE: Save will not work on a Japanese version, nor will a Japanese 100% save work on the English version.
Kichikuou Rance
http://www.mediafire.com/download/61y2aa1imlnws5r/Kichikuou+Rance+saves.rar
http://www.4shared.com/rar/BYdcUP3cce/Kichikuou_Rance_saves.html