H Scene Count- 52 scenes in replay, about 30~ of those are h scenes.

Created by Alicesoft, translated by Mangagamer

Length- 8-10 hours

Purchase

Rance 01 is the complete remake of Rance 1, the very old adventure game that started one of the longest running RPG series in the world.

For the most part, 01 just brings the lore into place that was just wonky in 1 while expanding some of the character stories and making the combat more interesting. From memory there’s only two completely new sections of the story. Still, they took an 1:30 hour game into something closer to 10.

Story

The stories of the original and this remake are the same. Rance is given a job to find a girl named Hikari who is a noble’s daughter. She went missing so Rance drags his (I think recently acquired) slave Sill to the capital of Leazas to search. Rance sends Sill to school since that’s where Hikari was last seen and searches on his own. Going on a few tangent quests before finding the culprit and changing a lot of peoples lives forever.

Rance is really a jerk in this one, with his taste in women being at the most wide it ever is. I think it’s 2 where he stops having an interest in loli’s like Patty, though the jerkery never really changes. He just gets more silly petty versus cruel as time goes on with episodes of cruelty just sprinkled in. Here though, he’s at his least heroic.

The only real additions 01 has in story and characters is Menad, a gate guard who you deal with to get into a coliseum, and some side quest arc with gambling. Every thing else is expanded on, but I do remember from the original.

Gameplay

The original Rance 1 was an adventure game with RPG combat thrown in. You would go into the field, hit attack until things died, go buy the best weapon and repeat until you could kill the strongest thing out there and had the best weapons bought. That takes about 10 minutes and then you are ready to just rub Rance’s face into everything to find stuff.

01 keeps the adventure game face rubbing. Interrogating and investigating are still a major part of the game’s advancement and a lot of good stuff is hidden behind looking around a lot. The combat on the other hand is completely different.

So this is technically a card game, though it calls them chips. You have a small amount of chips on you that represent your inventory. Weapons, armor, items, and key items all are chips. Some have passive abilities like stopping status effects, but most are either quest items or battle only stuff.

Combat is turn based. You throw up as many chips as you can/want each turn to deal damage and defend yourself. Each chip has an attack value, defense value, and a cooldown that represents how often you can use it in combat. Cooldowns only reset when you leave exploring and go back to turn, which you can do any time.

As for dungeoning, its cards. There’s 5 rows, and you can move straight, left, or right. Your goal is usually the blue cards where events occur, though there’s also traps, treasures, and monsters to deal with. Compared to Rance 1 this is a lot more engaging, though just about any kind of system would have been. It has charm though, and for the most part exploring was quick and enjoyable enough.

H and Other stuff

Rance Quest is considered the first well written game when it comes to porn in the series. 03 is the only voiced entry, so 01 which released between those two is at least written better then most of the series. Do remember that this is Rance at his worst with the fewest girls knowing who he is. So of course, that means most scenes are him forcing himself on girls with only a small number of actual consensual scenes. And there is some outright torture stuff in some of the scenes.

The weirdest thing in this is that Sill, Rance’s slave, is frigid. She doesn’t enjoy having sex with Rance at all until I think the next game. Few girls really do, but Sill is the only girl Rance has slept with before this adventure and she doesn’t enjoy it making what should have been the most vanilla content into more Rance forcing himself on her as she just… hurts.

There is a small number of scenes Rance isn’t in which mostly just show that for as bad as Rance is, he’s not the worst around. His world has some really bad people with more power then they should have.

Verdict

Decent. I struggled with the combat for a long time though, as I never felt like my numbers where as high as they should have been but when I wasn’t struggling the charm of the game kept me interested. Replaying a bit do to missing something, not needing to pay attention to as many small triggers and playing way more loosely felt more enjoyable, so you might want to ignore a guide on your first run even though you will likely need one to get everything.

I honestly don’t think of 01 as a good starting place in the series. It doesn’t do much to require playing to get the rest of the story, and the actual gameplay is at an okay level for me. If I wanted someone to get into Rance as a series, 02 or Sengoku would probably be better. Not that this is bad, it just only introduces like three reoccurring characters that get much better introductions in 3 and barely any actual lore.

One note for any one else trying to 100% this. The gal monsters all have cgs that you get by using an explicit attack and doing double there HP that turn. For the Zombie elf thing in the graveyard, it has four scenes based on doing that. If you return to its event card after doing the story stuff there and having fought it the first time, you fight it again 4 times in a row with slightly different names each time. If you kill it here fully, it will not respawn. It is one of many things that are missable in the game, and one of the more annoying ones.

Save for Rance 01 ~Quest for Hikari~

Contains- All cgs and scenes unlocked.