Tag: mangagamer

#oneaday Day 79: Some first impressions from Rance Quest Magnum

I’ve decided that to help me out when I want to write a longer, more substantial piece on MoeGamer about a particular game, I’m going to start using my daily posts here — when I don’t have anything “better” or more pressing to talk about, that is — to keep notes on my impressions about what I’m playing as I go along.

So, having finished Doom 2016 and not quite feeling in the mood to get back to Trails in the Sky: Second Chapter just yet — and very much feeling like I wanted something with a bit of colour and joy in it, given my general low mood — I decided to fire up Rance Quest Magnum for the first time.

For the unfamiliar, Rance Quest Magnum is the eighth title in the Rance series of 18+ role-playing games from Alicesoft. The Rance series, if you’re unfamiliar, is noteworthy for being almost as old as Final Fantasy, and an important part of Japanese gaming history. It was very late to get localised, however, as the fact many of the games feature a hefty amount of sexual assault in them (including incidents perpetrated by the protagonist) presumably meant a lot of companies thought it was too much of a risky prospect.

But MangaGamer, bless them, got over it, and have been steadily releasing Rance games for a while now. They started with Rance 5D and VI — with 5D being a soft reboot of the series, and thus a good starting point — and continuing on with the remakes of the first two games in the series, Rance 01 and Rance 02, the grand strategy game Sengoku Rance, then Rance Quest Magnum and most recently the penultimate installment Rance IX. I’ve written about a number of these in the past — see MoeGamer for my thoughts on Rance 5D, VI and Sengoku, and Rice Digital for my exploration of Rance 01 and 02.

You can find more (a lot more) about the history of this series at those links, so if you want to know more, go give them a click so I can get on with talking about what I actually want to talk about.

Rance Quest Magnum, like most entries in the Rance series, completely reinvents its core structure and mechanics. While Sengoku Rance was a grand strategy game with some RPG elements, Rance Quest Magnum is kind of-sort of a more conventional RPG. Except it’s a kind of-sort of conventional RPG in a different way to Rance VI: Collapse of Zeth, which was a first-person “blobber” dungeon crawler at heart.

Rance Quest Magnum instead adopts a heavily quest-based structure. There’s no “world map” to wander around, and quests are self-contained challenges, some of which have unique dungeons, others of which reuse maps used elsewhere. The main “RPG” action of the game primarily unfolds from a top-down perspective, with Rance represented as a polygonal “chibi” form of himself, similar to how stablemate Evenicle does things — and yes, I’ve covered that also. Although Evenicle had a world map so itself was a completely different sort of game to Rance Quest Magnum.

So each quest in Rance Quest Magnum unfolds across one or more top-down maps. On each map, you explore, find treasures, get into fights and attempt to complete your quest objectives. When you’ve completed your quest objective, that’s it — you leave the map. You can, however, repeat previously completed quests, which allows you to investigate the map more thoroughly, see events with choices unfold in different ways (which in turn can unlock new quests), acquire new treasures and, of course, grind for experience, money and items.

Rance Quest Magnum‘s core mechanics make use of an interesting skill system. Each character has a certain number of skill slots, and is usually able to increase these by purchasing a particular passive skill on level up. The skill slots can be used for either active skills, which are used in combat, or boost skills, which directly impact stats and overall effectiveness in battle. Characters can also have completely passive skills, which they just need to have learned in order to take advantage of; they don’t need to be slotted.

Active skills have a set number of uses per quest, and you can increase this count by spending the skill points acquired on level up. If you do this, it, of course, means that you can’t learn a new skill instead — but sometimes it’s more helpful to be able to perform a particular action more often than have a greater choice of actions available, particularly given that you can only equip so many of them at once anyway.

Among the passive skills, meanwhile, are skills that appear to have nothing to do with combat; the character Sachiko, for example, who is a student, has a skill that represents her putting some time in to study when Rance isn’t dragging her along to dungeons, and Rance himself, of course, has a “Sexual Prowess” skill.

The limited number of times each active skill can be used is sort of a callback to how Rance VI: Collapse of Zeth and Sengoku Rance did things, though a little different to both cases. In Rance VI, each character had a “stamina” rating, which represented how many battles they could participate in before becoming exhausted; aside from that, they could use any of their skills as you saw fit according to the situation. Sengoku Rance, meanwhile, gave each character a certain number of “action flags”, representing how many actions they could take in a single battle or dungeon delve. In the latter case, you could swap out characters from your complete squad if someone became exhausted or incapacitated.

You can do this in Rance Quest Magnum, too, though the number of times you can swap party members around is limited by Rance’s “Charisma” stat, which starts at zero to represent him bumming around being a violent nuisance at the outset of the game. For context, towards the end of Sengoku Rance, Rance’s longtime companion and slave Sill Plain became encased in enchanted ice that doesn’t melt naturally, and despite being firmly in denial, the beginning of Rance Quest Magnum indicates that he has not taken this all that well. His level has dropped massively, he’s reverted to his very worst extremes of brutish behaviour, and he’s generally having a negative impact on the world and people around him.

Rance is a thoroughly interesting character in that although he is indisputably an asshole, he has had a major impact on world events for the better across all his previous adventures. Indeed, if you look into the overall lore of the Rance series, his very existence is considered to be something of an anomaly, with the “gods” behind the running of the world keeping him around because he keeps things interesting. He’s not a “hero” by the definition of the “Planner Scenario”, which the world of Rance operates under, but he does have the interesting distinction of being born without a level cap, which means it’s possible for him to grow to extraordinary levels of power over the course of Rance Quest Magnum.

This is why it’s interesting to see him effectively starting again from almost zero in Rance Quest Magnum. His “loss” of Sill has clearly hit him hard, and it takes a fair bit of encouragement from the people around him to get him off his arse and pursuing some sort of cure for her. In the early hours of the game, he’s completing quests for pretty much selfish reasons, but I’m willing to bet that over the course of the game as a whole, his attitude will change — particularly if and when he manages to sort out Sill’s situation.

I’m really enjoying the game so far. Like most Rance games, it strikes a nice balance between interesting gameplay, well-written dialogue and cheeky, provocative humour. The mechanics and progression systems in particular look set to be very interesting indeed, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the quests progress as you continue through the game.

I’m sure I’ll have a lot more to say on the game after a few more hours with it, but suffice to say for now, I think I made the right choice deciding to make a start on it.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

2476: The Growth of the Visual Novel

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When discussing my full writeup on Supipara earlier today, it occurred to me that visual novels are in a much better place here in the West than they were even a few years ago.

When I first encountered visual novels — like, first first encountered them — they were like a hidden gem of the Internet. Gorgeous Japanese pixel art, interesting stories, memorable characters and porn, all in one happy package. Naturally, despite a number of them having been officially translated by the well-established (and still standing) JAST USA, they were mostly distributed through… shall we say, questionable means. (If I remember correctly, this was still the days of KaZaA and Limewire over dial-up, well before BitTorrent became a thing.)

I had a lot of fun with some of these early visual novels but was never quite sure if it was “acceptable” to talk about them, what with them being widely regarded as porn first and foremost. Fortunately, a number of friends and I all discovered Parsley’s wonderful True Love around the same time, and found ourselves thoroughly captivated by its wide variety of different characters, its interesting stat-based gameplay and the various mini-stories each of the game’s heroines got you involved with.

Other memorable early visual novels I encountered included Ring-Out!! which was about a young girl sold into essentially sex slavery dressed up as professional (all-lesbian) wrestling for the gratification of rich, bored playboys with nothing better to do and less-than-progressive attitudes towards women. While this game’s plot was a thinly-veiled excuse to have, well, lots of lesbian wrestling in lingerie, it stuck with me long after I first played it because it presented the protagonist as a very “human” character caught up in events beyond her control, not quite sure how to deal with what was essentially a horrific situation to be caught in. There were a number of different narrative paths through the game, each of which explored what might happen if the protagonist responded to her situation in different ways. Short version, though: if ever you wanted to feel really, really bad about popping a boner over some lesbians doing lesbian things, Ring-Out!! is the game for you.

I also quite vividly remember Three Sisters Story, because although it presented you with the opportunity to bump uglies with all three of the titular sisters over the course of the narrative, doing so would cause you to suffer the indignity of a bad ending where you didn’t end up with any of them after the dramatic finale. This was surprising to me, and confirmed something I already suspected: there was a lot more going on in many of these games than excuses to display lovingly-drawn images of depraved sexual acts.

It would be a good few years before I got back into visual novels, and Japanese games in general. I typically credit Katawa Shoujo with my current interest in Japanese popular media, despite it being largely Western-developed, and by this point, discussion of visual novels — including their lewd bits — had become much more “acceptable” to many, though still not all, people.

After Katawa Shoujo, I decided to catch up on a number of visual novels, primarily from JAST, who were still pumping them out, and a couple from relative newcomer MangaGamer. I had a great time with many of them, and still fondly look back on a number of these titles such as the gloriously silly My Girlfriend is the President and the lengthy, emotional road trip story that is Kira-Kira!

Visual novels still hadn’t quite hit the mainstream, though, and this was disappointing to me, as here was a genre of game — no, I’ve often argued it’s a distinct medium in its own right — that was exploring subjects and themes more traditional games typically shied away from for various reasons, whether it be concerns over the subject matter itself to simply not being sure how to make a game about people just living their life actually fun and interesting to play. I wanted more people to appreciate this fantastic medium and enjoy the stories I’d enjoyed, but it remained difficult to convince many people that they were anything more than just porn, even if I cited specific examples of how they clearly weren’t.

When I look around today, I see a very different landscape. Visual novels are everywhere on Steam, and not just from Japanese developers: these days we have works from English, American, Russian, Korean authors… authors from all over the world who want to tell their story in the distinctive way that the visual novel medium allows them to. And the genre/medium as a whole has, I feel, finally hit the mainstream.

That’s absolutely delightful to see for me, as someone who was around when they were very much an “underground” sort of experience; the growth of the visual novel sector — both adult and all-ages — has been wonderful to observe, and so long as there are great stories that people want to tell, there seems to be no shortage of new experiences to enjoy.

There’s still work to be done — most notably with regard to the distribution of adults-only titles, which can’t be sold on leading digital distribution platform Steam in their uncut forms, and which some companies are selling the sexual content for separately rather than simply providing a free patch or alternative download — but for the most part, we’re in a much better place than we were even a couple of years ago. And, I feel, it’s only going to continue to get better from here.

Also, buy Supipara. (Read more about why you should do this here.) I want to see the other chapters released!