Greentext Does: Sengoku Rance

As always seems to be the case, if you want an adult game with really good gameplay than look to the East. Sengoku Rance is an interesting hybrid of turn based combat, turn based empire management, and turn based dicking. It’s also apparently the 7th game in the Rance Series which started in 1989. I mean FUCK. This of course begs the question; “Why with almost 30 years of games and 13 titles, including the latest and final one being released just 2 months ago, was this specific one recommended to me over all the rest?” Well, lets find out.

Setup was incredibly simple compared to what I expected based on the last time I installed a foreign game. Download the .rar files, extract them all, done. Easy as pie and I didn’t need to screw with any of my settings or change my timezone. Translation is also..adequate. It’s well written but unfortunately it isn’t perfect. For starters the text is often too big to fit into it’s text boxes. I’m assuming this is because when written in Kanji it’s shorter. With no ways to increase the resolution that means there’s parts of text that you just can’t read. The options in this game are pretty limited and consist mainly of different text box colors and fonts.

The first major part of the game consists of deciding what you want to spend your limited actions in the map doing before your turn ends. Effectively, you end up choosing between attacking other countries, talking to people to up their affection, searching areas for loot or hidden dungeons, exploring said dungeons for loot, building structures to increase your national power (Your limit on soldiers and some other actions), preparing areas for battle, or sticking your dick in things. Combat with other countries consists of a turn based and row based battle where your health and damage dealt is determined by the amount of soldiers in your unit. On top of this each different unit type can preform different attacks like aoe magic blasts or abilities that negate the enemy’s guard.

For fighting you have warriors who do damage, footsoldiers who defend, musketeers

who do crazy damage but only have 2 shots, ninjas who can sometimes insta-kill enemies, archers who use range attacks from the back row, medics who heal,  Animals who you never actually use in combat, diviners who are amazing, and a few other types. To win a fight you can either kill all of the enemy units or just do enough damage to tip the scale up top in your favor. Each of these units have different stats and increasing your affection lets them level up which can increase their stats or get them unique abilities. Defeating an enemy sometimes lets you capture them. After this you can use units with high negotiating stats to convince them to join you. If your units get defeated they’ll often just get KO’d for the fight but sometimes they’ll straight up die. This includes interesting side characters or even the player character. Every once in a while I would win a fight only to get a game over because the RNG gods decided I died.

Another way you fight is in dungeons. These will usually be 4-10 levels deep where you assemble your team and kill everything on each floor. Getting to the bottom will get you a piece of gear and some currency you can use to buy other gear. Instead of having your entire army with you you fight just with your commanders in these and this is the only part of the game where your commander’s levels actually matter. A level 40 ninja won’t fight any better in overworld battles than a level 20 one. This usually means that leveling people up is pretty pointless as the resources it takes to do that would be better spent buffing them for overworld battles. Rarely you will actually fight like this in the overworld such as when you defeat an army and go 1 on 1 with it’s leader or fight off assassins.

As for the story, lets get this out of the way; Rance is an asshole. Seriously. The game does not try to make it’s main character likable in any way. Honestly, this threw me off for a while. I thought it was going to pull a TLS and surprise me with a different real main character but NOPE! I mean, Rance is the one the series is named after. He’s the “irresponsible person put in a position of power” trope personified. When he’s not raping random women he’s beating his slave. After a while I got used to this and started to go “Oh you” a lot more as opposed to trying to find someone else to like. The cast of characters is actually pretty decent and interesting. Of course you have your government mandated shy and insecure little girl and your tough as nails doesn’t talk much warrior women but you also have an engineer made out of cubes, pedophile samurai and not one but 3 battle maids.

The sex scenes in this one are pretty varied and decent. You have a lot of different characters and kinks to work with and they look pretty decent. Most of them just consist of Rance raping various women but they all react differently and it never really feels repetitive. Everything I’ve seen is thankfully straight stuff. I haven’t seen any cuck or gay content so no need to panic if the mere thought of someone else’s fetish being in a game ruins the experience for you. Any scene you’ve seen can be accessed at any time and it even includes a handy option to view it as just CGs or with included text boxes.

Honestly, I had a lot of fun with this one and plan to continue playing it after I put this up. The combat is pretty simplistic but enjoyable and taking over new territory feels rewarding and opens up new dungeons and scenes each time. If you’re interested in light tactics and a large amounts of pretty good smut than I’d suggest giving Sengoku Rance a try.

Sengoku Rance can be downloaded here: http://igg-games.com/sengoku-rance-free-download.html

And a big thanks to Bravostein on the /d/ games discord for helping explain how I actually go about playing this.