Today on the blog, we have a Rance Quest Magnum tester’s corner from Umbelia!
Hello, my good dude. Do you like aimless adventures where the plot suddenly turns intense halfway through? Do you like cute girls? The Alicesoft Morurun is looking for new victims- Rance Quest Magnum is here.
For anyone who needs an explanation: Rance Quest Magnum is the 8th entry in one of the biggest names in eroge history, Alicesoft’s Rance series. They are overwhelmingly closer to plot-heavy RPGs with eroge elements than the other way around and it works out amazingly well. The genre from game to game often varies wildly, and in Rance Quest Magnum’s case, it’s taking the form of a top-down dungeon crawler RPG.
The plot itself is a bit hard to talk about for a couple reasons- Rance Quest and Rance Quest Magnum are both totally solid standalone games with completely separate (though related) stories. On top of the distinction, Rance Quest is following up pretty much immediately where Sengoku Rance (which I strongly recommend playing) left off.
After returning to the continent from his adventures in Nippon, Rance is faced with the dilemma of -SPOILERS- and sets off on a quest to… solve the problem that, again, is completely impossible to talk about without blowing up major plot points of Sengoku Rance.
Through taking a spread of fairly random and unrelated quests, shenanigans lead to Rance falling victim to a curse called the Abstinence Morurun, which… does a lot of things, but most importantly he can’t have sex with anyone under level 35. Did I mention that this is incredibly hard to talk about?
Rance Quest Magnum picks up immediately after the end of base Rance Quest… and goes in a completely different direction from Rance Quest‘s general meandering and aimless nature- having a very pointed (and standard) JRPG plot about the world’s dominant religion and drama surrounding it and appointing a new bishop after the previous one recently deceased and… again, as a direct sequel to base Rance Quest, this is essentially impossible to talk about.
Outside of lore stuff, Rance Quest (and also the Rance series in general) has a huge cast of (mostly girl) party members that you can pretty much freely mix and match according to your taste… or min/max if you want to go hard.
The gameplay has a STEEP grind element to it, as dungeon crawlers tend to, but be ready to spend a lot of time farming! But if you decide to really go at it you’ll find that Quest is a pretty deep and solid RPG.
Aside from the writing and gameplay, Rance (and Alicesoft at large) is known for pretty great soundtracks and of course, Rance Quest Magnum is no exception. Hammering the point home that, really, Rance is more like a normal RPG than an eroge.
That being said, if it’s not already obvious- Rance is NOT a nukige by any stretch of the imagination. The art is good, the writing is great, the experience is amazing- and if you’re looking for something more in line with a horny RPG than a basic VN experience, then Rance is here for you!
Rance Quest Magnum is now available for purchase exclusively on MangaGamer.com!
