This emphasis on the important characters in the story and just a part of the overall setting has remained a key part of the Rance series’ design over the years each individual installment in the vast majority of the series focuses on a small, specific part of “The Continent”, the land in which it is set. There’s a reason for that, and it’s not just because it’s cheaper - it allows the games to place a strong emphasis on the characterisation of the main cast and explore a small part of the overall world in great narrative detail, rather than providing a sprawling map that features vast expanses of nothingness.

We still see this format today, particularly with dungeon crawlers - even well-known and successful series like Compile Heart’s Neptunia still tend to eschew fully explorable worlds and towns in favour of menu-based navigation and visual novel-style dialogue sequences. Quest for Hikari, which combined role-playing game mechanics with an adventure game-style interface, established a common format for low- to mid-budget Japanese RPGs, both within the eroge sector and more broadly in the gaming medium. Gameplay from Rance 01, the official remake of Quest for Hikari. They could be proper, honest-to-goodness games for grown-ups, in other words. Instead, they could have meaningful stories and substantial gameplay, and integrate the adult content with those things. Looking back on the period, this is considered to be an important watershed moment for the fledgling eroge industry in Japan, since it clearly demonstrated that erotic games could be something more than flimsy excuses for pornographic images. The Rance series proper got underway in 1989 when TADA established Alicesoft and co-wrote Rance I: Quest for Hikari. In 2010, he stepped down from his leadership position to focus on making Rance games. He also makes a point of slipping at least one of his Microsoft Paint “creations” into every game Alicesoft puts out, and these are inevitably among the hardest things to defeat in the entire game. TADA wrote Little Princess’ main scenario, went on to direct numerous Rance games over the years and was the head of Alicesoft for a significant time. One of TADA’s beautiful creations, seen here in Rance VI: Collapse of Zeth.

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