Rance Series

[InD_ImaginE]

Even in JP we had companies getting bankrupt right and left so yeah.

And yeah, VN hardly sells these days except to few passionate people and it is understandable that localization company wont be able to pay good rate for translators and editors.

 

[Deuce Traveler]

Maybe a kickstarter model is a way to go here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1396516721/venusblood-frontier-english-localization-project

 

[Haba]

Maybe a kickstarter model is a way to go here

With the content that Rance games have? No fukken way.

 

[Jason Liang]

Look on the bright side -

Rance X getting translated into English is inevitable

Maybe a partial unofficial translation will arrive even earlier than Mangagamer's 2040 target date, since it doesn't have to wait behind RQM, IX, 01 and 03

Translating the main route is not bad at all, it's mostly
- H Scenes (seriously props to Arunaru and MariaTulip for suffering through these)
- Meal scenes (this is the biggie for Rance X)
- Naked card scenes (even more H scenes to chew through)

Thats what makes a full translation of Rance X a nightmare, plus afaik there are no tools to hack the game yet

 

[TigerKnee]

I was always under the impression that MG was one of the better VN publishers out there but if this is accurate then I can't imagine what shitholes places like Sekai Project are like.

 

[Terra]

What's the trick to dealing with the Monster Army bs in Sengoku Rance?

Spoiler

They've just knocked out Mouri & Takeda and launched like 5 attacks on me in one turn. Their Shimazu commanders have around 2.5k~ troops to my best units 700-1k~. Some enemy encounter are literally ashigaru guard-spamming every round. Kenshin feels like she's made of paper with only 280 troops, heck a lot of my units feel woefully underpowered like I've missed a trick someone along the way.

 

[Nahel]

Just hold. The 5 attacks blitz is a one time event

 

[TigerKnee]

While they have a couple of events that will inject more troops into the army, the Monster Army suffers pretty badly from attrition. As stated, just hold out long enough

 

[Jaedar]

What's the trick to dealing with the Monster Army bs in Sengoku Rance?

Spoiler

They've just knocked out Mouri & Takeda and launched like 5 attacks on me in one turn. Their Shimazu commanders have around 2.5k~ troops to my best units 700-1k~. Some enemy encounter are literally ashigaru guard-spamming every round. Kenshin feels like she's made of paper with only 280 troops, heck a lot of my units feel woefully underpowered like I've missed a trick someone along the way.

Why are you using 280 troop units in the endgame? You should be fielding units with at least 500, preferably close to 1000 at this point.

And yes, the shimazu blitz is really hard to defend against, thankfully it's one time deal.

Sucks about Mangagamer losing their translator, but on the bright side: every rance game except for X,3 and 4 are already translated and just awaiting editing. Them sales are pretty sad though, 1500*30USD is not a lot of money considering taxes and salary.

Rance X getting translated into English is inevitable

Maybe a partial unofficial translation will arrive even earlier than Mangagamer's 2040 target date, since it doesn't have to wait behind RQM, IX, 01 and 03

We can only hope!

 

[Terra]

Thanks for the tips guys, managed to hold out against the Monster Army long enough and an event popped that put me on a more even footing, should be able to manage from here.

Mangagamer has backed out of a deal with the translator of Rance 10, and he is no longer working in the game:

Well, I'm not working on Rance 10 anymore after Mangagamer abruptly backed out of a deal we had regarding payment, so I won't be working with them in the future. But before we can get to how that happened, we have to talk about how Mangagamer is an absolute shitshow.

What he describes just seems to be the games industry in general rather than being particularly specific to VN localisation companies. They'll always prefer to hire young&passionate people who they can pay peanuts to and will kick em out and replace with a new batch whenever they become jaded.

Although I'd long hoped VNs could find some financial success on larger platforms like Steam which would hopefully alleviate some pains in this cottage industry, however with the SJW/feminist types running rampant right now, I can understand why it's tough selling these games outside of dark corners of the internet. I still believe finding that success on said platforms is possible, but the wider screeching harpies problem has to be definitively dealt with first.

 

[thesecret1]

They'll always prefer to hire young&passionate people who they can pay peanuts to and will kick em out and replace with a new batch whenever they become jaded.

If you did that with programmers, you'd go bankrupt pretty soon. Veterans are extremely important. But not translators - they're perfectly replaceable at any time and are basically a low-skill job. All it requires is knowing two languages decently enough, which is by no means exceptional (especially when one of them is English). Reading this dude's whining was rather amusing, especially his chagrin at how all those translators are being underpaid. Seeing as how MG manages to still have a staff, it's obvious there are enough people who for one reason or another don't consider themselves to be underpaid or do not mind it enough to stop working (there's also a question of just where they are from - if they're sitting somewhere in Romania and send finished work through e-mail, $17k a year becomes a really good wage to earn). He keeps painting himself a victim of some terrible injustice, but nobody was keeping him there - he wasn't even a fulltime employee, he could ditch them at any time. Really, it reads like someone getting indignant about free market.

 

[Jason Liang]

It has the biggest script in the history of gaming, was estimated around 2.6 - 2.7 million English words. For reference, Harry Potter series and The Bible have around 1 million words.

Again, the best case was always going to be a partial fan-translation (which is what I think is inevitable). This is better since ofc you can't sell a partial translation, whereas a complete translation that's the work of 3 bibles was always a bit of a pipedream.
tbh it's on AliceSoft to find a translator or distributor that can complete the project. That obviously wasn't going to be MangaGamer.
The best case would be if AliceSoft paid Arunaru for the translation work, and then MangaGamer could distribute.

 

[Terra]

And just finished the main route in Sengoku. Hat's off, this has genuinely been a really impressive game, worthy of the hype attributed to it. Are the other routes worth bothering with? I'm eager to try out the other games in the series now, but if there's decent amount of content I could blast through it again a few times.

 

[thesecret1]

And just finished the main route in Sengoku. Hat's off, this has genuinely been a really impressive game, worthy of the hype attributed to it. Are the other routes worth bothering with? I'm eager to try out the other games in the series now, but if there's decent amount of content I could blast through it again a few times.

They definitely are worth bothering with, especially since you haven't seen nearly all of the content after just one playthrough. As for other games, I advise playing them in order if you care about the story whatsoever. Sengoku is the most stand alone of them all, and the others fully expect you to be well versed in the lore and do not waste time with any recaps.

 

[Jason Liang]

And just finished the main route in Sengoku. Hat's off, this has genuinely been a really impressive game, worthy of the hype attributed to it. Are the other routes worth bothering with? I'm eager to try out the other games in the series now, but if there's decent amount of content I could blast through it again a few times.

I suggest playing from 02 to Rance VI, and then replay Sengoku Rance after VI and you will enjoy Sengoku Rance even more.

Suggested order:
Rance 02 (English fan translation) -> A short dungeon crawler adventure, but important characters for the rest of the series. Think of this as a prelude to III.
Rance III (English) / Rance 03 -> The first epic adventure in the series. 03 is a complete upgrade but only in Japanese so you can choose if you want to start learning to use machine translation tools or play the original III translated with primitive mechanics and graphics
Rance IV+4.1+4.2 (English) -> If you found the primitve mechanics in Rance III not too bad, might as well play these short adventures. If you did not like III's gameplay then go ahead and skip this one for now
Kichikou Rance (English) -> The final game of the "old" canon, this game is like Sengoku Rance with a more primitive battle system but blows SR out of the water for story and c&c. This game is a true marvel
Rance 5D (English) -> Another short comic adventure, consider it a prelude to VI. Some people hate it's weird battle system/ plot system but I think it's super underrated
Rance VI (English) -> The second great epic adventure of the series (not counting KR), this game has a truly great story and is one of my favorite rpgs of all time. It shows what can be achieved by a blobber with a real plot

***Sengoku Rance***

The final three games of the series should be played in order and currently can not be played in English, requiring use of machine translation. So if you didn't buy into machine translation for 03, this is now the only option if you wish to continue (in English. There are Chinese and I assume Korean translations for RQM and IX).

Rance Quest Magnum
Rance IX
Rance X

 

[thesecret1]

I suggest playing from 02

Migth as well go from 01, even though it's not nearly as critical as 02. Alternatively, he can watch the anime – it covers the events of 01

 

[Jason Liang]

I think you get a good enough sense of the Leazas characters from III. The OVA is alright but it puts Lia and Maris in a bad light. I think it's more for fans that have a connection with these characters and not so good as an introduction. Rance 1 is pretty standalone, and probably not worth the trouble of either playing the original or Rance 01 with machine translation.

 

[thesecret1]

It's true that the events in 01 aren't that important (can be summed up in a couple sentences, really), but I find it gives good introduction to Rance and Sill as characters.

 

[KingDoofus]

Just found out about Aru leaving and I wish I shared some of the enthusiasm that X is still going to come out in some English form. Aru leaving doesn't change that MG still has the rights to it, so anyone fantranslating it is almost certainly going to get hit with a cease-and-desist letter. A script of this size would necessitate a team working on it too, which is going to invite some degree of visibility. MG probably still hopes to release it at some point in the future so they'll need to get someone for it - I doubt the "other guy" working with Aru would agree to suddenly be the only person working on it. Maria's the obvious choice but nothing's been announced yet. We may hear in the coming weeks that she's working on it. If we don't then that means this is going to be a long term search. For a job that's so "replaceable," I doubt we'll be seeing anyone taking it for a long time.

I've also seen a lot of mental gymnastics going on trying to make this Aru's fault and MG was just acting like any other low profit company. I understand not liking his translations - or him for some reason? I don't know, I'm not on fucking twitter - but the company offered him a salary, then waited until he had flown to another country to tell him they weren't going to give it to him. That's not Capitalistic leverage. That's fraud. Aru's piece was full two things: him entering into agreements he shouldn't have and MG making financial commitments and not abiding by them. He should've left earlier but he stuck around so we could have games to complain about. What an asshole. What's funny is our best chance at seeing this game before 2040 (or ever) is for the work Aru's done so far to somehow "leak."

What really sucks is finding out just how threadbare the profits on these games are. Sengoku sold 2k copies? And most are lucky to get over half of that? Fuuuuuck. That sucks. That was one of the takeaways I got from that piece - that bringing over games with the complexity and size of Alicesoft games isn't financially viable, not in a standard business model. Venus Blood Frontier made over 200k on Kickstarter so it's not like there's no alternative, but man. I don't like to pirate games from companies that aren't making shit for money because I don't like to grind on people already ground down. Maybe MG has a take on what's going on with them and maybe they'd even like to share it. But it sounds like there's no avoiding it for the games we on this board are enthusiastic about: No Rance unless slave labor. Boo.


But I will talk up some of the other games that came out!

Terra, I agree with the recommendations you've gotten so far, on replay and other games in the series. The other routes are definitely worth a look and trying to recruit characters you didn't on your first run will make it more enjoyable. You'll see new stories and discover new challenges. Did you conquer and recruit Takeda? Or the One-Eye Monster house? Did you kill Orochi in the Miko Dungeon? There's a lot of optional stuff and it's pretty fun. Some things are only available on 2nd games anyway. Try turning the difficulty up too, it'll probably change how you approach the run and view certain characters' usefulness.

As for the other games in the series: if you only care about story and aren't bothered by old graphics and meh gameplay then just go through the games in order. It's a better story than any Japanese porn game has a right to have. No two Rance games have the same gameplay, but if you want gameplay to even resemble the fun of Sengoku:

-Rance 6 is a surprisingly good story and fun as a blobber. Probably the next best game you can play. You have a large roster of characters who can only be used so many times before they're retired for that run, so there's a kind of resource management going on with characters while you're blobbing. It keeps things interesting and keeps you from mauling every fight with your best units. You'll either get into it or you won't.
-Rance 5 is fun and silly with weird gameplay. I liked it too but I'd recommend watching a video of someone playing it - you'll know after 5-10 minutes if it's something you can get into.
-Kichikuou Rance is the closest gameplay-wise to Sengoku: Huge world, deciding where to invade next, managing territory, etc. Graphics are old and the battles aren't as fun as Sengoku but the story is solid and managing the world is fun. There's also a lot of different endings you can get both for the game and for characters.

Beyond that your best bet is machine translation. I played all of Rance X with machine translation and it was a blast, but it requires some work. Good luck to you and welcome to our awful, perverted world. Gahahaha!

 

[Morkar Left]

Oh well it seems I was too idle in Sengoku Rance.

Spoiler

Around turn 110 the game seems to decide I take too long and informs me that after a longer period of fighting clan Oda manages to capture all territories from the Monster army which were clan Mouri, Takeda, Uesugi and Takuga clan before. Only free territories left were Tokugawa, Imagawa and Dokuganryo. What the fuck??????? Really pisses me off.

Is that supposed to be like that? Is there a finite amount of turns before everything goes to hell? If not is there a way to stop the game doing that shit?

 

[TheEntitledOne]

Oh well it seems I was too idle in Sengoku Rance.

Spoiler

Around turn 110 the game seems to decide I take too long and informs me that after a longer period of fighting clan Oda manages to capture all territories from the Monster army which were clan Mouri, Takeda, Uesugi and Takuga clan before. Only free territories left were Tokugawa, Imagawa and Dokuganryo. What the fuck??????? Really pisses me off.

Is that supposed to be like that? Is there a finite amount of turns before everything goes to hell? If not is there a way to stop the game doing that shit?

It's the way the game has to tell you, *git gud*

 

[Morkar Left]

Oh well it seems I was too idle in Sengoku Rance.

Spoiler

Around turn 110 the game seems to decide I take too long and informs me that after a longer period of fighting clan Oda manages to capture all territories from the Monster army which were clan Mouri, Takeda, Uesugi and Takuga clan before. Only free territories left were Tokugawa, Imagawa and Dokuganryo. What the fuck??????? Really pisses me off.

Is that supposed to be like that? Is there a finite amount of turns before everything goes to hell? If not is there a way to stop the game doing that shit?

It's the way the game has to tell you, *git gud*

It's way too generous in telling me that. I could have captured these territories alone and would have had a lot of fun doing it. It totally spoils victory

 

[Jaedar]

It's way too generous in telling me that. I could have captured these territories alone and would have had a lot of fun doing it. It totally spoils victory

Git gud, start a second playthrough, show the game who's boss by getting a score that isn't -40

not actually spoiler

I also got this skip forward event on first playthru. It is very easy to accidentally go super slow on first playthrough

 

[Morkar Left]

It's way too generous in telling me that. I could have captured these territories alone and would have had a lot of fun doing it. It totally spoils victory

Git gud, start a second playthrough, show the game who's boss by getting a score that isn't -40

not actually spoiler

I also got this skip forward event on first playthru. It is very easy to accidentally go super slow on first playthrough

Is there a specific turn when you lose?

 

[Jason Liang]

It's way too generous in telling me that. I could have captured these territories alone and would have had a lot of fun doing it. It totally spoils victory

Git gud, start a second playthrough, show the game who's boss by getting a score that isn't -40

not actually spoiler

I also got this skip forward event on first playthru. It is very easy to accidentally go super slow on first playthrough

Is there a specific turn when you lose?

If you make the wrong choices, yes.