Rough Rance X Review

Writing-wise, Rance X knocks it out of the park. The bulk of the story is contained in mostly independent quests which tend to revolve around hunting and slaying a Majin/Fiend that's slaughtering human troops in a certain region. These Majin-hunting quests manage to be several hours long each and are practically short stories in their own right, introducing the Majin and developing them over the course of the quest until eventually you take them out. There's a perfect blend of humor and seriousness in these quests: Rance will be goofing around like his normal self on his way to the region and whatnot, but once you actually get to the battlefield, people are dying in massive numbers and shit gets real. It's actually impressive how Rance X manages to consistently balance the humor you would expect from a Rance game with the sheer brutality of the global war going on. There's always a natural transition between comedy and seriousness, and rarely did I feel mood whiplash. On top of that, the characterization is nothing short of excellent. There are over 200+ characters (with sprites!) in the game, but each manages to feel distinct and memorable. Returning characters retain their charm and personality from their own titles, and the new characters introduced effectively, especially the Majin.  Really, I have no complaints with the writing in Rance X. It delivers in humor, it delivers in more serious and dramatic story telling, and it delivers in characterization. I tend to prefer stories with more lengthy characters arcs, rather than a series of mostly nonlinear quests, but Rance X manages to be so consistently entertaining and overall quality that I didn't mind it here. Rance X's story delivers a grand end to a monumental adventure.

Ero-wise, I like what Rance X did here. There's way too many characters to give each an H-scene, so instead what they did was give each female character a nude sprite and a dedicated nude card that comes with a pseudo-H-scene which sometimes involve sex with the text doing all of the heavy living and sometimes just involve Rance chilling with the nude girl. The actual H-scenes with full on CGs are mostly devoted to new characters, but some returning favourites like Tillday get a scene too. Surprisingly, the game is light on ero overall, with a fair amount of ero being brutal gorey-rapey scenes following a region being successfully conquered by the demon army. If you play Rance X to fap you'll probably be a bit disappointed, but personally, the art was so good and the scenes so great I didn't mind the overall lack of them. I also personally developed a liking for the nude sprite "h-scenes", they're really endearing.

Gameplay-wise, Rance X... is good. The gameplay is quality enough to keep me entertained for 90 hours, but it has a lot of cracks that don't hold up under scrutiny. First, the good. The gacha system, where you get characters mostly randomly from chests after battles, is actually really well designed with it being just random enough to make each run different while also being consistent enough to allow for strategy. You get much more Leazas cards in Leazas, for example, so if you're looking for fighters it's best to beeline for Leazas and aim for a Rick card. If you want mages, go to Zeth. And so on. You can definitely plan ahead to get roughly the party you want, but there's enough randomness that you'll be tempted to stray from your plan due to ultra rare cards and such. You may think the excess of cards would lead to a lot of waste due to not needing most cards you get, but even cards you aren't using in your main party add to your overall strength, so you always win when drawing cards. Overall, the gacha system is way better designed than I anticipated and adds a unique flavor to the game, especially when mixed into all the freedom of choice given in chests. Replaying a game is fun both to see what new cards you get and to complete quests in different ways. TADA was right, he can do gacha better than phone games.

Unfortunately, the battle system itself... fairs a little worse. Unfortunately, in my opinion, the battles are way too easy. A system of focusing on melee fighters constantly attacking saw me through the entire game, excluding the last boss. Majin are extremely tough foes who need clever strategizing to beat... but they end up extremely weakened over the course of their quest to the point of being mostly trivial if you do their quest right, so ultimately, the bulk of the combat in this game is mopping up trash mobs using repeated "default attack x 1000" strategies. You can definitely mix things around to optimize fights better, but there's really no reason to except for personal satisfaction - the game is easy enough that you don't really need to do that. To make matter worse, the NG+ system (where you earn points from various endings and use them to power up future runs while aiming for the true ending) just makes things even easier. Just 2-3 points is enough to end up with tremendously overpowered characters. My first run I struggled a bit, but after getting 3 bad ends concentrated near the same point and starting a second run, I never struggled again until the final boss. Simple strategies are just way too effective and aren't punished enough. Majin DO punish simple strategies, and would be really hard fights, but you have to go out of your way to fight them normally. Basically, this game has a huge cast of playable characters with a huge variety in skills, but the only point you'll ever *need* to experiment and use characters effectively is if you go very much out of your way to do optional challenges (like beating Majin early in their quests before they get weakened due to story reasons). In any case, the combat isn't bad. It's fluid, interesting, and has the right amount of depth. It just falls into the classic JRPG pit of providing too many mob enemies that are easy to beat, and not enough bosses that actually challenge you. I think this has to do with the lack of grinding mixing with the randomized cards and making a game that's more or less impossible to balance for, but that's going in a bit too deep for this casual review. Suffice to say, Rance X has fun combat, but you have to go out of your way to really enjoy it on more than a surface level.

As an aside, balancing the defense of four regions at once is a nice flavoring to top all of this, but the actual grand strategy elements are light enough that really when talking about Rance X's gameplay it's the card system and such that deserves the vast majority of the focus.

As a double aside, the true end to this game adds a lot of unique content, but talking about it all in any measure is basically asking for spoilers, so I'm just going to pretend it doesn't exist for the sake of this review.

In conclusion, Rance X is a great game with fantastic storytelling and solid gameplay. It'll take about 100 hours to complete if going for most of the content, and even more than that if going for 100%. The writing is good, the scope is historical, and it's just a lot of fun overall. One of the best eroge I've played in my life for sure. Some games have better writing, some games have better gameplay, but Rance X puts it all together into a truly legendary Final Explosion that concludes an incredible series.