Sengoku Rance – Tester’s Corner Vol. 1

Today on the blog, we have a tester’s corner from Toufu Guy!

Hi!! I’m toufu guy. This is my first time writing something for the blog here as a beta tester, and I’m pretty dang excited to talk about my experience testing Sengoku Rance, brought to you by MangaGamer.

I like to consider myself a Super Sengoku Rance fan, and this opportunity allowed me to work directly with this classic title in an official context. It’s one of the first eroge I ever played, and it sure has left its mark on me.

As many of you know, Sengoku Rance is a 2006 SRPG developed by AliceSoft, depicting Rance’s adventure in the legendary eastern island of Nippon. With the seemingly simple goal of “fuck every [hot] princess,” he ends up doing a lot more, like dealing with a civil war, an ancient beast, and several villains who don’t respect women.

Sengoku Rance is particularly well known for the several branching paths it can take. There are four main routes – an Official History route, as well as one for each of Ran Nanjou, Kenshin Uesugi, and Isoroku Yamamoto. Do you declare war on the peaceable youkai? Do you lock the Takuga clan behind the gate to Shikokalamity? Do you let the young Kazemaru commit seppuku? Or do you force him to wear a mustache? Does Rance join the local book club? While some choices are trivial, some of them fundamentally alter the course of the game, and it’s worth making sure you save beforehand to see both results.

Underneath all the political strife and difficult decisions, Sengoku Rance rests on a cast of over a hundred named characters, all with their own distinct personalities. From ohagi-munching Orime to sex-loving Chinu Kobayakawa, hotwing-riding Baba Shouen to arquebus-wielding Yuzumi Yuzuhara, they all spring to life. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve played this game, but the jokes they tell are such zingers I still chortle to no end, and the tragedies they go through still make me weep.

Okay, I know what you’re thinking. What about the sex? What’s the point of talking about Rance without talking about sex? Alright. Sengoku Rance has a healthy variety of sex scenes, ranging from vanilla romance sex to impregnation sex to awkward handjobs to BDSM yuri (if you want anything more… unique, I recommend that you check out Beat Blades Haruka or Beat Angel Escalayer instead). What makes it so great this time is that… it’s all uncensored! Have you ever wanted to see all four of the Shimazu brothers’ penises? Well, honestly, I didn’t. But I have now! It was rather nice getting to see the Hyper Weapon in all its glory, as well as all of the vaginas, waiting to get penetrated. Also, it turns out that many Nipponese women have some pubes, so if you’re into that…! If I had to pick the three scenes I enjoyed the most from the beta, they’d be:

Most Erotic: Rance x Ran, first scene
Most Amusing: Leila x Rance
Most Terrifying: Rance x Kou

But, toufu guy! Rance and Kou don’t have sex! She’s too pure! Well. Maybe they don’t have sex, but there’s enough Hyper Weapon in this scene to count as an H-scene in my book.

And I’m not the only one unamused by this scene.

Over the course of beta testing, I came across plenty of bugs and nitpicks. Sometimes text would be rendered a few pixels off-center, or a line would break in a weird spot. There was a couple of crashes towards the start of the beta, and once, after waking my computer up from a nice, long sleep, the screen was shaking like somebody had smashed my computer with a sledgehammer. Us beta testers were offered some debug tools to help catch issues in text that would be difficult to run into mid-game, such as the battle dialogues. However, the debug tool wasn’t entirely correct about putting the right portrait on-screen, so it led to some funny mismatches. I’ve included some mismatches and other random quotes from the depths of the game here for your amusement.

Sengoku Rance may be a thirteen year old game, but it’s proven to me that it can stand the test of time. Story? Check. Cute girls? Check. Gameplay? Check. Sex? Check. Epic BGM? Check. Legendary hero in green? You fucking bet. I encourage everybody to check out this seminal entry in the Rance franchise and experience one of the finest games in the history of gaming There is no other game quite like Sengoku Rance.


Sengoku Rance is now available on MangaGamer.com!

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2 Comments

  1. GREAT !

  2. So…finding the bathing scene between Kou and Rance the scariest sex scene in the game (especially given some other Kou scenes) and basically calling rance a pedophile shows both a misunderstanding of Japanese culture and the Character of Rance that I find disturbing…

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