Sengoku Rance – Tester’s Corner Vol. 2

Today on the blog, we have a tester’s corner from threepwood007!

Visual novels don’t usually contain a large quantity of gameplay. In fact, they sometimes don’t require interaction at all aside from a click to advance the text – and even that is optional if you use auto mode.

Then there’s Sengoku Rance. A game that, if represented it to the average gamer without any embellishment… and without the naughtiness… they might be inclined to give it a shot, even as an anime game. Grand strategy, conquering Japan, troop counts, resources, items, RPG mechanics, a dungeon-crawling mini-game; these are the ingredients for a game to be successful in the strategy gaming populace.

And then, there’s what makes Rance games so popular to begin with:

SEX. And lots of it.

Oh, and I suppose the bizarrely amazing story. That’s a thing.

Sengoku Rance is definitely a crazy game. It’s almost completely different from the rest of the games in the series, let alone other visual novels in general. To Rance fans, this isn’t anything new: Sengoku Rance has an excellent reputation as a top-tier game in and outside the fandom.

It is at its core a turn-based strategy game with a hardcore story element. It fits into the “new” Rance canon quite nicely and covers a great deal of important timeline events, but also serves as an excellent “first” for newcomers to the series.

As for a game to beta test? Hoooooooooooo boy.

Sengoku Rance is a very strange “visual novel.” More game than novel, it requires a larger testing base and has a much larger surface area to test. The scripts themselves are massive, of course, but similar to The Spirit Master of Retarnia there are a great deal of assets that can’t be simply loaded into a spreadsheet and checked. They have to be examined firsthand.

And the RNG of Sengoku Rance sometimes makes that a tad fun. Depending on the priority of events that need to occur, it’s possible to delay interactions between characters for quite some time, and that’s ignoring all the special once-per-turn events and other crazy shenanigans that Rance throws at the player (sometimes literally).

But as far as a testing experience goes, it was infinitely invaluable. Where else could you find a visual novel that was more 4x that foursome (though those were some good scenes), and where else a better anti-hero who only wants some sex from every girl in Japan.

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