Rance 02 -The Rebellious Maidens- (Rance 02 Kai -Hangyaku no Shoujo-tachi-) is a 2009 visual novel by AliceSoft, a company well known for releasing eroge with gameplay mechanics. This release is a remake of their 1990 title Rance II which includes a rewritten script and an updated gameplay system.
Before getting into the specifics of the review, I’d like to point out that despite being a sequel to Rance 01 -Quest for Hikari-, Rance 02 was the first remake released in the series. This, of course, will make it feel like a downgrade to the first game if you’re playing the remakes in story order, so I suggest adjusting your expectations prior to getting into it. Regardless, the Rance that stars in this installment is a very familiar one—the same bold, arrogant, and selfish warrior who is willing to do anything that aids him in pursuit of the things he wants. That includes bullying girls, whether they deserve it or not! Poor Sill is at the brunt of all of this, so treat her gently.
Will the shift of the story’s focus outside of Leazas negatively affect our journey with Rance? Let’s talk about it more in our second review of the Rance series!
Finding Cute Girls in the Middle of Nowhere
Following the events of the first game, Rance 02 -The Four Rebellious Maidens- starts with everyone’s favorite duo Rance and Sill taking a quest in the middle of nowhere. There are no towns in sight, and Rance is getting increasingly impatient with how Sill’s navigation has been going. As he was about to head home after his usual tantrums, Sill spots a beautiful girl at the mouth of a nearby cave. She introduces herself as Chisa Gode, the daughter of the mayor of the town that issued the request for help to Keith’s Guild. She leads the duo into the town of Custom, a place that has been confined underground.
Shortly after arriving, they are welcomed by Gazel Gode, the mayor of Custom. Gazel tells them about how the town ended up underground due to a seal created by four mages. These mages, or witches as they call them, were once students of a strong mage named Ragisis who protected the town. They were undergoing training to one day succeed him and protect the town in his stead. But one month prior to the current events, after receiving magical accessories known as the Phil rings, they rebelled against their mentor and sank the town underground. Since then, the witches have taken residence in the nearby dungeon without so much a peep outside.
With everyone unable to leave because of the seal, some have tried to brave the witches’ dungeon to free the town, but none have come back to tell the tale. To make matters worse, some of the town’s residents have begun to disappear as well! Gazel pleads with Rance to help them, to which he obliges—after charging a hefty sum, of course. With Sill in tow, he sets off to the dungeon, thinking to himself how beautiful the witches must be. And if they’re beautiful but evil, justice must deal them the appropriate punishment.
And so starts Rance’s quest to free Custom as the righteous hero of justice.
The Rance Trademark is Conveniently Horny Storytelling
Rance’s quest to save Custom, like all of his adventures, is fueled by his characteristically strong libido. As he progresses through the story of Rance 02, his perverted tendencies, much to the chagrin of his victims, end up becoming the key to saving the town from the oppression of the Four Witches. He eventually learns that the Phil Rings’ power is tied to the user’s virginity, and with Rance being the embodiment of an ideal hero with a big heart, he puts his all into ensuring that the witches are unable to misuse their power any longer. Fittingly, most of the main quest is concerned with making his way to the witches through their personalized dungeons to give them nightmares about him.
Compared to Rance 01, however, there’s a lot less engagement when it comes to his conquests of the ladies in Custom. Their relevant scenes are all locked behind specific chapters, either through a side quest where Rance needs to procure an item from the dungeon or just simply encountering the event by exploring options. This makes the story of Rance 02 flow a lot more linearly, as their events act more like rest areas than branching pathways you need to take before going back to a main path. This isn’t inherently bad per se, but it diminished their impact as a character on me a lot. Their characterization becomes limited to the tropes they play because of a lack of an actual character arc, making them rather forgettable.
Overall, the flow of the story is a lot more simplistic for Rance 02. Go into the dungeon, deal with the random shenanigans each has to offer, get laid by trading off specific items, and claim your Custom witch at the end of each stage. Honestly, it gets a bit boring. The end does introduce a pretty nice twist to the story, but not enough to dispel the lull of the general plot progression.
A Vow of Poverty Leads to a Lack of Clothes!?
The most entertaining part of Rance 02 is probably Rance’s interactions with the residents of the town. Being a dashing figure of an adventurer makes Rance a pretty sought-after guy, but because of the high demand for him, he sometimes feels a little bit out of tune with commoners in the story. This results in interactions that paint him as a little bit weird, or delusional, as some people might say. New characters, such as Maria, have pretty good chemistry with him which makes the random dialogue they have pretty funny to read in the context of the overall situation. They introduce a lot of opportunities to explore these interactions with members of the party, especially when Rance and Sill start acting separately.
There is, however, a noticeable decrease in the amount of text compared to the first game’s remake. Perhaps due to the difference in their release dates, Rance 02 features a lot fewer options when it comes to dialogue. In fact, it’s a lot more noticeable specifically because options in the game start disappearing once they hit the “repeating” threshold when the option you click simply returns a default, repetitive sentence. It’s good in terms of making sure you explore every possible variation in the dialogue, but it makes it a lot more obvious how few the variations are. Thankfully enough, there are changes across each chapter, so it gives readers a reason to re-explore each option every time they move to the next stage. And if there’s more dialogue, that’s more chances for Rance to make us laugh.
Ibeprofuns for my Life-Threatening Wound, Please!
Like most old adventure games, Rance 02 preserves the spirit of its original version by retaining the gameplay system it employed back in 1990. This means that for most of your time playing the game, you will be spamming actions such as Look, Talk, Ask, Assault, Buy, and Leave (if you can’t Assault). Depending on what you need during the moment, some of the options will be necessary in advancing the story. But since you’ll end up spamming them as you go anyway, you can easily figure out when a line you encounter is significant. The only difficulty is deciding where to look for that plot-advancing line in the first place.
Since there is no time system in place, the only elements of the game that determine whether you can get access to special events or not is your current progress in the story. This means that whenever you return to the town in the middle of a chapter, you are incentivized to explore the options again just in case there’s something missable. This makes this particular gameplay loop a tad tedious because it can net you nothing new, but it’s easy to manage and keep track of because of the simplistic event design.
Maps and Compasses are Essential to an Adventure!
The other half of the gameplay loop for Rance 02 mimics a dungeon crawler. When you are on the map, you have four options: move, search your surroundings, find a monster, or camp. Move is named intuitively—you use the four directions to traverse the map by one space per interaction. Each movement has a chance of Rance’s party encountering a monster, so if you’re trying to avoid battle, use it sparingly. Some parts of the map, despite not being marked, will have traps lying in wait as well so tread carefully. The Search function, on the other hand, allows Rance and his party to look in the specific area of the map they’re on for items or fixtures that might be possible to interact with. Notably, this is mostly used to operate buttons on the walls or discover items that might just be on the ground. Special dialogue when entering the area can sometimes be an indicator of when to use this function as well.
Find Monster and Camp function the way they are named as well; Find Monster will let you encounter an enemy without moving through the map, and Camp will bring up the equivalent of a Pause Menu for the game. Both are pretty useful functions for enhancing quality of life, as Find Monster allows you to grind using the minimum amount of button presses possible and Camp is an accessible way of ensuring that you don’t accidentally lose progress by enabling Saving at any point in the dungeon. Additionally, if you hold the CTRL button while navigating the dungeon, you can speed up all these processes and slash down your time going through the stages.
Be warned though: holding CTRL makes you especially prone to accidentally skipping dialogue because of how fast it makes the system go. You might miss out on the story itself or important indicators for in-game events. Use it responsibly.
Why is Assault Not an Option When Assaulting the Enemy?
In Rance 02, battles make use of the adventure mechanics as well. There are two on-screen stats during battle; HP, or hit points, is your character’s healt,h while SP, short for stamina points, is consumed whenever you take an offensive or defensive action. The actions you can take are the following: Attack with Weapon and Use Special Move both deal damage with varying stamina costs, Badmouth insults the enemy and has a chance to trigger an instakill, Rest recovers a percentage of your stamina, Use Item gives you access to Ibeprofuns to heal with during a battle, and Run lets you escape battle with no chance of failure, except against bosses and a specific enemy in the story. Overall, it’s a very simple gameplay system with a failsafe button if you’re in any danger of losing.
Even though it’s relatively simple, especially during the early parts of the game, Rance and his party members are actually pretty susceptible to accidentally dying. Some of the enemies deal a sizable amount of damage, and while Sill usually casts Heal or uses an Ibeprofun to heal up any party member with fatal HP, there will be times when those are simply not available as options. Note that the game ends if any member dies, so be careful. You also can’t control anyone besides the main character featured for the chapter (either Rance or Sill), so if you’re using CTRL to speed up the game’s processes, you can easily stumble your way into accidentally dying by not paying enough attention to the screen. I know I’ve done that before!
Oh and for this title, you don’t have to do anything special to see something nice from beating Gal Monsters, or monsters that look like girls. Just beat them and they’ll reveal cute, lewd sprites.
Setting Up a Tent in the Middle of a Dungeon
Last but not least, the Camp button, besides Saving, gives you a few additional options to explore as well. Call Willis is essentially a button that lets you level up by summoning a beautiful goddess, Rest fully recovers your SP, View Status shows you the current stats of your characters and their equipment, Check Belongings displays a short description of the things in your inventory (including party members), Use Belongings allows you to use items that are available to consume in the overworld (including Sill), and System is your Save and Load. A third option for System, Keyboard Controls, toggles the display of keys on the UI to help people who might want to play without using a mouse or touchpad.
Overall, the gameplay loop is pretty straightforward. Explore the dungeon map, fight enemies, run if they’re too strong, regularly recover SP using Rest, and Save a bunch of times. Given all of these, Rance 02 is an incredibly easy game to clear. There’s absolutely no way to get punished except by stubbornly refusing to run away from a strong enemy, and the game even makes your party members automatically heal you if you’re close to dying. Frankly, you can hold the CTRL button and just mash attack or special move if you’re strong enough. Because it’s so easy, it makes the fights a lot less interesting than they should be, mostly because you can just grind all you want until you steamroll the strong enemies. Good for time, but pretty bad for engaging the player.
Pervy Pictures for Interested Sirs
The main reward for engaging Rance 02’s gameplay loop is its large assortment of adult scenes. Rance is a series that takes pride in a cast that features attractive girls that Rance can engage with sexually through the fulfillment of favors. This includes characters in town as well, as Rance usually demands their bodies as rewards for helping them out in mini side quests. In Rance 02, none of these quests technically help you out with the main story though, as they don’t provide any useful items in terms of gameplay. So for people who aren’t interested in completing their gallery, this content is easily skippable.
In terms of content, these adult scenes are pretty basic. For most of the scenes, there will be one to two HCGs depicting the entirety of the encounter. These HCGs do not have variations in facial expressions, which can be a bit jarring when the dialogue is escalating yet there are no changes on-screen. They’re pretty short scenes as well, usually featuring Rance getting his fill of his partner before a short, abrupt end. As with most Rance games, these are unvoiced and are devoid of sound effects. There are around 30 H-scenes to collect, not including some explicit ones without sex, so there’s at least a ton to look forward to. I honestly find them to be a bit bland for this installment because of the minimal assets used for each scene, but they’re still very pretty and arousing to look at.
At the Start of the Lost Decades
As a remake of the 1990 game, Rance 02 is pretty much a visual upgrade of its predecessor. The gameplay mechanics are mostly the same, with some quality of life upgrades such as not needing to right-click anymore to bring up a submenu while exploring the map. This means that you technically spend less time navigating its user interface, which is a big plus for how smooth it feels to play the game. The presence of the CTRL button as an option to speed up the system greatly diminishes the tediousness of its gameplay loop as well. The storyline remains mostly the same, however, with some additions and revisions here and there with the script that slightly change some scenes and gives more personality to its characters. None of these changes are significant, however, and everything, even down to the items, mostly play out the same way as the original.
In terms of difficulty, the original game is pretty much a pushover aside from the few enemies that can instantly bring you down to fatal HP levels and keep you in that loop. It also had an additional mechanic where after camping you had the chance to immediately trigger a monster encounter without making a move. This, of course, isn’t much of a problem since both games have an Escape mechanic with no drawback whatsoever, so it still makes the gameplay portion a breeze. What Rance 02 does perhaps better though is making some monsters inescapable while also buffing the general damage dealt by most enemies, making it a bit of a challenge without sufficiently leveling up. In short, if you frequently run away from encounters, you can find yourself stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Summarizing this, Rance 02 is a visual upgrade with minor improvements in quality of life functions and gameplay compared to the original. It doesn’t offer anything new besides a minor revision of the script and pretty much runs the same storyline with the same sequence of events.
Art and Music
Rance 02 features a total of 80 unique CGs, with all but one not having any variation. 53 of these are HCGs, featuring explicit parts of the body but not necessarily with sex. The main artist for the game is Orion, who has been a mainstay of the series staff since the release of Rance IV in 1993. He has worked on many AliceSoft titles, including but not limited to most of the Rance series (main artist for 5D until X), Galzoo Island, and Daiteikoku. Orion’s art style is easy to look at, sporting colors that, despite being particularly bright, work really well with the muted colors of Nakajii’s backgrounds. The overall art direction gives off the vibe of being in a cave, which is where most of the story is set. The monsters are done really nicely as well, with lots of returning AliceSoft classics like the Meatball, Cockatrice, Pinky, and the Hanny line of monsters.
Despite how pleasant the art is for the eyes, I feel like there was a lot to be desired artwise during my playthrough of Rance 02. A lot of times, since it’s using an ADV format for the screen, dialogues that take place between scene transitions will not feature any kind of background; this means that the display screen will only feature character sprites alongside the UI and nothing else. This happens multiple times across a playthrough, which comparatively speaking, the original does better because it almost always has a static background picture that illustrates the current area the on-screen dialogue is taking place in. It’s not that there’s a shortage of visual assets, but it’s that there are instances within the game that make it feel like there’s a lack of stills or scenes to fill in the screen.
There’s also no Event Gallery, which means you cannot view the sex scenes outside of your save in the game. You’d have to trigger the event during a playthrough to reread it.
Because of the retro style Rance 02 employs, the music gallery for the game is rather simple. There are no titles for the tracks; instead, they are represented by numbers that emulate the original’s 16-bit style. For this iteration of the list, there are some returning tracks, such as 01 and 02, which are either taken directly from the previous game or are remixes of the Leazas tracks. It provides a sense of continuity for the series, which is always appreciated as continuity details. 08 is a track that goes pretty hard, standing in for the more blood-pumping parts of the story. 13, the Camp music, is relaxing and appropriately feels like a break from the busy gameplay. And 25, My Glorious Days, is the trademark Rance marching music as he once again ruins someone’s day.
Overall, the light, high, and relaxing tones of Custom’s tracks paint a nice picture that makes me think of glowing insects in a relatively dim cave with bits of magic flowing around. It fits the theme of Rance 02 really well while also retaining tracks that represent Rance’s bold, arrogant personality. Although not exactly stand out, they do a good job of recreating the intended backdrop of the story.
Alice’s Kitchen
Regrettably, despite being relatively new, there is no Alice Mansion in this installment of Rance. What AliceSoft offers instead is a stage-end recap of the chapter featuring their ever so cute mascot Alice and her pet crow Yukichi. This also means that the game does not feature Staff Notes, so there are no interesting stories from them this time. Even in the original, despite having an Alice’s Mansion, the Developer Notes are rather brief so it’s not like the remake cut out much. They did eventually add a sort of Staff Corner in the Rance II Hint Disk, but the remake doesn’t have that, so tough luck. Regardless, the inclusion of Alice at the end of each stage does provide a short breather to players after clearing the chapter’s story, but it is still rather disappointing given that the feature is usually a staple for the company’s games.
Thankfully, the stage end segments do introduce you to another character that will become a frequent guest in Alice’s Mansion from here on out. They’re a pretty cute addition to the Extras gang.
Verdict
Rance 02 -The Four Rebellious Maidens- is the sequel to AliceSoft’s Rance 01 -Quest for Hikari- that features a simple gameplay loop reminiscent of the original 1990 release. The story is largely linear and offers only minor development for its cast because of the smaller amount of text in the game’s script. Similar to most Rance games, it offers a large amount of H-scenes that players can unlock by doing mini-side quests. It’s also one of the easier games in the series, with absolutely no penalty for abusing safety mechanics such as escaping a battle. This, however, makes it a little bit boring due to how easy it is.
Although lacking impact in its plot, it retains Rance’s signature humor in its dialogue, giving life to what otherwise would be a pretty dull game. The art style by Orion and his team is very pleasant to look at as well, incentivizing players to unlock as much content as they can as they play through the game. It’s pretty much a direct visual and quality of life upgrade to the original. The content is mostly preserved as is, with revised lines that make it an overall better read. Unfortunately, they took too much inspiration from its retro roots—the game is missing its Scene Replay feature!
If you liked Rance 01, then you’ll like Rance 02 as well. It’s the same silly protagonist inflicting trauma on innocent people he comes across, yet retaining a sort of charisma to him that makes you want to keep watching his adventures. Although technically less enjoyable compared to its predecessor by virtue of release date and relative quality, the experience is rather rewarding in terms of how many CGs you get out of it in a short span of time. Fans of point and click adventure games will have a nostalgic experience playing it as it retains the same old features. As long as you enjoy it as what it is—a silly story, then you’re bound to have a good time.
WAIT FOR SALE ON RANCE 02 -THE FOUR REBELLIOUS MAIDENS-
If you are looking for another Alicesoft visual novel, check out Dohna Dohna ~ Let’s Do Bad Things Together. We have also covered a wide variety of visual novels both original to English and localized from Japanese, which you can check out here.
Visual novel reader that wishes there were more than 24 hours in a day. Gacha victim, TCG enjoyer, and VTuber simp. Still trying to live happily.
