I absolutely love the Rance series — see my coverage of Rance 5D and VI here on MoeGamer, and my articles on 01 and 02 on Rice Digital — but I’d been putting off playing Sengoku Rance, the seventh game in the series, for a while.
The reason for this is that I knew it was a strategy game on a grand scale, and frankly I’ve always found that kind of game rather daunting, to such a degree that I simply haven’t enjoyed previous attempts to explore the genre. I love the idea of Crusader Kings, for example, but absolutely cannot get into playing it.
But a little while back, I decided I was in the mood to play something new and, encouraged by the arrival of my Rance IX physical copy from MangaGamer, I decided it was time to start catching up on the series. Hit the jump and read on to find out more about what many people consider the very best Rance game.
Sengoku Rance follows directly on from Rance VI: Collapse of Zeth. Much like every previous Rance game, the story opens with protagonist Rance and his slave Sill travelling to a new region in search of adventure, having previously resolved the situation depicted in the prior game. In this instance, Rance and Sill have crossed the Tenma Bridge to the island nation of Nippon, and find themselves embroiled in the region’s unrest.
As the name suggests, Sengoku Rance takes some inspiration from the real-life Sengoku (or “warring states”) period of Japanese history. Indeed, it even goes as far as featuring characters with the same name as historical figures from our world’s Sengoku period, but it’s important to remember that Rance’s world is not our world.
Sure, it has some elements of it — and the existence of the characters Kentarou Ogawa and Miki Kurusu, stars of Little Princess, the game that was retroactively positioned as a Rance prequel, demonstrates that it’s possible for characters to move between an alternate dimension very much like our world (known as Dimension 3E2) and Rance’s — but the world of Rance is one that very much plays by its own rules.
Specifically, Rance’s world primarily exists of a large coherent landmass known simply as “The Continent”, and Nippon is attached to it by the aforementioned bridge. The Continent proper rests atop the backs of Four Holy Beasts, while Nippon is suspended out from the “south-eastern” corner by Tenma Bridge, meaning if the bridge was ever destroyed, Nippon would fall into oblivion. So far, at the outset of Sengoku Rance, that has not happened.
We join Rance and Sill after they have spent some time with the Oda clan in Nippon, who have proven to be rather hospitable. The present lord Nobunaga Oda is a sickly sort, and suggests that Rance take over leadership of the clan, since he seems capable enough. Unlike our world’s Nobunaga, however, the Nobunaga of Rance’s world has no grand ambitions of conquest; instead, he simply wants the Oda clan to control enough territory for his little sister Kou to be safe, secure and happy.
Rance, of course, takes this as a challenge, and begins his own campaign of conquest. And thus begins Sengoku Rance, a game that blends grand strategy with elements of role-playing games, and comes out as something altogether unique. While the individual elements of Sengoku Rance might be familiar, the way in which they are seamlessly blended together is quite unlike anything else I’ve ever played — and works extremely well.
This is entirely in keeping with the rest of the Rance series, which has rarely played things straight in terms of mechanics. Rance 01’s recent remake blends elements of card games and casino gambling with conventional RPG elements, for example, while Rance 02’s dungeon-crawling unfolds like a board game. Rance 5D was what its developers called a “roulette RPG”, taking some heavy cues from tabletop campaigns, and Rance VI combined first-person dungeon crawling with an interesting stamina management system that discouraged simple grinding.
Let’s take a moment to look at how Sengoku Rance plays. One of its biggest strengths is that it presents a lot of options for the player to make use of at any given moment, yet never becomes completely overwhelming. Particularly on your first playthrough, you’ll find the game gently nudging you in the direction of actions that will help advance the story — and there are even numerous features along the way that will help you out if you’re new to strategy games of this scale, or struggling to clear important narrative battles.
To put it another way, while the game’s documentation indicates that you shouldn’t be too proud to cut your losses and start over if things are going really badly, unless you really mess things up, it’s unlikely you’ll have to do that on your first time through. As for your second playthrough and beyond, that’s another matter — but we’ll get to that.
Sengoku Rance unfolds in a turn-based fashion. Each turn, you have a number of actions that you can take, represented by “fans”. For every fan you have, you can take one action. You begin with two, but it’s possible to acquire more as you progress through the game, depending on your actions.
Actions take numerous forms. The most straightforward is triggering an event of some description. This might involve Rance speaking with one of his commanders, it might involve advancing the narrative in some way, or it might see Rance and company investigating part of the map they haven’t yet been to. As in previous Rance games, events are presented in a visual novel style, but they’re never particularly long; dialogue is snappy and witty, and each individual event is no longer than a couple of minutes, tops, depending on your reading speed, meaning those who prefer to keep the “action” moving shouldn’t find themselves getting bored at any point.
Other actions include going on a hunting expedition that will help you earn money for your war chest, searching for treasures rumoured to be hidden in a particular region, locating dungeons and fortifying your positions.
The hunting expeditions unfold as a fairly straightforward RPG-style battle in which you can bring up to six of your commanders (including Rance himself) and must defeat all the enemies before running out of available actions. Yes, as in Rance VI, each character has a limited number of actions they can take per battle before they are exhausted, though it is possible for any unit with actions remaining to swap out another unit (exhausted or otherwise) with a randomly selected one drawn from your available pool of commanders. This usually isn’t necessary during hunts, but it does become important at the other times in the game this battle system is used.
Those other scenarios are important story boss fights and dungeon crawling. In both of these situations, you’ll lose the battle and be forced to retreat (or in some circumstances, be defeated entirely) if all of your units become exhausted, so swapping out units to ensure you can keep attacking and defending effectively is of critical importance.
This element of the game is at its most strategic during the dungeon crawling sequences. There’s no actual manual exploration of dungeons in Sengoku Rance; they simply involve a series of 5-10 battles in succession, with no opportunities to heal or recover actions between battles. However, you can choose to retreat early and challenge the dungeon again later; if you take this option (rather than being forced to retreat by being exhausted or defeated) you’ll start your next dungeon run one floor deeper than the previous attempt.
The dungeon crawling is a relatively minor element of the game, but it is important for a couple of reasons: some unique items can only be found in dungeons, and completing a dungeon also causes all of your recruited commanders — including those who didn’t participate in battle — to level up. Your level isn’t actually super important for much of Sengoku Rance on your first playthrough, but it does make these RPG-style battles a little easier — and given that there are several important story moments that use this type of battle, it can be helpful to buff up your whole army as much as possible.
The meat of Sengoku Rance occurs when you’re at war with one or more of the other states in Nippon. For your first few turns, there’s no obligation to declare war on anyone, but the game ensures that you’re never left twiddling your thumbs for too long; if you don’t declare war on a neighbouring state for a little while, chances are they will declare war on you before long. There are a few exceptions to this rule, but they mostly occur later in the game after a significant event we’ll get to — for much of the early- to mid-game you’d better be ready for armed conflict.
War in Sengoku Rance is carried out by commanders and their squads of troops. Each commander has a base troop type, and this can be Samurai (frontline melee attacker), Ashigaru (tank able to defend other units), Miko (healer), Archer (ranged attacker), Ninja (also a ranged attacker, has the potential for interesting special abilities such as assassinating commanders), Tactician (class focused almost entirely on buffing and debuffing), Onmyouji (magic support class) and Sohei (melee support class). There are several special units you can recruit in the game that don’t fall into these neat divisions — recruiting Rance 5D heroine Rizna Lanfbitt, for example, gives you a unit of mages who are completely immune to magical damage — but for the most part, you’ll want a balance of unit types.
A commander and their troop’s overall strength is determined by a number of factors: firstly, their base attack, defense, intelligence and speed stats, and secondly, the number of troops in the unit, which acts as its overall “hit points”. The more troops in a unit, the more effective it is; conversely, the more troops that are defeated in a unit, the less effective it becomes.
The maximum amount of troops a commander can have is determined by a number of factors including your “National Power” rating, determined by the number of territories you hold, and the amount of money you have to actually recruit new troops. Commanders who participate in battle will also automatically recruit a small number of troops to their unit after a victorious battle, so it pays to use your favourites; using this method, they can increase their troop counts well above the cap at any given moment in the game.
Troops also have several non-combat skill ratings: construction, search and negotiation. Construction is used for any actions on the game map that require you to perform a “build” action; search for any actions that require a “search” check; negotiation is used for recruiting new allies, declaring war or demanding that a territory surrender before you completely defeat them.
In all these cases, the checks are carried out in the same way: the action in question has a base difficulty rating, and you must choose up to 5 of your commanders in an attempt to equal or exceed that rating with the relevant stat. For example, if an action requires a “Build 20” check, you can pass it by using four commanders with a Construction rating of 5. If you’re unable to achieve the full required total with five commanders, the total amount you were able to achieve is taken off the difficulty rating for your next attempt. This means if you can’t complete a check with a single action, you can take additional actions using other commanders to complete it.
It’s worth noting that for these checks, the troop count for a commander doesn’t matter, since it’s the commander who is performing the action, not their army. The troop count is only relevant during army battles.
Army battles occur any time you either attack a territory you are at war with, or a province you are at war with attacks one of your territories. Each province is split into several locations, and these can either take the form of fields, towns or castles. As you might expect, towns and castles provide greater defensive bonuses for those attempting to fend off the attack.
Upon engaging in combat, you can choose up to six commanders and their armies to participate. Like in the RPG battles, they are split into two rows, with the back row only hittable by magic or ranged attacks. You can use any non-participating commanders’ Search skill to scout the enemy forces, which will give you an indication of their troop counts and types, allowing you to strategise accordingly; scouting will also give you a small bonus to your “Battle Rating”, which is an important feature to bear in mind during Sengoku Rance’s combat.
There are two ways to win an army battle in Sengoku Rance: either completely annihilate all enemy forces, or survive until the battle’s turn limit expires and have a superior Battle Rating to your opponent. Battle Rating is a tug-of-war-style meter at the top of the screen that moves according to the happenings in the battle; most simply, you push it forwards in favour of you by dealing damage to enemies, and vice-versa. Completely defeating a unit causes a larger swing in your favour than simply damaging it, and several units — notably Ninjas — have the ability to manipulate the Battle Rating in various ways.
Because battles don’t necessarily have to be won by defeating all enemies, you can do things like take strongly defensive strategies when attempting to fend off an opponent’s unwanted advances. There are even items and abilities you can acquire that start the battle with part of the turn timer already expired, meaning that so long as you keep the Battle Rating in your favour, you might not even have to attack directly at all.
When one unit attacks another, they use one of their actions (or, in some cases, for especially powerful attacks, all of their remaining actions) and deal damage according to their stats and their troop count. It’s not a one-sided thing in most cases, however; if a melee unit is attacking another melee unit, the attacking unit will also take damage as the defender counterattacks them. The defensive Ashigaru units are especially effective at this, and also have a “Guard” ability that can intercept attacks intended for squishier members of the party.
You can avoid being counterattacked by using ranged attacks or wailing on enemies that primarily use magic; these tend not to fight back when you hit them, so prioritising your targets can be very helpful, particularly in the late game.
One of the nice things about Sengoku Rance is that it doesn’t overcomplicate the battle side of things. Each type of unit has only one or two different actions they can take on their turn, and are strongly specialised. They’re all useful in different ways, but the game is also flexible enough to accommodate a variety of different formations. I didn’t use Miko units at all in my playthrough, for example, instead focusing on tanking damage with a strong Ashigaru and dealing heavy damage with Samurai and Ninja units.
On top of that, around the midpoint of the game you gain access to items known as “Battle Permits”. These can be equipped on any commander’s squad that has 1,000 or more troops, and that commander will then act independently and automatically, usually automatically conquering an area in a neighbouring province you are at war with at the expense of some of their troops. Battle Permits will never finish the job and completely capture a province — that’s up to you — but they can save a lot of micromanaging as your overall forces expand.
If you win an offensive battle, you’ll take one of the enemy’s areas in a province. Take all the areas and the province becomes yours, adding its National Power to your own and thereby increasing the number of commanders you can have in your roster without taking an income penalty at the start of each turn. It’s important to avoid being penalised in this way as much as possible, because you need money to replenish lost troops and expand armies.
It’s also important to conquer territories as it often allows you to recruit their commanders. Many of these commanders — particularly those who are major characters rather than generic troops — have strong stats and special abilities, so it pays to add them to your lineup if at all possible. It’s also worth noting that if you force a province to surrender, you aren’t considered to have “conquered” them, and thus will typically lose the opportunity to recruit their powerful commanders.
Conversely, if you lose a defensive battle, the enemy will take one of your areas in a province — though again, they have to take all the areas in order to capture the province entirely. Once they have a foothold in an area, they’re likely to keep attacking, though, so you’ll need to stay on your toes.
An important consideration is that each of your commanders can only participate in a single action per turn. So if you’ve used your six best commanders in an offensive mission, you cannot then use them to defend against an enemy attack in the same turn. Likewise, commanders who have been used for Build, Search or Negotiation checks this turn cannot participate in any battles. The only exception to this is dungeon crawling; if you delve into a dungeon, all your commanders are available, even those who have already taken an action.
Because Sengoku Rance starts with relatively small-scale conflicts — the first war you’ll get into will likely be against a house with just one province to call their own — you have plenty of opportunity to get to grips with all the different mechanics at play, so when the game starts to open up in its latter hours, you can feel suitably prepared for what is going on. The Oda clan’s territory is in the middle of the map, after all, placing it somewhat at risk of attack from both sides if you’re not careful.
As you participate in wars and conquer territories, Sengoku Rance’s overall plot will start to advance. Without spoiling things too much, it concerns the resurrection of a Fiend, and Rance’s quest to defeat them once and for all. How rapidly this all starts kicking off is determined partly by how quickly you expand the Oda territory; it can pay to take your time a bit and explore all the regions under your control thoroughly before getting too ambitious, otherwise you might find yourself in the challenging late game scenario a little earlier than you might like!
This late game scenario involves the emergence of the Monster Army, which quickly consumes a clan in the south-western corner of Nippon and expands rapidly. For a while, it looks like you’re heading for an unwinnable situation, as the Monster Army continues to devour several clans on the map if you haven’t already conquered them by this point. However, if you survive long enough, the game employs a “time skip” of several months, which causes Oda to conquer the majority of the map and corner the Monster Army into the original four provinces they took — and to beat the game you only really need to take two of these, then complete the game’s final RPG-style battle.
That is, all this occurs on your first playthrough. On your second playthrough and beyond, it’s possible to shift the story into several “What If?” scenarios, most of which focus on the tale of a particular character you can add to your roster. One of these effectively turns the story off so you can play the game as a sandbox conquest game, too — and one leads to a bad ending. Sengoku Rance is a lengthy game on your first playthrough, but these completely different scenarios on offer give it an absolute ton of longevity.
And even if you just play through the canonical storyline again, there’s plenty more to discover. The game is set up so it’s not entirely possible to see everything in a single runthrough, and the game’s creators recommend against using a walkthrough so you can enjoy your own personal emergent narrative through the game. Of course, the theorycrafters of the Internet have used spreadsheets to “optimise” playthroughs if you prefer to play in that way — but honestly, Sengoku Rance really benefits from you playing it as blind as possible, and resisting the temptation to reload a save when something bad happens. Struggling against adversity can make for some extremely satisfying moments when you finally overcome a particular challenge — and the game works in such a way that it’s quite hard to get yourself into a genuinely unwinnable position and need to start over or lose lots of progress.
Indeed, it’s generous enough to allow you to retry important story battles — including the final boss — with the difficulty reduced slightly on each retry. This means that you can’t lock yourself into a narrative beat that it’s impossible to progress past.
However, it’s also worth noting that the game has a scoring system. You start the game with 50 points and lose one for every turn that passes, plus more for retrying story battles. Points can be earned by “clearing” characters — i.e. seeing all their character-specific events — as well as accomplishing tasks like locating special treasures, and defeating optional enemies. When commanders learn new skills, you can choose to take a skill that simply increases your score at the end of the game, too — though naturally, if you do this, you miss out on the opportunity to increase their stats or improve their abilities.
The game is quite open about the fact that you will almost certainly end your first playthrough with a score of zero — it can’t go into negatives, thankfully — but a lot of replay value can be had in the pursuit of high scores if you have the patience for it. It’s a way of rewarding those who want to truly get down in the dirt and discover absolutely everything Sengoku Rance has to offer. And there is a lot of game to experience here.
I’ve deliberately not talked a lot about the plot today because, as previously noted, Sengoku Rance is best experienced blind on your first time through, at least partly because a significant part of the experience is your own personal twist on the story you create through the actions you choose to take.
Rance himself is as Rance as ever, although interestingly enough this particular installment feels notably lighter on sexual assault than previous entries in the series. That’s not to say that it’s completely absent, of course — conquering territories and clans tends to result in Rance having his way with the clan’s princess, for example, and the main bad guy delivers some truly unpleasant sexual horror scenes in the late game — but considering that to Rance outsiders, Sengoku Rance is primarily known as “the game with the ‘Look at her underwear/Rape her’ choice”, it feels like Rance as a character is almost “maturing” out of his more odious behaviour.
He’s still absolutely Chaotic Neutral at heart, of course, and he still does things that are morally reprehensible, but just as we’ve seen in all the previous Rance games, there’s a clear difference between him taking what he sees as a “reward” for a job well done (i.e. sex) and the villains of the piece indulging in outright violent abuse.
Even when the question of consent is, to put it politely, a little murky, Rance always makes an effort to ensure his partner ends up having what he believes to be a good time. He doesn’t take advantage of anyone because he wants to hurt them; he does it because he’s a horny lech whose preferred reward to absolutely anything he does is to be able to plunge his Hyper Weapon into a warm, moist receptacle and blast off a dose of Imperial Juice.
Contrast with the scene where an important character gets kidnapped and gang-raped by a group of youths in the employ of one of the main villains, for example — an event which clearly leaves mental scars that Rance is remarkably supportive and understanding about — or the scene in which the “big bad” violently defiles his own daughter, with some excruciatingly painful-sounding descriptions of what is going on in the text. It’s clear that while Rance does things which one should not attempt to recreate in reality, there’s a difference between what he does and what the “bad guys” do — and a difference in how those are viewed by the society depicted in the world of Rance. It remains one of the most interesting things about the series — and yet also one that people are most likely to be completely dismissive of.
Rance also develops genuine emotional connections with a variety of the important characters in Sengoku Rance. Of particular note is his relationship with the kunoichi Suzume, who in many respects can be looked upon as a female mirror image of Rance. Introduced as someone who typically assassinates her targets through seduction — much as many of the real kunoichi were — she quickly becomes a fixture in Rance’s life, and their frequent erotic encounters where they try to “out-sex” each other in increasingly amusing and extreme ways are a highlight of the game’s lewd content.
There’s so much more I could probably say about Sengoku Rance, but take it from me: beating the game once is just scratching the surface of what it offers. And while I think I’m probably going to play the other Rance games before revisiting Sengoku Rance, I’m definitely planning to return at some point in the future. It’s not hard to see why this is held up as one of the best entries in the series as a whole — and I’m glad I finally got over my fear of grand strategy and experienced it for myself.
Want more Pete? Check my personal blog I’m Not Doctor Who, and my YouTube channel ThisIsPete. If you enjoy what you read here, please consider buying me a coffee.
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