Creator / AliceSoft

aka: Sengoku Rance

AliceSoft is an eroge developer, one of the oldest in existence. While perhaps not as well known as the truly big groups like Type-MOON and Key/Visual Arts, AliceSoft has managed to carve out a niche for itself by incorporating interesting and involved gameplay elements that occasionally challenge the player. Where other developers will eschew gameplay in favour of telling a fantastic story or cutting straight to the heart of the matter, AliceSoft embraces it wholeheartedly to the point that many of their works on this wiki could be classified as both Video Games and Visual Novels.

The company began in 1989 making games for the PC-88, MSX and PC-98. These included a Visual Novel known as Intruder and the very first Rance game, chronicling the adventures of everyone's favorite Heroic Comedic Sociopath as he searched for and "rescued" kidnapped girls. They continue to release games in uninterrupted succession to this day.

Many of AliceSoft's games tend to be either Eastern RPGs, Dating Sims or Turn-Based Strategy games and have a penchant for sly, subtle jabs at elements of anime and Japanese pop culture in general. Their more beloved titles fall squarely in the Explicit Content category, and have high quality soundtracks courtesy of their in-house composers. Occasionally, the company will allow its games to be adapted into short OVAs, that tend to overemphasise the "porn" aspect of the works.

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Notable AliceSoft titles include:

• The Rance Series
  • Rance/Rance 01 - Search For Hikari
  • Rance II/Rance 02 - The Rebellious Maidens
  • Rance III/Rance 03 - The Fall of Leazas
  • Rance IV - Legacy Of the Sect
  • Rance 4.1 - Save the Medicine Plant!
  • Rance 4.2 - Angel Group
  • Kichikuou Rance (Alternate Timeline)
  • Rance 5D - Lonely Girl
  • Rance VI - Collapse of Zeth
  • Sengoku Rance
  • Rance Quest
    • Rance Quest Magnum
  • Rance IX - The Helman Revolution
  • Rance X - Showdown (final game in the series)
• The Miki-chan series (Made back when they were called Champion Soft)
  • Sarawareta Miki-chan
  • Little Princess
  • Little Vampire
• The Toushin Toshi/Tournament of the Gods series
  • Toushin Toshi
  • Toushin Toshi II
  • Toushin Toshi III
• Darcrows
• The Beat series
  • Beat Angel Escalayer
  • Beat Blades Haruka
  • Beat Valkyrie Ixseal
• The Dai Series
  • Daiakuji
  • Daibanchou/Big Bang Age
  • Daiteikoku
• Atlach=Nacha
• GalZoo Island
• The Pastel Chime series
  • Pastel Chime
  • Pastel Chime Continue
  • Pastel Chime: Bindseeker
• Ultra Magical Girl Manana (A serial in Visual Novel form chronicling the adventures of the titular magical girl)
• Mamatoto ~A Record of War~
  • Mamanyonyo
  • Widenyo (a remake of Mamanyonyo)
• The Evenicle Series
  • Evenicle 1
  • Evenicle 2
• Dohna Dohna

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Tropes that apply to this company's games:

• Aborted Arc: Ithere was Spared By Adaptation in Rance 03, but he didn't appear at all in Rance X and a guidebook even stated he died, making the sacrifice of his apostles worthless.
• Absurdly High Level Cap: A good way of gauging how important someone is in the Rance series is by looking at their level cap. As the average person generally has a level cap in the single digits, someone with a level cap in the mid thirties is considered comparable to an elite soldier. For the most part, however, all of the major players in the Rance universe have level caps of forty or higher, with Rance (and, theoretically, his descendants) having no level cap at all!
• Absurdly Low Level Cap: Generally, there are three levels of profession, but level 3's can all warp reality in some way.
• The Ace: The main characters of the Dai games are all incredibly talented alpha males who excel in pretty much everything. While Rance has slowly raised himself to this position in his games, the stand out example for the longest time was Rick Addison, who is presented as handsome, intelligent and better at fighting than Rance.
• Adaptation Distillation: As Kichikuou Rance condenses an entire six games worth of plot that had yet to be fully realized, along with several other pieces of additional background information, the majority of the events are simplified versions of what they would actually become in series canon, with some being completely different entirely.
  • The Animated Adaptation of the first game, cuts off several characters, quests and subplots and focuses mainly on telling the main story of Rance finding Hikari and punishing Queen Lia. Those who yearn to see Mikki Kurusu animated will be severely dissapointed.
• Adaptational Heroism: Rance gets this big time. In the original timeline ^note Rance I-IV and Kichikuou Rance he is an outright villainous character, who fights dirty, doesn't hesitate to use the members of his Battle Harem as meat shields, and commits some downright immoral and atrocious acts in the process of saving the world, punishing evil and/or rescuing Sill. In the Continuity Reboot^note Rance 01-03 remakes and Rance 5D to 10(X), he is more of a Heroic Comedic Sociopath with plenty of Jerk with a Heart of Gold moments (mind you, he still does some pretty horrible things).
  • In the original Kichikuou Rance Oda Nobunaga is a ruthless and cruel warlord who is going to frustate a lot of players with his personality and tactics. In the retconned Sengoku Rance timeline, he is presented as a laid-back Nice Guy capable of befriending even Rance, who only did atrocious things after getting possessed by an evil demon.
• Affably Evil: The vast majority of the Fiends aligned with the Kayblis faction are pretty okay people overall and simply work for Kayblis due to various circumstances forcing them to. Some, like Galtia, Warg and Kite are Punch Clock Villains while the most villainous ones like Medusa and Kayblis himself are prone to goofing around and having fun.
• Affectionate Parody:
  • Rance is one to pretty much every medieval fantasy Role Playing Games, though particularly Ys and Dungeons & Dragons.
  • Big Bang Age follows suit, parodying 80's shonen fighting anime as well as fighting games such as Rival Schools and Street Fighter.
  • Dateikoku manages to be on to both the Space Opera genre and all of World War II.
• Afro Asskicker: Recurring character Abao Akuu sports a fantastic futuristic looking afro and is almost always a strong unit when playable.
• All Abusers Are Male: While there is no shortage of especially cruel female villains, all cases of Villainous Incest in the company's games involve men violating their daughters or nieces.
• All Gays Are Pedophiles: Zappa from Dohna Dohna, when asked what his type is, answers that he's gay, and "just happy ogling Joker", who appears to be no older than 14.
• All There in the Manual: Pretty much the case with every game they make, though none quite like the Rance series, where there are several volumes worth of tie-in books that explain the history of the setting. Rance Quest is kind enough to include a "Trivia Section" explaining the history of the numerous characters you come across, but even that only covers a small fraction of the series' lore.
• Alternate Continuity: Rance I-IV, Rance 4.1-4.2 and Kichikuou Rance are the original timeline, Rance 01-03 and Rance 5D-10(X) are the Continuity Reboot, while Mamatoto seems to be a parallel universe featuring several of the same characters.
• Alternative Calendar: Rance's world numbers their years by the reign of the current Archfiend. The series begins in LP003, third year of Archfiend Little Princess's reign. The known reigns are KK (Kkulf-Kkulf's reign, 2,014 years), AB (Abel's reign, 721 years), SS (Ssulal's reign, 500 years), NC (Nighcisa's reign, 960 years), JL (Jill's reign, approx. 1000 years), GI (Gai's reign, a little over 1000 years), and LP. When Rance becomes Archfiend in Rance X (LP008), the RA reign begins. The timekeeping system used prior to the first Archfiend's creation is unknown.
• Amazon Brigade: While there's no shortage of female warriors in Rance's world, the Leazas Gold Corps. is made up entirely of the strongest women Leazas has to offer and serve as the Queen's personal guard.
• Anti-Hero: Their protagonists manage to fall all across the spectrum. Rance and Akuji accomplish heroic goals, but are overall sociopathic sex offenders who are frequently hard to sympathize with, Tougou and Rouga are both cocky and arrogant but are otherwise entirely heroic characters, while Nanus and Kentarou are straight-laced heroes who frequently get the short end of the stick due to their wimpiness.
• Art Evolution: Considering how the company has been around since the late 80s, there's been a lot of this. Especially noticeable in the Rance series.
• The Atoner: Several antagonists throughout the Rance series end up becoming this, most notably Queen Lia (the antagonist of Rance 01) and Patton (one of the main antagonists in Rance 03).
• Author Appeal: TADA, the Director of the Rance Series, Executive Vice President, the chief of the Game developing department, and the one in charge of marketing the AliceSoft brand, likes silly girls, Meganekko, Role Playing Games, Global History (especially Pre-WW2), Romantic Comedies, both insulting and comforting girls, Cute Monster Girls, Battleships, and Military Planes. All of these elements have appeared in AliceSoft games one way or another.
  • After Tori left the company due to health reasons, TADA made a post for applicants for her position. While he didn't list any of the above likes as being requirements for the job, they were listed as requirements for being his best friend.
  • TADA also has examples of Author Unappeal as well, at odds with some of the other staff members. Primarily the Rance series' half-assed policy on monster design and his dislike of Lolicon.
  • AliceSoft really, really likes Gundam. You'd be hard-pressed to find a game of theirs that doesn't reference a character or mobile suit somewhere.
• Author Avatar: TADA once again. He calls himself "King Hanny" around the office and shouts "Moe!" when he sees a cute girl in glasses, so the haniwa are basically an exaggerated version of him.
  • A few of the other staff members like to insert themselves in the games as Mooks. Notably Tori and the Iyanayastu (Fan translated as "Asshole" or "Gross Guy") as well as Plum's Ghost.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: While Sill's love for Rance is clear, their borderline abusive relationship, mixed with Rance's love of skirt chasing, makes his feelings for her rather dubious. Despite this, whenever he's about to face a near death situation, Rance is always quick to give Sill a very passionate hug. This becomes even more obvious in Kichikuou Rance where, when Sill gets kidnapped, Rance decides to conquer the entire world just to save her. After Sill becomes frozen in Sengoku Rance, Rance gets thrown into a Heroic BSOD and does everything in his power to try and free her.
  • In Rance IX, Rance is pretty much horrible to every woman he comes across, but if the player happens to trigger one of the "heroine bad-endings" wherein the girls die in various horrific ways, he gets absolutely devastated by their loss.
  • Rance X goes through yet another one of these situations at the climax of part 2, Archfiend Rance, who should be little more than an Empty Shell consumed by the demonic bloodlust, incapable of even recognising his own family, staggers for a moment after seeing Sill frozen in ice. Later on, when his sanity is restored and Sill asks him why he would go that far for her, he finally admits loving her.
• Babies Ever After: With a franchise like Rance, it would be criminal not to end the game series without this. Rance has a lot of children by the time of his death, who all have lots of grandchildren of their own.
• Battle Harem: Rance Quest has a massive character roster, but almost all of them are female characters, with the series' male cast getting reduced to occasional guest appearances. Naturally, Rance has sex with all of them.
• Big Bad: Played with in the Rance games. While Kayblis is certainly the closest thing the setting has to a main villain, he's not actually the designated Big Bad that is the Archfiend, who is actually Rance's adorable ally Mikki. To further his "kind of the main bad guy but not really" image, it is made abundantly clear that he's just as much a pawn in the game that the Creator Gods are having as anyone else and holds no real power in the grand scheme of things and is generally treated as a Laughably Evil No-Respect Guy. This essentially makes him a Big Bad Wannabe since he is closer to this since he's not an Archfiend, a Dirty Coward and is just a pawn in god's game.
• Big Good: By Rance X, Rance ends up leading all of humanity to fight against the fiends. Crook meanwhile becomes the Big Good for Part 2 where she sends her child to gather all of El's siblings and bring Archfiend Rance back to his senses.
• Bitch In Sheep Clothing: Despite Bird's more affable demeanor and looking like a Knight in Shining Armor to the women he dated, he is actually just as perverted as Rance except that he keeps hiding his lust behind a facade, which crumbles the moment he is in trouble. Not to mention the fact he tends to outright forget about women he dated and has the tendency to ditch them even when they were adventuring together with him outright starting to flirt with another woman, who catches his eyes.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: While there are some genuinely good people within Rance's world, the majority of the governments are led by corrupt rulers, Leazas included and Rance is the closest thing they have to a hero. The villainous characters, on the other hand, are so despicable that it's impossible not to root for Rance anyway.
  • Pretty true for almost every game they make. While there are some legitimately evil people roaming around, for the most part everyone is a decent person, just embroidered in deep conflict with everyone else.
• Born Lucky: Rance is one of the only individuals alive who is completely immune to the laws that govern his universe, which gives him a major edge over pretty much all of his opponents. Later games finally seem to address it and imply that he may be some kind of Humanoid Abomination known as a "balance breaker", though this only opens up more questions.
• Breakout Character:
  • Rance went from just another one of their protagonists to the company's poster boy. In fact, he was so popular that he dominated the Visual Novel Character Polls for years before the poll became exclusively for female characters. It says a lot when the most popular character from an Eroge is a guy.
  • Some characters who scored high in the poll of Kichikuou Rance end up having bigger roles in games from the new timeline for example Isoroku who scored first on the poll gained her own route of Sengoku Rance and Reset became a major character in both Rance Quest (Magnum) and Rance X.
• Breather Episode: Rance Quest, which takes place in the shadow of Rance's Heroic BSoD, is significantly more lighthearted and less plot heavy than the games proceeding and following it and serves as a way of setting up plot points for the next games rather than actually advancing the plot itself.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: Rance's infinite level cap theoretically makes him the most powerful being in the universe barring the very beings who created it, but he is prevented from completely destroying every game by losing most of his levels between them due to No Atrophy from not doing anything between them. He's gotten a bit better by recent games where he's managed to remain around level 40, but characters like Rick and Kenshin still surpass him due to constant training.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Pretty much all of the most powerful people in every game have at least one quirk that makes them this. For example Queen Lia, has incredibly cutesy looks, is prone to infantile tantrums and has a child-like infatuation with Rance, but she is also shown to be a terrifyingly perceptive and effective ruler. This includes the protagonists, who are generally more interested in getting laid than saving the world, despite being very competent.
  • TADA, the former head of AliceSoft and creator of Rance himself is prone to going off on tangents, making up lore for his universes off the top of his head and randomly shouting "Moe!" in the middle of conversation. Naturally, he is the inspiration for the Mascot Mook hannies.
• Butt-Monkey: Rance's personal slave Sill suffers a lot of humiliation across the series, but she has nothing on Kentou Kanami, who pretty much exists to be the butt of all of Rance's cruelest jokes. Another recurring Butt Monkey is Bird Lithfie, who is guaranteed to lose both his girlfriend and a limb whenever he appears usually because of Rance, but mostly because of himself.
  • Everyone ends up playing this role from time to time, simply because Rance acts like a gigantic jerk to everybody, even the people he likes.
• The Cameo: Characters from later Rance games, such as Tomato Puree, Maria Custard and Isoroku Yamamoto show up briefly in the Animated Adaptation of the first game's remake. Curiously, Rance VI's characters are the only ones absent.
• Can't Hold His Liquor: Rance. While he does enjoy alcohol, he tends to try and refrain from drinking it because he is a lightweight to an absurd degree. Sadly, a lot of the men he's come to know as friends (except for Rick) like to share a drink with him, which generally results in him doing something foolish.
• The Casanova: While most of their protagonists are Chick Magnets, Tougou Tsuyoshi of Daiteikoku is the only one who fits the character type, being a suave flirt who constantly sleeps around.
• Cerebus Syndrome: While the Rance series always had genuinely serious moments, they were primarily meant to be wacky parodies. Starting with Rance VI, however, the series has become more and more focused on telling an epic story and the humor, while still very prevalent, has become less and less prominent over time.
  • Even within the serious entries, Rance X is the darkest entry on the series by the largest margin, with mechanics depicting how many millions of humans are dying every month (keeping the remaining population and the percentage of casualties since the war started) tons of bad endings that either state or imply mankind's extermination (or at least the end of their role as protagonist race) and the A endings being very Bittersweet Ending at least until Part 2 brings things to a close and a Golden Ending.
• Character Development: While he's still very much a Heroic Comedic Sociopath, Rance has become a nicer guy over the course of his series. Compare his interactions with Patton in Kichikuou Rance with their interactions in Rance IX, which tells the same story but with an in universe year's difference between them. In Kichikuou Rance's disgusted at the thought of shaking hands with Patton while in IX they're Fire-Forged Friends. Rance has also developed a far more heroic motivation besides his usual "have sex with every hot chick in the world'': freeing Sill from the eternal ice she's encased in.
  • His development comes to a head at the end of Rance X. With Rance being willing to absorb Miki's demonic blood to spare her becoming Little princess, heartbroken by Sill's demise. Later on he did all he could to keep the bloodlust at bay, enduring five years every time, whereas the other Archfiends always succumbed to the bloodlust instantly.
• Char Clone: The most iconic one is Rick Addison of the Rance series, but Idagawa Ren from Daibanchou and Eagle Douglas from Daiteikoku also fit the bill.
  • Recurring Traveller Abao Akuu more or less is Char except with a ridiculous design featuring a bright pink spacesuit and afro. Nearly every word out of his mouth is taken directly from the man himself.
• Child Hater: Rance is an interesting example, because while he does not have trouble getting along with the children of the orphanage in Rance VI, he personally does not want children himself, which is why he makes Sill use Contraception Magic on him. However, after getting Reset, his first child who actually wants to spend time with him, he does not mind getting more kids which is a far cry with Rangi whom he did not even want to meet due to being uncomfortable with having another kid.
• Chuunibyou: While several characters play this straight, Miracle from Rance IX is a subversion. She is a level 3 mage and she does have great magic powers, and she can travel to Another Dimension at will, but the spells she normally uses are much less powerful than what she lets on.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Kenshin and Senhime are both highly skilled Ladies of War and two of the most powerful units in all the games they appear in, but they both have neglected their other (social and/or survival) skills and are highly naive to the point that they need a Cloudcuckoolander's Minder to function properly.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Rance himself. From the point of view of someone who doesn't know the things he has done he is a boastful idiot. He does get himself into dangers he could easily avoid by simply thinking twice what he does. But when he gets serious there is nothing in the world able to stop him.
• Combat Pragmatist:
  • Despite Rance being a very skilled swordsman, he has no problems pulling this trope off against his enemies. Whether it's stabbing a dark lord while his back is turned due to Shizuka offering herself to him while naked or giving poisoned relief supplies to an enemy nation in Sengoku to buy time after they've had an earthquake.
  • General Minerva from Rance IX is a Deconstruction of the trope. Her obsession with winning by any means necessary (such as desecrating the graves of the Helman citizens to build a wall blocking Rance's progress) and using underhanded tactics ends up driving more people to the revolution's side and ends up strengthening Rance's party.
• Complete Immortality: Most of the higher gods in the Rance setting possess this attribute, though it's been stated that if the human population of the Continent plummeted to the single digits, the Hero would be powered up enough that even the Supreme Gods could be killed (the gods tried to object to this when it was implemented, but Rudrathaum found the idea of the highest gods getting killed by their own creations for negligence to be hilarious, so he overruled them). Archfiend Jill was also granted absolute immortality, on the condition that she be permanently reduced to 5% of the power she had previously commanded.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist:
  • Rance I: Lia is a childish woman who enjoys torturing innocent girls to death, but plays innocent up until the very moment she is exposed. Despite her actions, however, her subordinates are nothing but loyal to her.
  • Rance II: Ragishss is a fatherly man who was killed by the very girls he exploited, and has no issue revealing his true intentions after he achieves his goal.
  • Rance III: Noce is a Nigh-Invulnerable monster who, unlike the fatherly Ragishss, has no personal attachment to his subordinates, and instead works for the benefit of someone even more powerful than himself.
  • Rance IV: Bitch is a Non-Action Big Bad who uses his cunning to get what he wants, and is able to manipulate people much stronger than himself because of it.
  • Rance 5D: Unlike Bitch, who Rance encountered many times throughout Rance IV, Genbu is The Ghost (Up until Sengoku, at least), whose primary method of creating conflict stems from his mystical powers.
  • Rance VI: In contrast to Genbu who only served as a villain indirectly in 5D, Camilla is very much proactive, breaking through the Maginot Line toward the end of the game and leading a large-scale invasion on Zeth. In addition, while Genbu was a mere Apostle to a then-unknown Fiend, Camilla is a Fiend who is shown up in the postgame by her own initially unknown Apostle.
  • Sengoku Rance: While Camilla was sealed away at the end of Rance VI, Xavier begins this game already sealed away, and rather than invading Nippon directly, he depends on his Apostles to revive him so he can attack the country from within.
  • Rance Quest: Whereas Xavier was opposed by Tenshiism as the sole Big Bad of Sengoku, Am is a former pope of Alicism, and goes unseen and largely unmentioned until the postgame, with Rance primarily dealing with smaller, individual threats throughout the game rather than a single overarching villain.
  • Rance IX: Stessel looms large throughout the story, as the current chancellor of Helman, handling much of the empire's operations behind the scenes, and it is clear from the beginning that he is the main villain of the game.
  • Rance X: Unlike Stessel, a Non-Action Big Bad whose actions mostly concerned his own country, Kayblis is undoubtedly one of the strongest beings on the Continent, and gets his way by strong-arming most of the other Fiends into doing his bidding, leading a brute force invasion of the Human Realm.
  • Rance X Part 2: Although Kayblis was motivated by greed and anger to kill the current Archfiend and take her power, Rance was voluntarily given the Archfiend's power, and accepted it for entirely selfless reasons. While Kayblis was feared and/or hated by nearly all of his subordinates, Rance is loved and/or trusted by most of the Fiends who directly serve him, and he willingly secluded himself from humanity as he suppressed the Archfiend's blood for years, only becoming an active threat once he finally succumbed to it.
• Corrupt Church: The ALICE Church in the Rance series is a prime example. Though, given the fact that they serve Jerkass God, who has a vested interest in keeping the world as messed up as possible, it's completely justified.
• Crutch Character: Due to the Nintendo Hard nature of most of their games, the player is generally given a character who can steamroll most of the early game with ease (Feliss and Rick from Rance, Shibagami from Daiteikoku), but rendering them unusable after certain events to prevent the player from relying solely on them. Interestingly, the main characters of each of the three Dai games also manage to be this due to having far better stats than pretty much every other playable character, particularly early on, but are incapable of getting character cleared, meaning they'll never get any New Game Plus bonuses like the other characters.
• Cute Monster Girl: Played with for Gal Monsters. While most of the Gal Monsters have both "cute" and "girl" down, some of them are lacking in the "monster" department. This is rather apparent in certain classes of Gal Monsters like Magician and Valkyrie, who don't have any part of "monster" on them.
• Cutting Off the Branches: Generally speaking, only one route is followed from game to game. However, there is a notable exception with Rangi, Isoroku Yamamoto's son. Normally, he only appears in the (non-canon) "Isoroku Route" of Sengoku Rance, but by the time Rance goes to NIPPON in Rance Quest, it is confirmed Isoroku was impregnated by Rance and that Rangi was just recently born.
• Darker and Edgier: Kichikuou Rance is this for the Rance series, originally conceived as a "what-if" story before later being made canon to the original timeline. Compared to the rest of the series, the art style is grittier and more detailed, Rance's Nominal Hero status is taken much more seriously, and many of the game's antagonists make him look like a saint by comparison even then. It is telling that Kichikuou is the only installment in the original timeline to feature bad ends, both for individual character arcs and for the game as a whole.
• Decomposite Character: In the new canon aspects of Pastel Kalar were split into several different Kalar Queens with the only aspect retained being the mother of Reset, while her original design and personality went to Modern Kalar, and her manner of thinking to Vivid Kalar.
• Deconstruction: Toushin Toshi 2 is one of the typical H-game, namely the player's presumed motive for playing to see sex scenes. Within the actual story, while the main character Seed has his own motivation of winning his girlfriend's hand in marriage by winning the tournament, the player can make him have sex with a large chunk of the female cast. While the game doesn't immediately punish Seed for being unfaithful, all but a few sex scenes require Seed to do increasingly horrible things to unlock them, culminating in murdering every girl he has sex with, which the game goes out of its way to describe in horrifying detail and having Seed become terrified and confused by his own actions. Ultimately the game asks the player the question of whether they're invested in the characters themselves, or simply want to see the sex scenes.
• Deconstructive Parody: The Rance series is just as much a deconstruction of traditional Role Playing Games as it is a parody.
• Defiled Forever: Averted in the Rance series, actually. When Kouhime is raped and is depressed because she believes she cannot marry anymore... Rance tells her guys like that don't count, makes fun of the rapists' small penises, and promises to marry her himself if no one else will take her.
• Depending on the Writer: The characters in Rance series behave really differently depending on who handles the script. This becomes especially apparent if you compare Rance 01-03 (the 2010s remakes) to Rance I-III (the 1990s originals). For example, in the original Rance III, Rance murders the essentially innocent Weapon Shop keeper because he got pissed off about something that was beyond the keeper's power (his shop was raided by bandits and he lost his merchandise). In the remake, the Weapon Shop owner actively antagonizes Rance and gives away the weapons Rance is looking for, just to spite him for sleeping with his "beloved daughter". The end result is the same (Rance gets angry and kills him), but Rance's actions are somewhat more justified in the remake.
• Designated Heroinvoked: Rance is an iconic example, but Princess Lia from the same series is another perfect example. She's the de facto Big Good of the story but is a childish Yandere who was the main antagonist of the first game.
• Despair Event Horizon: If you play the open-ended games, you will most likely cause a character to cross one (yes, even the one you control), either deliberately though your actions, or by mistake. This, more often than not, leads to a Downer Ending.
  • Within the more linear "Rance Quest" this happens to the protagonist twice. The first time at the beginning of the game, when he gets the Abstinence Morurun curse, and the second one at the end when Pastel fails to lift Sill's curse, informs him that there's nobody who can lift the curse (because it was cast by the Archfiend), and that he should give up on her. The first time it's Played for Laughs, the second time... not so much.
• Developer's Foresight: Hacking into Daibanchou to allow yourself to control characters who normally aren't playable like Kamui or Jeanne reveals that they have recorded dialogue for winning and losing battles as well as raising stats, despite never being intended as playable.
• Didn't Think This Through: All over the place in their games.
  • In Rance III Rance uses all the members of his Battle Harem as a Human Shield in order to cross a particularly narrow bridge where The Dragon shoots fireballs. When he finally manages to cross it, he finds out that all of his party members are out for the count and there's nobody to fight by his side in the (really tough) upcoming battle ahead.
  • In Rance VI Nelson Server decides to take out the power generators surrounding the Zeth continent, without realising that this will allow the demon army to invade.
  • All of Miracle's intimate interactions with Rance in Rance IX involve her severely underestimating his sex drive and putting herself in a compromising situation in front of him, which he inevitably takes advantage of. But this is nothing compared to the finale of her route wherein she recklessly uses teleportation magic during the final battle and ends up getting lost and trapped with Rance in the teleport dimension for thirty whole years before Hunty Calar finds them and brings them back. When they get back to finish the battle both Rance and Miracle have aged 30 years. Hunty proceeds to explain to them that while you don't age while being in the teleport dimension, the years you spend in there catch up with you when you exit, which is why teleportation magic is only safely used by ageless beings like her.
  • Eve in Evenicle aka the first human set up a series of Divine Laws enforcing monogamy upon the world's populace and cursing anyone that cheats on their partner, in an effort to reign in humanity's most base desires. Unfortunately, she didn't make any provisions for people who cheat against their will.
• Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?: In general Rance does not care who is in front of him and how powerful they are. Special mention goes to the Blood Memories who he fights with his children in Rance X: Part 2. His reactions to its transformations into every Archfiend range from Bring It, annoyance and even amusement especially from its transformation into Kkulf Kkulf which he only sees as a Last Stand which signals the end of the battle.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: The climax of Rance III has Rance rape the Humanoid Abomination Physical God Archfiend Jill, historically noted to be the most dangerous Archfiend of all time.
• Dirty Coward: A number of characters could fall under this, but Kayblis takes the cake. Despite being by far the most powerful Fiend other than the Archfiend, he has a policy of never getting into a fight if there is even a 0.001% chance he could die. Considering how long he's survived, he might be on to something.
• Does Not Like Men: Rance! He finds ugly men to be hideous wastes of space and attractive men to be threats to his harem, to a point where he'll kill a man in a heart beat if he annoys him too much. There are a small handful of men that he doesn't hate (Patton, Gandhi, etc.) but he's still incredibly abusive towards them and frequently forgets their names. The only men who could genuinely be called his friends are Chaos, Rick Addison and Oda Nobunaga, all of whom he has a heavy Vitriolic Best Buds relationship with.
  • Pretty much every AliceSoft protagonist is like this, with the exception of Rouga, who values men and women equally, and Tougou, who vastly prefers women but has no problem working with men.
• The Dog Bites Back: Played with; In Rance X, Bird finally snaps and kills Sill to get back at Rance for all the humiliation he received in the series. While Bird is right that Rance is responsible for part of his suffering, most of it actually comes from his inability to accept his shortcomings and flaws. Not to mention the fact, he chose to kill Sill, who is always kind to him, rather than Rance.
• Doorstopper: Rance X is not only the longest eroge ever made, or even just the longest Visual Novel - in terms of sheer word count it's one of the longest pieces of fiction period, at over ten million Japanese characters, which likely translates to roughly three million English words.
• Double Meaning: The Abstinence Morurun in Rance Quest causes anyone who sleeps with Rance to drop to level 1. It turns out this applies in the literal sense as well, as Rance gets in a bit of trouble with his party after Kouhime falls victim to the curse simply from sleeping next to him. Seeing this event also unlocks the ability to inflict the curse on male party members as well.
• Drowning My Sorrows: A very interesting subversion occurs at the original ending of Rance Quest (alternate ending in Magnum). When Rance gets informed that The Kalars can't lift Sill's curse and that nobody else in the world can (since the curse was cast by the Archfiend), he pretty much crosses the Despair Event Horizon and proceeds to lose himself by going on a "vicious sex binge" with all the members of his Battle Harem. Said binge lasts a full week, and is so brutal that a lot of members of his Battle Harem proceed to leave the party.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Nagi su Ragarl, Shizuka's half sister and rival, appears on the cover of Rance 2, a full four games before her official debut in Rance 6. This is a case of What Could Have Been, as a scenario featuring her was planned for that game, but not implemented until the sixth one.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Getting the Golden Ending in the company's games often involves going through a lot of replays and seeing many bittersweet or downright bad endings and unpleasant scenes. Have fun!
• Engrish: Due to their love of western settings and names, this happens a lot. Ironically, the most notable usage of English (albeit a bit nonsensical) is in the opening to Big Bang Age, the game that takes place in Japan.
• Entitled to Have You: A lot of the villains in their games tend to play this straight. Rance is a rare heroic example of the trope, in that he believes all beautiful girls in the world are rightfully his to enjoy, and will do anything to protect said girls and prevent harm from coming to them. Though, given how he tends to treat them when he gets his hands on them, most of them would have preferred to die anyway.
• Establishing Character Moment: If you ever wondered what sort of person Rance is, all you have to do is watch the first few minutes of his first 1994 OVA, "Rance - The Desert Guardian". There, he comes across a band of bandits who are chasing a girl in order to rape her. He manages to One-Hit Polykill most of them with his signature "Rance Attack" and the one remaining bandit falls on his knees and pathetically begs for his life. It's then that Rance reveals his Nominal Hero status and proceeds to painfully kill him by shoving his sword up the remaining bandit's ear, at which point he orders his slave Sill (who is already carrying Lots of Luggage on her back) to check the bandit corpses for weapons and valuables. He then turns his attention to the rescued girl, pushes her to the ground and forces her to "thank him with her body", while Sill in the background is crying about him having sex with another woman. Needless to say, he is not the standard hero archetype.
• Everyone Has Standards: Rance can be a pretty horrible person, but he hates racism (especially notable in Rance VI) and goes ballistic when confronted with pedophilia.
• Even Evil Has Standards: In Evenicle Rance 2, the game's main villains become so appalled by Rance's behavior that they have a Heel Realization and perform a Heel–Face Turn in order to stop him, complete with a Heroic Sacrifice.
• Everyone Can See It:
  • Everyone knows Rance is in love with Sill, no matter how much he denies it. It reaches a point where, during his wedding with Lia in Kichikuou, the only thing several of the guests talk about is how shocked they are that he isn't marrying Sill.
  • Patton and Hunty is another example in the Rance series. Everyone around them knows they love each other, but they don't allow themselves to get romantically involved until the Helman revolution in finished.
• Fantasy World Map: Both Sengoku Rance and Kichikuou Rance involve interacting with this quite a lot.
• Fan Translation: For a long time, they were the only source of English translations of their games, to the point where AliceSoft themselves encouraged them. Apparently, the efforts of the fan translations convinced AliceSoft to give their games commercial releases internationally.
• Fascist, but Inefficient: Played straight in both the Rance and the Evenicle series. Repressive regimes (such the military dictatorship of Helman and The Magocracy of Zeth) are shown to be plagued with corrupt high-officers who are more concerned with keeping their positions than serving the people they are supposed to serve, failing to even provide basic protection against rampaging monsters. Meanwhile, regimes where the citizens are largely left to their own devices (such as the kingdom of Leazas) are shown to be prosperous and efficient, even when their acting rulers are not completely right in the head.
• Fat Bastard: A recurring villainous archetype, from Radon Alphorne, to Ashikaga Choushin, to Fletcher Modell. While the former two were humbled and pull a Heel–Face Turn, Fletcher refuses to back down and gets killed by Rance. The Ham Bambara are a whole race of them.
• Fountain of Expies:
  • They do this to themselves. Several character designs and personalities have been recycled in other games.
  • Big Bang Age is on the receiving end of this to Rival Schools.
• Forbidden Fruit: Mikki Kurusu (aka the archfiend Little Princess) is one in the Rance series. Whenever Rance encounters her, there's always an option to assault her and force himself unto her. Doing so, will always cause her to give in to her Superpowered Evil Side and blast Rance out of existence, resulting in an instant Game Over. So it's always best for Rance to mind his behaviour around her, unless you're on her route in Rance X, where she gets Laser-Guided Amnesia and Rance can actually seduce her.
• Gameplay Roulette: The Rance series almost never sticks to one genre between games. There are generally RPG Elements and an increasing focus on Tactical Combat, but beyond that vary greatly in gameplay and presentation.
  • Rance I is a simplified Point-and-Click Game with RPG battles thrown in - almost literally, as the game runs on a modified version of AliceSoft's regular Visual Novel engine at the time.
  • Rance II is a tile-based dungeon crawler.
  • Rance III is a mostly traditional RPG, but battles have some strategy elements, a la Live A Live.
  • Rance IV combines II's dungeon crawler exploration with III's strategy RPG battles, along with a few elements of a Life Simulation Game.
  • Rance 5D is one big Luck-Based Mission, most often compared to a board game.
  • Rance VI is a first-person dungeon crawler.
  • Sengoku Rance is a grand strategy game with some Dating Sim elements.
  • Rance Quest is probably the most traditional RPG out of all of them, with free movement while exploring dungeons and a first-person perspective for battles.
  • Rance IX is almost a pure Visual Novel, with gameplay only consisting of a handful of tactical RPG battles per chapter. While said combat is certainly more complex than III or IV, there are few enough battles to make IX the least gameplay-focused entry in the series.
  • Rance X is a Card Battle Game with heavy strategy elements even outside of battle, officially described as a "Great War RPG".
• Gender Bender: Suzaku in Sengoku Rance changes gender everytime s/he's killed, resurrecting as a female in Rance Quest and finally getting to have sex with Rance, much to Rance's horror when Suzaku revives as male again, but is ultimately fine with it if Suzaku remains female. There's also the Sex Change Temple in Sengoku Rance which can change the gender of any generic unit... or Rance, which leads to a hilarious Non-Standard Game Over.
• Full-Circle Revolution: Their games recognize this trope and mostly play it straight. Patton during the finale of Rance IX averts it by relinquishing the throne, immediately after being crowned king and turning Helman into a democracy, allowing his sister Sheila to get voted in as the country's first elected president.
• General Ripper: Nelson Server in the Rance series is one. He is so obsessed with toppling over Zeth's corrupt government for thinking they didn't give him what was entitled to him that he doesn't realise his actions cause the demon army to invade and take over the his country.
• Glitch Entity: Many individuals in the Rance game world are considered "Balance Breakers" due to either having completely broken abilities or coming up with ridiculously dangerous inventions and ideas. The role of the game's official religion, the ALICE Church, is to essentially reign them in and eliminate them in order to preserve the world's balance and keep the Top God Rudrathaum happy. Some of them however, like the titular protagonist and Maria Custard are allowed to live, get embraced by the religion and become Ascended Glitches instead.
• God Is Evil: In the Rance series, Rudrathaum, the Space Whale Top God who created the world (AKA "the Continent") along with his three children Creator Gods, did it to stave off his boredom; unfortunately for pretty much everybody, what Rudrathaum finds to be the most entertaining is pain, suffering, despair and constant struggle on a grand scale, so the rules of the world are explicitely set up to ensure the perpetuation of its Crapsack World nature. Even the three Creator Gods have a strong vested interest above and beyond that in ensuring the world stays that way due to Rudrathaum having put in place a clause that can screw them over, just for the lulz. If, due to war and genocide and other atrocities, the population of the world ever drops to single digits, The Hero's sword then becomes powerful enough to kill anything save Rudrathaum. The sole justification given for this is that if such a thing were to come to pass, it's because the Creator Gods were lax in their duties (mortals can't provide entertainment if they're all dead...).
• God Is Flawed: In Evenicle, the sole character who knew her in person describes Mother Eve as this: just a somewhat-normal woman doing the best she could and not always making the right choice. Her most persistent flaw was her inability to understand human sin and evil; the seemingly insane laws surrounding sex make a lot more sense through the lens of someone who doesn't necessarily know rape is even a thing, since before her there were no males in the entire world, and the idea that anything could possibly drive sapient creatures to want to murder one another is seemingly so alien to her she never could come up with a solution more elegant than letting people sublimate their darker desires and not punishing people for killing those who've already murdered.
• God Is Inept: Mother Eve in the Evenicle games isn't so much a loving mother goddess as she is a woman with godlike power who just happened to birth humanity and then didn't know how to raise them properly afterwards. This is first hinted at by the way she set up her commandments to be enforced: You might think that "Do Not Cheat On Your Partner" isn't that bad a rule, but the way it is instantaneously and automatically enforced gives serious implications that are shown pretty early on. Get raped? Congratulations, you're now married to your rapist, and divorce is not an option. Get raped by a second person? You're now cursed for your infidelity, with no hope of appeal. It's implied, when one character discovers and possibly rediscovers, a means of breaking the Outlaw curse, that it wasn't necessarily intended to be permanent, but poor Eve's inability to truly understand human sin consistently results in tragedy across the franchise; it's entirely possible she just didn't know that rape was even a thing.
• Golden Ending:
  • Clearing every ending in Rance IX and then watching one last time the true ending shows Sill getting finally defrosted by Crook thanks to a long ritual and a national treasure from Helman.
  • Rance X also has one when the player managed to save every kingdom. This unlocks Part 2 which is about the children of Rance who need to defeat their father who became the Archfiend, and clearing it shows the true ending of the series.
• Gotta Catch Them All: The monster gals in Rance 5D, Rance VI and Rance Quest (Magnum). They are only needed for 100% Completion in Rance VI. In Sengoku Rance, there is a list of named commanders that you can recruit and "clear", and you need to finish the game with. Considering you can't recruit all of them on a single playthough (since some of them are only available as a New Game Plus bonus), this means you have to finish the game numerous times in order to get them all and see all of their stories.
• Grand Finale: Rance X to the Rance and Little Princess (Mikki-chan) series. It's even subtitled The Last Rance Series. The game revolves around a full-on demon invasion of all of the world's nations at once, with long-time Big Bad Kayblis at the helm of the demon army. It eventually ends with a Where Are They Now montage for a number of the main characters, finishing with Rance growing older after a lifetime of adventures (eventually becoming 100 years old) , siring many children, and passing peacefully with Sill by his bedside.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Rudrathaum, the jerkass God that rules the world, desires entertainment, but sadly he only finds some in suffering, so the entire world, the Fiend system with the Archfiend is engineered to give him what he desires.
• Guide Dang It!: Most of the company's games have some element of this to it:
  • Catching some of the commanders needed for 100% Completion in Sengoku Rance for example, means you have to be patient and not take over their territories right away, up until a specific event unlocks them or going out of your way to catch a very specific commander before conquering them.
  • Getting NIPPON's six great treasures is an especially egregious example since you need to (1) Upgrade the National Power of two specific provinces, (2) Complete a specific dungeon twice, (3) Clear a character that you can only recruit in New Game Plus under very specific circumstances, (4) Do the Pork Hunt event more than six times and finally (5) Deliberately losing a specific province to the Demon Army -all actions that are counter-intuitive to how someone normally plays the game. Good luck getting them all without a walkthrough.
  • The "bad endings" in Rance IX involve allowing a certain heroine to get defeated during certain battle-chapters. While it's easy to recognize those chapters (they have two event-circles simultaneously attached to them), the game doesn't give you a hint which heroines are supposed to fall. To make matters worse, most of these chapters have multiple battle-phases and the heroine has to get defeated during a specific phase in order to trigger her event. Prepare to go through a lot of replays, if you are going for 100% Completion .
• Happiness in Slavery: Largely averted. Slavery is generally portrayed negatively in their games. Sill Plain and Sheila Helman seem to play the "lesser evil" version of this trope straight, but they are still shown to be routinely abused and humiliated by their master, Rance.
• Hard Levels, Easy Bosses: Both Daibanchou and Daiakuji require large amounts of micromanaging to keep troop morale up, maintain conquered territory and fight off endless swarms of enemies. In comparison, the bosses, though by no means ridiculously easy, are simply stronger versions of normal enemies with powerful special abilities, which shouldn't be a problem for you if you can actually reach them. Daiteikoku averts this by having a system that makes all fights be predetermined Curb Stomp Battles, meaning bosses simply require confronting with higher stats than normal enemies do.
• The Hedonist:
  • Rance lives exclusively for his own pleasure, and has no real interest in any of the world's affairs despite the massive amount of influence he has on them. Tougou Tsuyoshi is also more interested in sleeping around and having a good time than running a navy, though he takes his job much more seriously than Rance does.
  • Rance's hedonism is driven home in Kichikuou Rance, where the Golden Ending, which requires Rance to become King of Leazas, unite the human world, liberate the demon world and (momentarily) defeat the creator of existence, has him immediately filing a divorce from Lia and escaping Leazas to go on more adventures with Sill. In fact, his entire motivation throughout the game is to conquer the world so he can go back to screwing around in it.
• Hero of Another Story: Considering the scale of Rance's world, this isn't very surprising. There are actually three "Designated Protagonists" within the continent consisting of Rance, Kentarou Ogawa and Arios Theoman. Another standout example would be Patton Misnarge, whose quest to reclaim his kingdom is quietly told in the background for over six games before taking center stage in Rance IX.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: Tougou and his best friend and second in command Akiyama in Daiteikoku. They've known each other for years, serve as the other's confidant in times of need and raise a child together. Naturally, the Ho Yay gets lampshaded to hell and back, especially when one of their main crew members is a Yaoi Fangirl.
  • Rouga and Kyoichirou from Daibanchou are also an example, with Akiyama being heavily inspired by the latter.
  • A female example would be Maria and Shizuka in the Rance series, who are almost always together. In the one game where this wasn't the case, Shizuka was quickly added into the game as an update.
  • Patton and Hubert from Rance also count, to the point where Hubert is willing to get declared dead by his country to help Patton out.
• Hilarity Ensues: Basically, the premise of the "Evenicle Rance 1 & 2" Pre-Order Bonus. Aster (1) and Alex (2) is replaced by Rance and the player watches as he turns the world of Evenicle upside down. Both cases end with Evenicle's resident Game Over Pair commenting on how Rance is completely unsuited for this world and urge the player to finish the game with the normal protagonist instead.
• Honor Before Reason: In Sengoku Rance, the Takeda Generals, having been backed to the wall by Rance, concede that Rance would be more successful in realizing their dream of a united NIPPON, but only Sanada Tourin decides to surrender and join Rance in realizing that dream, while the other three decide to go out in a blaze of glory in a final assault against Rance. On a New Game Plus playthrough, you unlock an option to assassinate Takeda Shingen, whereupon Rance discovers the truth behind Shingen and disbands the Takeda army without further bloodshed, causing the Takeda Generals to become mercenaries in other armies where they can be captured and recruited.^note However, this is non-canon as Tourin reminesces about his fallen friends in Rance IX, confirming their deaths.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: The encounter with Ruberan that caps off the prologue of Kichikuou Rance is not meant to be won, though it is possible with enough grinding and luck, and in fact leads to a unique ending.
• Horrible Judge of Character: Almost every heroic character in the Rance series manages to somehow misinterpret Rance as a heroic person despite obvious hints suggesting otherwise. The stand out example would be King Ragnarokarc Super Gandhi, who believes Rance to be the messiah!
  • This even applies to evil characters such as the Jerkass Gods that govern and created the world Rance lives in. The Top God Rudrathaum expected him to become an evil tyrannical king that would bring chaos, destruction and despair to humanity which is why he was allowed to live despite being a Balance Breaker, but instead Rance actually shortens the wars he's involved with^note For example the Helman Revolution which was supposed to take two to three years only took two months after Rance took over and minimizes the amount of suffering humanity has to go through.
• The Illuminati: The Snake Crest organisation in the Evenicle series which aims to bring forth a world war in order to dissolve Eve's grip upon the world.
• Improbable Age: The cast of Daibanchou is made up of the elite members of the factions warring for control of Japan. Most of them are around 18 and only a small handful are above 30, meaning almost all of Japan's government is run by high school students.
• Intimate Healing: The plot of Evenicle 2 centers around the hero's Medica skill, which grants him the ability to purge diseases from women's bodies by having sex with them after finding and eating some Improbable Antidote, after which he can conjure up a more conventional remedy for that disease the normal doctors can study and duplicate. Thus he and his wives go around intentionally exposing themselves to a wide variety of increasingly peculiar diseases so that they can boink a cure into existence.
• Irony: Archfiend Jill did everything in her power to sandbag the Hero System, ensuring that no noble champion would rise up to strike her down. She is instead defeated by Nominal Hero Rance, who rapes her after she's beaten and abandons her to a very long and lonely imprisonment in the alternate dimension they had fought in. To his credit, he does apologize for doing so as he exits, but it's made clear that a more traditional hero might have been sufficiently moved by her plight to at least try and save her.
• Jerkass Gods: As a rule of thumb in their games, the bigger power a deity has, the bigger jerk they are:
  • The world of Rance is ruled by a giant Space Whale and his children, who created "The Continent" in an excercise of defeating boredom. Everything that goes wrong in this world (and there is a lot of that) happens only to sate his own lust for entertainment. For example, humans are the third species to have taken control, following Cthulhu-esque monsters (who were smart but too squishy) and uberdragons (who were too resilient), while humans can prevail but also can die in so many horrifically entertaining ways.
  • Even the Gods that serve under him are humongous jerks. The goddess ALICE for example appears to be caring and loving to her followers, but in reality she is ruthless, manipulative and cruel. To be fair though, this is because her job is to provide entertainment (i.e. pain, war and bloodshed) to the creator god mentioned above and failing to do so will spell the end of her existence.
  • The world of Evenicle is ruled by Eve who appears to be a benevolent deity at first... And then you actually see what her rule of law has done to her world. To put it simply, her sole rule is that if you have sex with somebody, then you are obligated to have sex with them and only them until you die. If you cheat on him/her then you become Cursed, you are branded an "Outlaw", and you are no longer even considered human to the rest of society. You are forced to become a Subhuman Savage in order to survive since you literally can't do anything else and wait for a hero to come by, kill you and put you out of your misery. Oh, and the same goes for your partner by the way. Even if you or your partner are literally captured, imprisoned and forced into cheating by force, you are still cursed and dehumanized even though it was against your will and you had no power over it. It's eventually downplayed in that later story events reveal Eve was basically a decent person in a bad situation who was no wiser or aware of consequences than anyone else and just didn't foresee a lot of those technicalities that led to innocent people being punished. She also didn't want to be a god, but was forced into it by a being more powerful than herself who enjoyed watching her struggle.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Rance might be a jerk to everyone, including his allies, but he occasionally comes up with nuggets of wisdom that are hard to argue against, such as pointing out to Rocky (in Rance VI) that his "Wizards are evil" attitude is no different from the Fantastic Racism both of them witnessed at the start of the games or making Maris Amarylis realize that her My Master, Right or Wrong attitude did more harm to Queen Lia than good. The Animated Adaptation of the first game also has him throw this at her:
  Rance: You say that the Queen's mind is broken and that she deserves pity. So what? Does this give her the right to kidnap those girls and do all those horrible things to them? And, by the way, what have you ever done that actually helped her?
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Sure, Rance is a serial rapist, but he's still a passionate leader, and many of the games show his kindness to his troops and friends. A good example would be when he alongside his troops were supposed to subdue Medusa. Since she's an attractive woman he was originally planning to spare her for sex, but after hearing and seeing the atrocities she caused including crippling Rizna, he decides to just kill her even when she tried to bargain sex for her life. Naturally everyone was surprised to see him kill an attractive woman without any hesitation.
• Karma Houdini: For all his crimes and antics, Rance never gets his comeuppance in any major form unless you consider enduring the sheer bloodlust of an Archfiend for fifteen years, while barely able to keep his sanity. Kaybliss also gets away for starting a bloody war against humanity, albeit completely depowered and thoroughly humiliated, while the surviving Fiends by the end of Rance X: Part Two get Brought Down to Normal and able to live their own lives, though most of them aren't particularly cruel. Even more jarringly, Bird gets away with brutally murdering Sill (actually a substitute body, as her true body was still frozen in ice), who had always treated him with kindness, and nearly plunging the world into a new era of darkness by inadvertently spurring the creation of Archfiend Rance.
• Lady Not-Appearing-in-This-Game: Combined with Early-Bird Cameo, Tomato Puree and Nagi su Ragarl have been on the covers of Rance and Rance II, respectively, but they haven't made their in-game appearances until Rance II and Kichikuou Rance.
• Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: Lieutenant General Oluore The Third from "Rance IX" is essentially a carbon-copy of Lupin The Third from his iconic looks down to the way he moves and fights.
• Level Cap: One of the most notorious aspects of the Rance series is that every single individual has a set level cap determined from birth. The average person has a level cap of around 5, while an elite soldier has one of around 20. Of course, practically every major character has a level cap of 40 and above, with Rance and his descendants surpassing everybody with no level cap whatsoever, in theory making him and his descendants the strongest beings alive.
  • This becomes an important plot point in Rance 03 Jill opens a dimensional rift, rapidly raising her level and Rance's, not even paying attention to him, only to be stunned by facing a level 560 Rance, and only that level because she closed the rift due to having met her own limit.
• Lighter and Softer:
  • The 1994 OVA "Rance, The Desert Guardian" is considerably lighter than the series it is based on, with a bigger focus on situational comedy, rather than the high stakes the games have.
  • Daibanchou in comparison to their others games. While there's still plenty of rape, the main character Rouga never does any of it and is more or less an All-Loving Hero rather than a Designated Hero. The following game, Daiteikoku's hero Tougou Tsuyoshi is also considerably more noble and heroic than most of the other protagonists, but he's still far more of a jerk than Rouga is.
  • Mamatoto, while still covering dark themes, has perhaps the most traditional hero of any AliceSoft game ever and makes almost all sex scenes completely optional, to the point where one could play through the entire game and only see two of them. As a tradeoff, however, the optional sex scenes are almost all rape courtesy of the protagonist's Manipulative Bastard Dirty Old Man of a father.
• Love Martyr: In the Rance series Sill and Kenshin play this straight. Sill is the constant target of Rance's bullying/lust and performs a Heroic Sacrifice for him while Kenshin is completely selfless in her affection to the point where she prays that whatever punishments Rance has to face in the afterlife (which she realises are going to be many) get inflicted on her instead.
  • Copandon Dott and Queen Lia on the other hand are subversions. They are both highly selfish individuals, attracted to Rance for selfish reasons and they would definitely prefer if Rance didn't sleep around and focused solely on them, but they also eventually realise that they can't change him or stop him and that maintaining any sort of relationship with him, practically requires them to be somewhat selfless.
• Luck-Based Mission: Essentially the entirety of Rance 5D. To explain: You have a limited amount of actions before the game ends. Using this limited amount of actions, you play a special roulette game where you have to land five "event balls" that will allow you to progress to the next level. If the actions run out, it's Game Over. Also, you need to be leveled up sufficiently to beat the Mini-Boss and Level Boss. Some of the game's bosses are not even possible to beat if Rance hasn't acquired his patented Rance Attacks that you get at certain levels. Battling monsters and getting treasures costs additional actions. To further complicate things the game's battles are also entirely luck based (though some bonuses can affect outcomes), which means that even when you are sufficiently levelled you can still lose and get a Game Over. Oh, and did we mention that the game autosaves and there's no way to save scum? Lets just hope you chose to get that hourglass bonus when you had the chance.
• Magnetic Hero: All of their heroes are on a first name basis with the most influential and powerful people in their universe by the end of the game, and have slept with all of the female ones.
• Mascot: Alice-chan, the lovable little girl who serves as narrator (in the Rance series), dev room operator (in most of the games), and is usually on the company's logo. The Hannies are also a prominent part of their advertising.
• Mascot Mook: The Hannies, goofy living potteries with a love of all things moe. One is on the company's current logo.
• Mayfly–December Romance: Also doubling as Interspecies Romance, Patton Misnarge (Human) and Hunty Kalar (Dragon Kalar), as well as Mary Ann (Human) and Lei (Fiend). The latter case is particularly tragic as both parties can't be intimate ever since Mary Ann would be electrocuted to death by Lei's electrical discharges, which happens to her incarnation in Kichikuou Rance should Rance kill Lei in a fair fight, embracing the dying Lei for the first time and dying of electrocution to be Together in Death, an act that moves even Rance, who normally wouldn't care much of old women or other men.
• Men Are the Expendable Gender: Male characters who aren't Rance are generally treated like losers or are outright villains and serve no other purpose than to have their women stolen by Rance or to get beaten up or even killed by him. This has steadily been reduced as the series continues to the point of being more or less averted, as more recent games feature just as many badass male characters fighting alongside the female ones.
• Minor Major Character: Tons in the Rance series. Characters like Arios Theoman, M.M. Rune and almost all of the Fiends only ever get passing mentions, yet are some of the most influential characters in the entire series.
• Morality Chain: If a character is powerful in some way, expect him or her to have one. In the Rance series Kentarou Ogawa is what keeps Mikki's Superpowered Evil Side at bay and losing him can cause her to cross the Despair Event Horizon. Sill is the one who keeps back Rance's more destructive and selfish tendencies and Rance himself is the one that keeps Queen Lia from Jumping Off the Slippery Slope and using her power and influence to Take Over the World.
• Most Writers Are Male: Averted in the Rance series, of all things. Tori (main writer for Rance 2-7) is a woman, and came up with most of the traits that define Rance as a character.
• Mutually Exclusive Party Members: A preferred tactic of theirs to create more Fake Difficulty and replayability. Generally it is impossible to recruit every single possible playable character in a single run through of a game.
• My Master, Right or Wrong: Heavily Deconstructed, especially in the Rance series. Generally speaking, blindly following someone's orders without question never leads to anything good, even if that someone is benevolent and has his country's best interests in mind. This is even true with you at the helm.
• Nerds Are Sexy: One of the main characters of the Rance series, Maria Custard, is a cute tech geek who is both clumsy and obsessed with robotics. Naturally she's one of Rance's most popular girls both in and out of universe.
• Netorare: Actually used as a game mechanic in Sengoku Rance. If you are on the Ran or Monkeyslayer route, instead of the standard Demon Army, you get to fight the Shimazu brothers who can seduce any of your female roster members that isn't in "Love" status. This means that highly strong units such as Urza or Leila are in great danger of being lost, since you can't raise your affection to more than "Trust". And, to twist the knife further, even if you do manage to somehow recapture them after they ditch you, you can't recruit them again on your roster. So, the units the brothers manage to seduce are effectively permanently missable to the player and unavailable for the rest of the playthrough.
• Never My Fault: Bird is incapable of confronting or accepting his flaws and blames all his misfortune completely on Rance and while Rance is responsible for getting Kisara to hate him, all other women Bird dated lost interest in him after realizing how big a facade his "Nice Guy" demeanor is.
• Nintendo Hard: Their games often have a steep learning curve, though some are definitely worse than others.
• Non-Action Guy: A common trend in their territory capture games is to feature one of these as your Mission Control. Examples include 3G in Sengoku Rance, Zanma Gou in Big Bang Age, Jun in Daiakuji and Akiyama Keichirou in Daiteikoku. Occasionally these characters will also be playable in game, but they'll often be a Joke Character with almost no use in actual combat.
  • Interestingly, Nanas from Mamatoto plays the very role described above despite being the main character.
• Not Blood Siblings: Nanas and Arvy in Mamatoto were raised as siblings despite Nanas not being Kakaro's biological son. The revelation of this causes Arvy to allow herself to give into her feelings for Nanas and are what ultimately allow them to become romantically involved by the end of the game.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Rance 5D and Rance VI, has a bespectacled Expy of Bill Gates as a Random Encounter. He wears a "95" shirt that gets upgraded all the way up to a "Millenium" costume as the fight goes on. It's then that he starts freezing and breaking down. He can cause major damage to your party, but fights with him typically end with him self-destructing before you can even touch him.
• Nonstandard Game Over: All over the place in the company's games. If you make the wrong choices in Evenicle for instance, you are branded an outlaw and your story ends. And if you beat the first battle against the Helman Army in Kichikuou Rance (which is doable with a bit of grinding), Rance goes on to become the greatest bandit leader in history, without needing to marry Queen Lia to save Sill thus ending the game prematurely.
• Not His Sled: As Kichikuou Rance was made long before half of the series was finished and covers the entire plot from beginning to end, by the time the events appear in the actual games they've changed completely to the point of only vaguely resembling their Kichikuou portrayal. This is even lampshaded by Rance when he briefly encounters Ruberan Tser^note The woman general who defeats his army of bandits, imprisons Sill, sends him on the run, and sets the events of Kichikuou Rance in motion in one of the missions in Rance Quest.
  Sachiko Senter: What's the matter, boss?
  Rance: I don't know. It's like this woman somehow caused me a lot of pain in another life.
  • Unlike the previous remakes that averted this trope, Rance 03 changes multiple plot points. Some are small, like certain characters joining Rance, while others are pretty big, Like Ithere's fate or Jill's relationship with Rance. This is done in order for Rance 03 to be more in line with the canon of the rest of the series.
  • Sheila Helman's story in Rance IX subverts this. Her story plays out quite differently from Kichikuou Rance in both the "Main Route" and "Sheila's Route" where the focus is on her. If, however, you trigger her bad ending by allowing her to get defeated in the "Imperial Capital" battlefield, her fate plays out pretty much the way it originally played in Kichikuou Rance albeit with one horrific difference.
• Oblivious Adoption: Nanas, the protagonist of Mamatoto, is actually the prince of Gaston who was kidnapped by Kakaro as a baby and raised to be a tactical genius so that he could conquer the world for him. Nanas reveals towards the end of the game that he always subconsciously suspected that this was the case, but chose to deny it in hopes that it wasn't.
• Obliviously Evil: For a degree of "evil", if the heroes of AliceSoft games (Rance, of course, being the biggest example) do morally reprehensible thing like rape, torture, etc, it's generally because they run off the Insane Troll Logic that heroes don't do evil things, and they're the heroes, so if they do said act then they're not evil. It's actually a plot point in Rance's case, as he was subjected to a power that uses a person's inner evil to destroy them, and he was unaffected because he doesn't comprehend that he does evil things and thus has no inner evil. It generally helps that the villains in their games are usually far more cruel and depraved than the protagonists and revel in being evil.
• Old Master: Plenty, though the two most prominent examples are Barres Province, Supreme Commander of the Leazas Army and Freak Paraffin, the hundred-year old robot mage and mentor to the Patton Faction.
• Only Sane Man: At least one per game. While this position jumps around a lot in the Rance series, the most frequent holders of it are Kanami and Shizuka, Rouga and Nanus serve as this in their respective games and Akiyama serves as this in Daiteikoku.
• Optional Boss: Generally there's at least one optional boss fight per game, though there are frequently several. The most iconic is definitely Gunagan, a titanic Humanoid Abomination who rewards the player the a bizarre and out of place piece of artwork upon his defeat.
• Orcus on His Throne: Kayblis. Even though he's so powerful that he could easily destroy the forces of man by himself, he refuses to budge from his castle unless absolutely necessary. His personal policy is to never get into a fight if there is even a 0.001% chance he could die, and with up to three Fiend-killing weapons going around on the battlefield, he'd rather just let his subordinates do everything.
• Out with a Bang: Given the subject matter of their games, it's not surprising that a few characters in their games choose to go out this way. Some like Suzume even die smiling.
• Pals with Jesus: One of your earliest units in Daiteikoku is Shibagami, who is the god of Japan. He admits to being rather weak for a god but this still makes it no less impressive that he's your subordinate. In Rance X, Rance manages to get the 1st Class God Quelplan to fall for him to the extent she moonlights as a Level God just to be near him, but even before that he's already Pals with the Pope, and had a child with her who's actually the Top God incarnated as a human after the Pope convinced him to do so in order to teach him empathy.
• The Power of Love: Technically, it's "The Power of H", but it's what powers Kouenja Sakuya's Escalayer form in Beat Angel Escalayer; and Takamori Haruka's and Shihoudou Narika's Blades form in Beat Blades Haruka. In both cases, it helps that love is a factor in recharging their powers faster, but having sex with a certain person gets the... recharging going. The inverse is true: getting raped by their enemies drains their superpowered forms.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: Hubert's "disguise" in Rance IX consists of wearing a fake mustache and different armor. He's forced to wear it for the entire game.
  • "Pink Mask" from Rance 4.1 and 4.2 is most definitely not Sill in disguise. Hilariously, Rance completely buys into it, immediately countering anyone who suggests she may be Sill with "She can't be! Sill's at home!".
• The Paranoiac: Kaybliss made himself unable to sleep in paranoia of being assassinated while sleeping, allowing him to No-Sell Warg's abilities and coerce her into his cause. He also intends to eliminate other strong monsters that may oppose his rule as Archfiend.
• Peaceful in Death: By the end of the series, Rance sires a ton of healthy children, became a successful adventurer who experienced tons of exciting adventures, succeeded in every goal of his life and died of old age with Sill by his side, smiling all the while. Pretty fulfilled life, is you ask us.
• Permadeath: Frequently employed in their games, though not always.
  • Played straight in Kichikuou Rance, Daiakuji and Daibanchou, where player commanders (but not always enemy commanders) will die after being defeated once.
  • used to a lesser extent in Sengoku Rance where commanders can die randomly upon defeat, but have good odds of survival even if you lose the battle entirely.
  • Completely averted in Daiteikoku.
  • In Rance 4.1 and 4.2, permadeath applies even for enemies. A few Recurring Bosses can be snuffed out early in the story, but accidentally killing a boss whose continued existence is pivotal to the story will result in a Non-Standard Game Over.
• Power Levels: Everyone in the Rance series is aware of their Level that determines how strong and tough they are. It ranges from an average human being at around Level 10, a soldier around 20, elites ranging from 30 - 40, with 60 and above being at "legendary hero" status, and no human being in history being recorded above level 120 (the Hero's unique Game-Breaker powers notwithstanding). Originally, the Archfiend had a power level as well (suggested to be somewhere around 500) but this was retconned around Rance 5D: they still have great power, on par with 2nd or 1st class gods, but it is not codified in a Level system.
• Powerful, but Incompetent: Annis of the Rance series is a level 3 Magic user, which is considered to be an exceedingly rare Physical God level of power. Along with this, she has a level cap in the eighties whereas most high ranking generals' fall some where between the thirties and fifties! While this may seem to make her an obvious candidate for World's Strongest Man, she's so utterly stupid and incompetent that she's much more of a danger to her own teammates than she is to anybody else and is more or less useless in fights as a result.
• Pre-Order Bonus: AliceSoft tends to do them from time to time. For example, the pre-order bonus for Evenicle 1 and 2 was a bonus extra named "Evenicle Rance 1 & 2" respectively wherein Rance takes Aster and Alex' places in the story. It doesn't go well for the game world in both games due to Rance's chaotic often stupid behavior and Invincible Hero status. In the end, the game's own Game Over Pair end the whole thing by commenting on how unsuitable Rance is for the Evenicle game world and beg the player to start the game again with the normal protagonist this time.
• Press X to Die: Happens in a few of their games:
  • During the Isoroku route in Sengoku Rance, there is part where you only get one action per turn. During that time, you have to focus on getting the truth out of Isoroku about Rance's supposed successor. Failing to do so traps you in a hopeless no-win situation, especially if you've been relying on the game's autosave feature.
  • The "heroine bad-endings" in Rance IX. If you trigger them, you get two choices, one where the heroine dies in a horrifically cruel manner and one where she escapes her cruel fate at the last minute. Choosing the former grants you the girl's "bad end CGs" but also causes a "Game Over". The game warns you to save before you make the choice.
• Prolonged Video Game Sequel: In the original Rance timeline, each main installment is at least twice as long as the previous one, with the exception of Rance IV, which is only a few hours longer than Rance III if you know what you're doing in both games. This culminates in Kichikuou Rance, of which a single playthrough can take weeks or even months, in a game that requires multiple playthroughs to achieve 100% Completion.
• Protagonist-Centered Morality: Played with in the Rance series. The titular protagonist is a narcissistic sex offender who thinks he is entitled to every treasure and every beautiful girl he comes across by virtue of being the series' main character and defeating evil along the way. He is a Born Lucky Karma Houdini most of the time, but it's made abundantly clear throughout the series, that the things he does are not okay, are not viewed positively by the rest of the cast and only he finds them enjoyable.
• Quirky Miniboss Squad: A Fiend's Apostles tend to be this, and one consisting of mutant monsters appears in Rance X. Known as the Maereeta Squad, they fight the party multiple times, being one of the few examples of Level Scaling in the game, and eventually seeing the Extermination Squad as Worthy Opponents. In several routes, the Maereeta Squad successfully infiltrate Rance Castle and kidnap Miki, making Kaybliss paranoid of their ability and deciding to get rid of them later on. When they catch on, they ally with the Extermination Squad to defeat Kaybliss, and later become the commanders of Archfiend Rance's army.
• Quest for Sex: This is how the plot of Evenicle is set into motion. The Hero, Aster, has two beautiful twin sisters living in the house next to his. While he would happily marry both of them, and they'd be more than happy to share him, the magic of the world they live in would irredeemably curse all three of them if he tried bedding more than one of the two. Fortunately, Knights who get appointed by a King are allowed to take additional wives, so he sets off for a nearby kingdom to become a Knight.
• Rated M for Manly: Surprisingly, Rance IX is an example of this. The game is primarily a war drama with a cast made predominantly of incredibly manly men doing manly things, with Rance's antics being sidelined for most of the game.
• Recurring Traveller: The most common ones being the Moe-obsessed Hanny King, his Lust Object and walking Moe Blob ill girl Nozomi Okita and Afro Ass Kicker Char Clone Abao Akuu.
• Recycled Soundtrack: Oh, they've done this several times. Notable ones are...
  • "Running to the Straight". Originated in Mamatoto as the main battle theme, it was remixed twice. The first time was in Sengoku Rance just before launching the final assault on Tenma Bridge in the True Route. This was not included in the OST or sound test. The second time was in Rance IX which is the final boss theme.
  • "Ontology". Originated in Kichikuou Rance as Kayblis's theme, it was remixed in Sengoku Rance, spelled "Ontlogy", as the battle theme for the Monster Army, appropriately enough.
  • "My Glourious Days", Rance's Leitmotif, is actually not a remix from any of the AliceSoft games. It's actually a remix of the National Anthem of East Germany.
  • "Force", originally heard in Rance III when the Tulip 3 is deployed against the Helmanian forces occupying Leazas Castle, is reused as the Leazish army's theme in Kichikuou Rance, and comes full circle when it's used again in Rance 03.
• Reused Character Design: Tends to crop up from time to time. This gets relentlessly lampshaded throughout Rance IX, with Hubert successfully disguising himself as Barbazza from Mamatoto simply by wearing a fake mustache, Rance confusing Hubert with Bernard and later Alexander throughout the game and Rance wondering why Miracle looks so much like the Raven Princess he saw in his mind during Rance Quest.
• Revenge Before Reason: Pastel Kalar in Rance Quest embodies that trope. When it turns outs that her curse is not effectively preventing Rance from getting laid, and that her daughter Reset is not too keen to kill her own father (as the two of them end up bonding), she goes off the deep end and retrieves the forbidden Kalar treasures in order to kill Rance herself. This doesn't exactly go as planned: The ALICE Church incapacitates her and confiscates the treasures, which in turn leaves her own village vulnerable to attack and defenceless. The Helman Nation, which has had its eyes on the Kalars for centuries, seizes the opportunity to invade them, leading to many Kalar casualties. Rance himself steps in, stops the invasion, and saves the Kalar Village, which ends up earning him the respect and admiration of the Kalar villagers, much to Pastel's chagrin. After that particular fiasco, maddened by feelings of guilt and inadequacy, Pastel is about to hang herself, when the past Kalar queens intervene and convince her to get her revenge in a different way. To her credit, she does mellow down eventually, and what Rance originally did to her was pretty horrifying.
• RPG Mechanics 'Verse: As a part of the Planner Scenario, Skills, Levels, and Experience Points are something everyone is aware of. Skills and one's Level Cap are determined at birth, while Experience Points have to be handed off to a "Level God" in order to level up and become stronger. There's even an Archfiend who is the ultimate evil for humanity to defeat ("Ma-ou" or "Demon King" in Japanese, which is eye-rollingly stereotypical for a Japanese fantasy RPG Big Bad) and a "Chosen Hero" with many supernatural advantages who is destined to battle against the forces of evil.
• Runaway Bride: In the very first Rance game, as well as the remake, Queen Lia attempts to force Rance into a Shotgun Wedding after she gets reformed by "his whip of love". Rance promptly packs his stuff with Sill, jumps off a windows and runs away. In Rance VI he leaves poor Magic the Ghandhi waiting at the altar while he absentmindedly leaves Zeth incognito thinking to himself that there was something important he forgot.
• Run or Die: Downplayed in the first encounter with Lu Bu in Dohna Dohna. The party strongly suggests steering clear of him, but a prepared player can easily beat him. Nothing happens if you do, however.
• Satanic Archetype: Kayblis, the Big Bad of the Rance series, seems to combine traits from a number of evil mythological figures. He is one of the first beings to exist on the Continent, confined to one realm, and eventually leads an all-out war against the opposite realm with the goal of killing a specific person, invoking Surt. He is a Mix and Match Critter who seeks to gain ultimate power, akin to Anzu, and, of course, he began life no different from the Gods' other creations, but his pride and anger led him to go against the will of his own superior, much like Satan himself. The canon timeline makes it even more apparent, by changing the antlers he had in Kichikuou Rance into outright horns.
• Schmuck Bait: There are certain choices in the company's games that lead to an instant Nonstandard Game Over, for example following Brainwashed and Crazy Athena's instructions to put the sunflowers on your head in Rance 5D or going into the room Rodney tells you to fight him in instead of directly pursuing him in Rance VI. To be fair, the games DO tell you that going through with those choices is a bad idea.
• Screw Destiny: Several characters do this within all universes. The most notable example is Copandon Dott who, upon receiving a "Bad Luck" Divination, proceeds to modify on her own it as "Great Luck" and makes it her life's goal to marry someone who has a legit great luck status -which unfortunately for her ends up being Rance. Through her efforts to win Rance over, she ends up becoming the richest person in Rance's world and the de facto leader of the Free-Cities alliance. And then Rance X happens.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: You can finish Sengoku Rance and Rance VI before achieving the Golden Ending. Doing so will just usually display A Winner Is You text message that also implies that the game didn't end so well for the other characters involved. But, hey, Rance is alive and kicking so all's good, right?
• Secret Character: Takega Satsu from the Daiakuji game can join your team in Rance VI, if you put her CGs in the game's folder. In Sengoku Rance Shizuka can join your commander's roster if Maria is in your group and you clicked on the "enable secret characters" option during New Game Plus.
• Self-Censored Release: Their console and handheld ports, naturally.
• Serial Escalation: The first Rance game was all about Rance doing a job for the guild to find a missing girl. By Rance X, he's uniting the entire world in fighting against the invading fiends led by Kaybliss. Then this is taken up to eleven in Rance X: Part 2 where Rance's kids are fighting against him to stop him. And finally, the series ends with Rance taking on the source of the Archfiend's life, permanently destroying the fiend system forever.
• Sexual Karma:
  • If you are the hero and you act heroically, expect sex to be hot and steamy. If you act like a villain, the scenes you get will call you out on how much of a bastard you are. Furthermore, whenever a sex-scene involves a villain, it will inevitably involve a lot of pain and humiliation.
  • Subverted in the Rance series. Most of Rance's scenes are Played for Laughs in an over the top fashion, and it's made abundantly clear they are only pleasurable for ''him'' and not the woman involved. However, whenever he gets to appreciate the woman he's with (for example Isoroku Yamamoto in the "Yamamoto Route" or Uesagi Kenshin in the "Kenshin Route" of Sengoku Rance) and gives in to his more noble/heroic tendencies, the sex tends to be hot, passionate and good for everyone involved.
• Slasher Smile: Rance's only facial expression besides looking pissed off. He switches between which one is the default depending on how annoying the situation he's in is in each game.
• Sliding Scale of Gender Inequality: Surprisingly quite well balanced. While men generally make up the majority of the armies, there are several women in positions of power all across the continent and several of the strongest characters in the setting are women. At the same time, male characters have become more and more prominent as time has gone on and have just as much plot significance as the females do.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: The world of the Rance series is an incredibly cynical place in a constant state of war, with the few occasions peace had been achieved resulting in a complete apocalypse due to it boring the Jerkass Gods. Despite this, Rance's actions have legitimately shifted things for the better, suggesting that the world can improve, it just takes a complete sociopath with an insatiable libido to do so. In a way the golden ending of Kichikuou Rance and Rance X, the final games of their respective timelines, can be seen as part of the opposing side of the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism (despite both games ending with Rance continuing to travel with Sill).
  • The ending of Kichikuou Rance represents the cynical side of the spectrum. The Top God Rudrathaum still enjoys the suffering of humans in order to entertain himself and launched an attack to slaughter them all after they attained peace. The best Rance could do in the end was put the god to sleep for around three centuries, but the world is still in chaos thanks to the attack and isn't united. This means that Rudrathaum still might get what he wants after sleeping for many centuries.
  • The ending of Rance X represents the idealistic side of the spectrum. The Top God Rudrathaum reincarnates into Rance and Crook's child El Mofus in order to experience how life on the continent felt. After an adventure Rudrathaum learns how to appreciate his creations and most importantly empathy. This causes Rudrathaum to dismantle the system his sons have created in order to entertain him. While the world is still divided in some ways. There are no more Archfiends or Heroes that need to create suffering. This means that humanity may one day truly attain peace and not get attacked by an Angel Army like in Kichikuou Rance.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Rance at the start of the series. Though, by the end of Rance X, the small name is no more.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: My Glorious Days, Rance's main theme, is heroically grandiose, epic and bombastic. It's also the music that plays during a lot of his rape scenes.
• Spanner in the Works: Rance repeatedly foils the plans of the bad guys by routinely doing things so unexpected that they get caught blindsided either on purpose or by complete accident. His biggest one is on Rance X Part 2 where he gives up his Archfiend powers to the 1st class goddess Quelplan, who became a Kaiju due to events happening in the game, only for the Blood Memories to unsuccessfully possess her since a goddess cannot become an Archfiend, let alone a 1st class goddess herself. This allows Rance and his children to permanently get rid of the Archfiend system for good.
• Spared by the Adaptation: A completely unexpected one from Rance 03 the Fiend Ithere was spared by Rance when asked by Shizuka to show him mercy. He was dying from his wounds anyway, but his apostles gave their lives to heal him just enough for him to survive and stay hidden in Leazas Castle.
• Spin-Off: The 1994 "Rance, The Desert Guardian" OVA only features Rance and Sill and doesn't attempt to adapt any of the games' stories. That being said, it manages to capture Rance's character perfectly.
• Spiritual Successor: The Evenicle series is one towards the Rance series even though the first Evenicle game came before the release of the final Rance game. The Evenicle series shares much background and beings the Rance series has, but still differs in way to be unique on its own.
• Stalker with a Crush: Queen Lia of Leazas' obsession with Rance reaches a point where she monitors his every action intently. She herself doesn't do the stalking, rather she forces a ninja to scout him out at all times while she watches from a crystal ball.
• Stating the Simple Solution: What's the way to improve such Crapsack World ruled by a manchild whale god who only finds entertainment by watching the suffering of mortals? Convincing it to experience one life as a mortal, being able to mature, to grow a conscience, to gain loved ones and appreciate the world for what it was. Even though it was seems easy to come up with this, it took mortals and gods alike thousands of years for Crook to reach such a simple plan.
• Stylistic Suck: Gunagan, a recurring Optional Boss throughout the Rance series, will always reward you with a simplistic and usually nonsensical CG upon defeating him.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: It turns out the good idealist king, Ragnarokarc Super Gandhi, who acts like a vigilante is a terrible ruler, and his antics end up destroying his kingdom in Rance VI and outright getting himself killed in Rance X.
• Supporting Harem: The Rance series features one. Despite his obsession with making every attractive woman in existence his, it's pretty clear that Rance cares more about Sill than he does anybody else. This is even recognized in universe, where characters who are in love with Rance like Maria and Lia recognize that they don't have a chance against Sill.
• Supporting Protagonist: While El is the protagonist for most of Rance X: Part 2, once Rance comes back to his senses, El becomes this trope while the spotlight goes back to Rance. It does go back to El for the epilogue where El says goodby to his/her siblings and friends.
• Technology Marches On: Every Rance game features at least one joke enemy or character that is a reference to a specific technology that was present during the time of that release. The problem is that that those games got officially translated (or fan-translated) several years after they got originally released, so a lot of players are lost on what that enemy or character is referencing. Okay, a lot of people might still be familiar with 3G mobile networks, but how many are old enough to remember FM Towns home-computers or that the Windows Millenium OS had a tendency to freeze and break itself down?
• Teleportation with Drawbacks: The way teleportation works in their games is very interesting. It mostly involves going through a separate dimension wherein you can't age or die and coming out the other side. To someone not in the know on the outside it looks like instant teleportation. The caveat is that even though you can't exactly die in the teleport dimension, you can get trapped in it for an indeterminate amount of time, losing yourself and turning into mindless data if not careful. Furthermore, the time you spend in the teleport dimension catches up to you all at once when you exit the teleport dimension meaning you can be significantly older and even die once you exit. This is what happens to both Rance and Miracle Tor during Miracle's route in Rance IX. Consequently, only ageless beings can use teleportation magic safely.
• Took a Level in Badass: Satella was considered to be one of the weakest amongst the Fiends, but still more powerful than humans. By the time of Rance X: Part 2 she became strong enough to be The Dragon to Archfiend Rance and even managed to break Nikkou, the weapon she was supposed to be weak against.
• Tsundere: Considering the number of games they've made, there are plenty. Interestingly, the two stand out examples from the Rance series, Shizuka and Kanami, lean so heavily to the tsun-tsun side that they more or less genuinely hate Rance, with the few genuine moments of kindness they show towards him leaning more towards "He's not a total asshole" than anything else. The straightest tsundere in the Rance series would be Satella, who insists that Rance is her rival despite clearly having feelings for him. Keep in mind that Satella is a Fiend who is most likely hundreds of years old and one of the most powerful characters in the setting.
  • Now averted with Kanami as of Rance IX. Turns out all it took was for Rance to actually treat her like her a girl and not just as a gopher/sex toy.
  • Rance himself plays this quite straight in relation to Sill. He's constantly picking on her, but every game shows that he values her more than he does anything else in the world.
• Übermensch: Both Rance and Zanma Rouga are exceptionally talented young men who rise above their fellow men to tear apart the oppressive system. Rouga is a traditional example while Rance seems more interested in enjoying himself through any means possible, with everything else simply being a side effect.
• The Unchosen One: Rance isn't his universe's designated chosen one, but it is actually because of this that he is able to accomplish everything he does. He's a glitch in the system, and his actions tend to drastically change the world as a result.
• Token White: The unnamed Caucasian British man who works at AliceSoft and is only known outside of the company by his nickname Union Jack.
• True Companions: If there is a resistance or rebel group in a Rance game, expect them to stick together and do their thing long after Rance leaves the scene.
• Twin Threesome Fantasy: Should Rance manage to recruit both La Hawzel and La Seizel in Rance X, he can H both of them at the same time, though they seem to be more interested in each other than him...
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: It's generally a good idea to save your game in many different files and at different times, as it's possible to screw yourself over royally by mistake. In Rance 02 for example, if you do anything other than going directly to the wizard's house to find the mayor's daughter when the designated NPC tells you she's been sighted there, then you will not find her there, which means you won't be able to progress the game, which means you'll have no choice but to start over from a previous save (if you are lucky enough to have one). In Isoroku's Route of Sengoku Rance, you can find yourself in a Press X to Die situation if you don't get the truth out of Isoroku fast enough, which can be bad if you've been relying on the game's Autosave too much. And god help you if you do a bad move in Rance 5D, where the game doesn't even allow you to save manually.
• Unmanly Secret: One of Rance's few hobbies that doesn't involve sex is reading Shoujo Manga, another is collecting rare seashells.
• Unwinnable by Design:
  • Ever so slightly downplayed with Archfiend Kayblis in Kichikuou Rance. To start with, he boasts 60,000 HP, nearly 100 times that of Babolat, the second bulkiest boss, who isn't even meant to be beaten by fighting. Any Fiend you send to fight him will defect to his side, leaving Rance and Kentaro as the only units that can hurt him whatsoever. Lastly, he attacks four cities per week, forcing you to deploy your other units anyway just to defend your territory. For all intents and purposes, allowing this boss to come into play is a very drawn-out Non-Standard Game Over. But if you're willing to spend years of in-game time and Save Scum like your life depends on it, you can eventually defeat him. There is no special event or ending for doing so, however, and all fortune destinies are omitted from the completion report afterward.
  • Zig-zagged with Little Princess in Sengoku Rance's Sandbox Mode, as she is completely invulnerable, even against Rance, and her Fixed Damage Attack wipes out 9,000 troops a pop. If she comes into play, the game actually tells you that it has just become unwinnable. Unlike in Kichikuou, however, complete annihilation is not necessary to win a battle, meaning it's actually possible to take all of her territory in spite of her attributes. Doing so leads to a Non-Standard Game Over, however, denying you the Macrogame benefits that come with completing a successful playthrough.
• The 'Verse: AliceSoft has several major universes. These include...
  • The Rance Universe, which is also the setting for the Toushin Toushi series and the "Mikki-Chan" series.
  • However it is also split in two timelines with Rance I to Kichikuou Rance being the old timeline and the games from Rance 5D onwards being the new timeline with Rance 01 to 03 being Updated Re Releases to better accommodate the new timeline.
  • The Dai Universe.
  • The Beats Universe, which include Beat Angel Escalayer and Beat Blades Haruka.
• Videogame Caring Potential:
  • In many of the Rance games, there is at least one character that is Too Good for This Sinful Earth, that Rance can take under his wing. Examples include Rizna in 5D, Caloria in VI, and Kenshin in Sengoku Rance.
  • In Dohna Dohna, your talent will make significantly less money if their mentality falls low enough and they become "broken". As hustling takes a significant toll on mentality in most cases, you are naturally inclined to give your talent mentality-boosting items whenever you can in order to keep them happy.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: All of the open-ended Rance games from Kichikuou Rance to Rance X have at least one instance where you can utterly screw (often in more ways than one) a character with Videogame Caring Potential. Doing so will inevitably lead to a scene where you witness how much your actions have hurt that character, and how much of a jerk you are for doing so. For example, choosing to betray Kenshin in Sengoku Rance by allying with Kensei, will lead to a scene where she laments on how much of an idiot she was (emphasis on was) for falling in love with Rance and for trusting him to do the right thing
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment:
  • Again quite a few present in the open-ended Rance games. Those can range from permanently losing access to some of the best units in the games to a Nonstandard Game Over.
  • There are a lot of opportunities in Toushin Toshi II to perform various atrocities. Toward the end of the game, the main character is confronted with a demon lord who lists the ones the character committed, and offers him one last chance to atone - unless the player chose to commit all of them, in which case he is unceremoniously condemned to Hell. Considering that the list includes slave trading, rape, and throwing an unarmed woman to her death for no reason, it's hard to say you don't deserve it if you play that way.
• Video Game Long-Runners: Would you believe the Rance series is nearly 30 years old?^note  More than 30 years if you count the "Mikki-chan" games whose stories are part of the series' continuity. And unlike the Final Fantasy franchise, it tells one continuous story with a definitive beginning and a Grand Finale end.
• Villainous Incest: Really prevalent in the Rance series. If a character is evil or non-sympathetic, expect him (and yes, it's always a "him") to have at least one scene with his daughter, provided they have one.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Being born with a Level 3 skill in the Rance universe means you are practically God Level at it (for example, someone with a "Sword 3" skill, can cut through freaking dimensions). It also means, more often than not, that you will also be too crazy (Am Yusael), too messed up in the head (Miracle), or just too plain stupid(Annis) to do anything positive with it on your own.
• Wham Episode: Absolutely no one expected that Rance X would even have a Part 2 and star Rance's kids.
• What If?: Kichikuou Rance was created under the concept on "What if Rance became a king?". However it ends up widely considered to be the last game for the old timeline with the games of Rance 5D onwards being considered a Continuity Reboot.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: Daibanchou features one detailing what happens to all party members that were Character Cleared, a few that weren't and a handful of secondary characters. Depending on how well the player did, this can last for nearly twenty minutes.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Mikki Kurusu aka the archfiend "Little Princess" is a textbook example of the trope. She was a normal high school girl and deeply loved her boyfriend Kentarou, who also loved her back and the two were looking forward to spend the rest of their lives together. Then a dimension-hopping Demon King shows up, kidnaps her and forces her to drink his blood in order for her to take up the mantle as the next archfiend, right before her boyfriend shows up to save her. Since then, she walks "The Continent" with her boyfriend in order to find a cure for her condition, all the while having to eat the extremelly bitter Harami lemons in order to keep the bloodlust at bay and keep herself sane. She can't even return back to her own dimension, since leaving "The Continent" would mean she would lose access to the Harami lemons which consequently means her home world would be nuked by her Sealed Evil in a Can or worse. And that's just her original introductory "Mikki-Chan" games! Things get From Bad to Worse for her during the Rance series.
• World's Strongest Man: The previous holder of this title was Thoma Lipton of the Helman Third Army before he was killed in battle by Rance. Currently, Rick Addison is recognized as this though Rance has potential to become far stronger. Rance officially took the title after becoming the Archfiend, not only did his sword fighting skills improve, but he also gained Magical Abilities. He was so powerful that not only was he stronger than other Archfiends, but 11 of his children were needed to level grind to level 250 and above and got help from many allies just to fight against him. This still wasn't enough to defeat him and all they could do was restore his sanity with Reset's slap.
• Wrench Wench: Maria Custard, one of the series' poster girls is a witch who is far more proficient with machinery than she is with magic.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Most antagonists in the Rance series are Genre Savvy, which allows them to flourish in a RPG Mechanics 'Verse. This however doesn't serve them very well when they cross paths with Combat Pragmatist Heroic Comedic Sociopath Rance, and the genre shifts into Deconstructive Parody.
• Yandere: Queen Lia of Leazas refuses to allow Rance to see any girl besides her, and has attempted to murder Sill on multiple occasions because of this. Despite this, Rance sleeps with so many women that it's impossible for her to keep up.
• Zero-Approval Gambit: Rance willingly takes up the mantle of the Archfiend after Kayblis is defeated, becoming the essential new token Evil Overlord of the continent, in order to ensure peace between the Demon realm and Humanity for the future. Only problem is, while he did this with a good purpose to ensure mankind's survival, he is slowly losing himself to the Archfiend blood in his body, and as such is slowly turning into a flat-out villain and has begun the cycle of destruction anew. The entire plot of Part 2 revolves around his children teaming up to find a way to defeat him or find a way to bring him back to his senses.

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