YMMV / AliceSoft

• Anti-Climax Boss: Kamui in Daibanchou. It's guranteed to be at least a 3 on 1 fight in your favor, but you can have up to 6 party members during it. Combined with the fact that, though his stats are the highest of any enemy in the game, he's really no different from every other enemy you've fought up to this point, not even possessing a That One Attack like all of the other boss characters did. Generally one or two attacks from Rouga or Gou are all you need to defeat him.
• Awesome Music: Tons, though the first thing that comes to mind is Rance's main theme, "My Glorious Days."
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • With a character like Rance, it's inevitable. Plenty consider him to be a breath of fresh air from the generally uninspired Visual Novel protagonists, while just as many consider him to be an immature series of rape jokes and nothing else. Whether he's a Rounded Character who shows large amounts of depth and Character Development across the series or a Flat Character is also a recurring argument. The fact that a woman created him the way he is also often comes into play when discussing his habits and why he is like that.
  • Sill Plain is a very divisive character, with many seeing her as a fantastic Foil to the incorrigible Rance while just as many deride her as a bland and out of place Love Interest in a series that doesn't need one. This is also reflected in the character polls where, despite being the de facto main heroine of the entire series, Sill doesn't ever place very high.
  • Outside of the Rance series, both Rouga and Tougou suffer from this. Plenty are happy to play as a hero who can actually be sympathized with and admired on a regular basis while others are annoyed by their apparent Bishōnen designs and bland "hero-type" personalities and generally find their antics boring in comparison to Rance.
• Broken Base:
  • Beat Blades Haruka being the first AliceSoft game to receive a commercial release internationally caused this. While the fanbase was for the most part ecstatic about the company finally opening itself up to foreign waters, others were disappointed that the launch game wasn't a Rance title. Fortunately, this quickly became moot, as the Rance games, starting with 5D and IV, quickly followed suit, along with some of their other games such as Evenicle.
  • The official localizations of the Rance series use much different terminology from the fan translations, which has become a point of contention among more long-standing fans of the series. Probably the most polarizing is the term "Fiend", which was originally translated as either "Dark Lord" or "Demon", depending on the game, though all three terms have their defenders and detractors. "Fiend" is consistent with "Archfiend" (the being known as the "Demon King" in fan translations) while still being distinct from it, but implies mindlessness and monstrosity, which not nearly all of them are. "Dark Lord" sounds the most threatening of the three terms, but sounds interchangeable with "Demon King". And "Demon" is the most literal translation of 魔人 (majin) and is consistent with "Demon King", or 魔王 (maou), but can be easily confused with Devils, who are different beings entirely, which is likely also the reason why "Demon King" itself was translated as "Archfiend" instead.
• Complete Monster:
  • Mamatoto ~A Record of War~: Kakaro Alphorioa is the King of Mamatoto, who stole the son of his greatest rival to raise as his own. When the boy, Prince Nanas, proved a capable strategist, Kakaro had him wage a war against other nations, and promptly murdered his more noble rivals. A Serial Rapist on the side, Kakaro abuses countless women and girls, even his own daughter, while later unsealing a demon to take possession of him and destroy the world rather than let Nanas save it.
  • Rance series:
    • Sengoku Rance: Xavier is a Fiend sealed away long ago. Garnering a hatred of the Nipponese, Xavier possesses Oda Nobunaga to slaughter his way across Nippon and massacre monks to prevent any more sealings. Abusing, torturing and raping his own daughter, the goodhearted Kurohime, Xavier attempts to massacre as many Nipponese people as possible before ultimately simply attempting to wipe the country out.
    • Rance IX: Prime Minister Stessel Romanov of Helman seduces the empress to have her bear his child and gets her addicted to an aphrodisiac to make her dependent on him, before running the country into the ground, intending on handing it to fiends for power. Manipulating his daughter and ruining the rightful heir, Stessel lets millions die in a plague outbreak before trying to seize total control and awaken the Wargod MM, a super weapon with which he will use to dominate all he can. Upon nearly losing, Stessel simply attempts to exterminate everything with it. Sheila's "bad ending" also has him winning the war, getting his own daughter addicted to drugs (because he doesn't want to allow her to have even a sliver of free-will) and turning her into his blindly-obedient Sex Slave. Sheila gets so utterly broken by Stessel's abuse that she eventually begs her own servant to kill her in a Suicide Pact.
• Designated Hero:
  • Rance, naturally. He's a serial rapist, cruel brute, and narcissist whose only motivation is to bang pretty girls.
  • The Goddess Eve in Evenicle. Her laws are such that rape victims are automatically married to their rapists, and even worse, gang-rape victims are given the same punishment as the monsters who assaulted them because it technically counts as infidelity. Her strict laws ultimately made humanity so vulnerable to temptation that when the Snake Crest kidnapped Croix and disabled Eve's commandments for a few days, civilization fell apart in an orgy of degeneracy that would make Slaanesh proud. The official explanation is that God Is Inept; Eve just didn't understand human urges towards violence and probably didn't even know rape was a thing.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Rance is often interpreted as having autism or ADHD due to his emotional immaturity, his Brilliant, but Lazy demeanor, and his tendency to forget exactly why he's on his current adventure, with seashell collecting and sex being seen as special interests of his.
• Disappointing Last Level: Hell in Daibanchou is a short series of battles before an easy boss fight. After the Nintendo Hard game you just played through, this comes off as a little underwhelming.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Uesugi Kenshin actually beat out Saber on the first Visual Novel Character Poll she appeared on.
  • On the male side of things, Rick went from a character who was simply meant to serve as the Crutch Character and Always Someone Better to Rance to one of the most iconic characters in the series and Rance's best male friend by the later games. Being a Char Clone helps.
  • Shizuka is probably the earliest example, to the point where she was put into a patch for Sengoku Rance due to the uproar caused by her absence from the game, despite most of the regular cast being sidelined apart from a few cameo characters.
  • Aburako/Oily Girl Dousan from Sengoku Rance is a minor recruitable character that can be recruited rather early. Like most generic units, she doesn't have any unique interactions, but is popular for her cute appearance, silly battle quotes about oil and having the useful Action Transfer/Convert Action ability for troop battles, which lets her spend an action to grant an ally an additional action even if they have already used all of theirs, allowing certain units to use powerful abilities that cost all remaining actions multiple times per battle.^note Most monks can use Action Transfer in solo battles, but not troop battles where Dousan can. Also, the New Game Plus bonus character Makotsudono Takehiko has Action Transfer 2, but it's considered inferior as it costs 2 of his actions to replenish 2 actions of an ally, as they would usually waste the extra action. In 2005, Alicesoft even made an April Fools' Day (fake) announcement for a spin-off about her.
  • Camilla is also well loved by the fanbase, which is impressive considering she's only appeared in one game so far.
  • Despite the fact that he only appears in Rance X: Part 2, Nagata-kun actually managed to get second place in the male popularity poll, just behind Rance.
  • From the Dai games Satsu ended up becoming the most popular heroine from Daiakuji despite being only a secret route and quickly came to dominate all advertisements for the game, Gou from Daibanchou proved to be incredibly popular to the point of getting a spot in Widenyo's roster over Rouga and Retia Adolf from Daiteikoku became an instant hit from the moment her design was revealed.
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception: While many eroge are already dismissed by those outside the visual novel scene as simple "porn games" with no plot outside of "you have to bang the girl", the Rance series gets hit especially hard by this notion, with many non-fans assuming any story it might have is simply an Excuse Plot for the hero to go around raping women, which paints a bad picture of the fandom, including those who enjoy the series for non-sexual reasons.
• Franchise Killer: Daiteikoku, the ambitious third installment of the Dai series, received lukewarm reception and put the future of the series into question. It is almost unanimously agreed to be inferior to its predecessors.
• Game-Breaker: Rick in Kichikuou Rance, due to having an excellent special attack from the moment you get him and being available almost immediately. He was also a borderline example in Rance IV, but was at least mitigated by a number of mid-game puzzles and events forcing you to bench him in order to advance. While these helped lead him to his Ensemble Dark Horse status, it also led to complaints about him making these games too easy, causing his following playable appearances in Rance VI and Rance Quest to make him a late game Eleventh Hour Super Power.
  • He's back to being one in IX where he's once again available from early on and is now a Lightning Bruiser with a fantastic critical hit rate.
  • He's one again in Mamatoto, where he's continues to be an insanely powerful Lightning Bruiser who is available as early as the first chapter. His only weakness, his poor commanding ability, is offset by his having the highest attack growth in the game as well as a long-reaching special attack that can take out ten enemies in a single shot. While there are party members who match Rick in usefulness, almost all of them join toward the end of the game, meaning Rick is the only one capable of being fully abused.
  • Feliss whenever she's playable by virtue of being completely immune to all enemy attacks. This reached a point where, after Rance 5D, she stopped being playable to avoid easy and boring victories.
  • In Sengoku Rance, Tacticians tend to be this especially with the Battle Rating Down 2 skill (spend 1 action to push the battle rating by a flat amount), although they're rather weak early on with low stats or weak skills. This allows you to win extremely difficult fights on harder difficulties by stacking the Initial Battle Rating passive on other units, stalling out enemies via tanking or action removal, while using Battle Rating Down to force your battle rating over the halfway mark for a rather painless victory. Otherwise, enemy troop counts on higher difficulties will vastly outnumber yours such that you gain barely any or even lose battle rating by attacking them.
    • On a lesser extent, units with One-Hit Kill abilities like Ninjas' Assassinate 2^note the New Game Plus-only Ninja Gekkou has the strongest variant, Assassinate+, which guarantees a kill on any unit that has expended all actions are also priority units, having a chance to instantly remove obnoxiously large Foot Soldier/Ashigaru walls or priority targets. But, with the random nature of such skills, players will expect a lot of Save Scumming as the success rate scales to the difference in unit sizes between the attacker and target, and harder difficulties massively inflate enemy troop count. Apart from Ninjas, there's Musketeers like Yuzuhara Yuzumi or generics with the rare Commander Snipe skill, and Yamamoto Isoroku after learning the Whirlwind shot ability.
    • Cavalry are also considered the best offensive melee class, as they can strike vulnerable backliners unlike Samurai, Monks or Musketeers, while possibly having strong skills such as Battle Rating Up (less efficient version of Battle Rating Down), or Onrush (2 action attack that removes an action from the target). The unique Cavalry characters, Yamagata Masakage and Baba Shouen are also very strong units, but their availability is limited if you don't take their house bonus.
  • Individually in Sengoku Rance, Urza, Kenshin and Natori are often priority units in most playthroughs, who you can also get early on but remain relevant throughout the game, especially with their high level caps that make them strong in dungeons/bossfights.
    • Urza can be gotten fairly early through the initial satisfaction bonuses that you'll easily get conquering the weak territories surrounding you at the start of the game. As a member of the aforementioned Tactician class, she also boasts high starting stats and her Accurate Shots ability she can unlock trivializes many battles, doing Scratch Damage to all enemies, interrupting preparations while also removing one of their actions at the cost of all her remaining actions. Couple that with a Monk who has the Convert Action skill and Urza will ensure the enemy never gets a chance to act.
    • Kenshin can be gotten rather early if you push through the northeast, and despite being a dangerous adversary, players can instantly win any battle against her by deploying her crush Rance against her, causing her to retreat out of lovesickness. What makes her dangerous is not just her high combat ability, but her unique passive ability removes an action from all enemies at the start of battle, making her as dangerous an ally as she was an enemy. Coupled with Urza, it's possible to nullify all the enemy's actions at the start of battle.
    • Natori, leader of the Miko Institute, can also be gotten fairly close to Kenshin, possessing just a single territory but rather strong forces. She possess the Miko Storm 2 ability, which is a significant upgrade from Fuuka's Miko Storm 1, and is the only Miko unit that possesses this ability. After a very short preparation time, compared to an Onmyouji/Diviner's Shikigami attack, Natori removes 30% of every enemy's troop count, inflicting a massive amount of damage against the enemy at the cost of all her actions. ^note The monk Seigan has a similar ability, but usually gets recruited very late into the game, and his preparation time is longer than Natori's. Kobayakawa Chinu also has the Poison ability which removes 50% of every enemy's current troop count, but she dies early in majority of routes.
    • Omachi, the strongest of Dokuganryuu Masamune's wives, is widely considered the strongest Onmyouji/Diviner. Instead of default Shikigami attack, Omachi can instantly strike all enemies with Lightning, or use the Large Lightning ability that functions like a faster and stronger Shikigami attack, but requiring 2 Shuriken attacks to interrupt. The only issue is that she's only available after annihilating her unit (no easy task, even by savescumming assassinations), defeating the One-Eyed House, recruiting Masamune and character clearing him, if you didn't take the One-Eyed House New Game Plus bonus.
    • While most Foot Soldiers/Ashigaru are Boring, but Practical defenders, Mouri Teru is usually considered the best if not one of the best, being available mid-game when fighting the Mouri house. She starts with the Counterattack 2 ability, which can inflict painful losses on any unit attacking her in melee. If you give her the item that increases counterattack damage, watch as enemies quickly push the battle rating in your favor just by attacking her. ^note Shimazu Yoshihisa has slightly better starting stats, but is only available in very few routes and much later than Teru.
    • Kikkawa Kiku equipped with the Guts Armor can solo defensive battles with her Ninja Art: Leaves Hiding, which makes her Nigh-Invulnerable such that the enemy is unlikely to do enough damage to push your battle rating below the halfway mark.
  • Kavahuan in Mamatoto has the highest natural magic stat in the game, along with a special ability that hits every enemy on screen, which make him lethal in combination. Hunty Kalar plays the very same role in Rance IX, making both incredibly powerful units. This is balanced by the late availability of both characters in their respective games, but still doesn't stop them from steamrolling through the endgame content.
  • Kunagi and Kuga in Daibanchou are both insanely broken units. Kunagi, while having low health and stamina, has a special ability that guarantees that she'll dodge the attacks of all but the strongest enemies, and will generally avoid them as well, making her functionally invincible. Kuga, on the other hand, is essentially a slightly weaker version of Rouga with a mid-range attack instead of a short one and many more type advantages, which combined with his cheap special move that deals twice as much his regular damage and large stamina pool make him capable of one-shotting practically every enemy in the game. The kicker? While Rouga has better growth rates than either, both of them can be Character Cleared while he can't, meaning they'll end up with higher stats than him on every playthrough following their clearing.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Sengoku Rance is widely regarded as the best Alicesoft game period in the United States, while it is merely considered a particularly good installment in the Rance series in Japan, where Kichikuou Rance still holds the title for best in the series.
  • Rance X is rated even higher than Sengoku Rance, being tied with CLANNAD and placed even above classics like Fate/stay night and Ever17.
• Growing the Beard: A given considering how long they've been around, but even their detractors have to admit that their stories have become more complex and their characters more rounded as time has gone on. For the Rance series in particular, it's generally agreed that it started to hit its stride around the third or fourth installment, with III establishing lore that would serve as a foundation for the rest of the series, and IV being a huge leap in the overall quality of the art, writing, and even gameplay and audio.
• Heartwarming Moments: Plenty, surprisingly enough. One of the most iconic is Rance tenderly embracing Sill at the end of Kichikuou Rance.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Plenty play the games not for the porn, but rather the story and gameplay, to the point where MangaGamer released a "streamer patch" for Sengoku Rance which removes the CGs from sex scenes and covers up any remaining nudity (nude character portraits, etc.). There are even plenty of mods that skips the porn in the visual novels. There are also growing group of people who want Alice-Soft to do away with porn altogether and provide a purely-story-driven visual novels.
• LGBT Fanbase: Although the games are aimed at straight male players, they do attract no shortage of Achilleans, due to the large amount of well-built male characters among the cast. Characters such as Patton, Katsuie, and Gandhi, who are portrayed as unattractive in-universe, have plenty of male fans who find them attractive regardless. On the opposite end of the gender spectrum is Mineva, the musclebound female commander of the Helman 3rd Army who swears like a sailor and is covered in scars. She's so masculine that popularity polls count her as a male character, but sapphics love her, especially after her redesign which gave her a decidedly more feminine face.
• Marth Debuted in "Smash Bros.": Widenyo was the English-speaking debut of several franchises, but special mentions go to Tsubasa and Ragou, who were cameo characters in Daiakuji from different games but appear in Widenyo in their Daiakuji incarnations, leading most English speakers to assume Daiakuji is the debut game of both, when in reality it is true for neither.
• Memetic Loser: Bird, who almost nobody likes. This also applies to Kayblis, though he's intended to come off as pathetic in-universe as well. Kanami as well, until she takes several levels of badass with Suzume and Freya's mentorship.
• Memetic Mutation: Whenever Sill is being discussed by the fanbase, there is a tendency to mimic Rance and act Tsundere towards her.
  • Anyone who makes derisive comments about Rance is immediately assumed to be Bird in disguise trying to slander him.
• Moral Event Horizon: You find out something is not quite right with Oda Nobunaga. However, once the Fiend Xavier takes over Nobunaga, he orders Kouhime to be raped or killed (depending on the route), while Nobunaga watches helplessly in his own body. At that point, you want to kill the bastard.
  • The Demon King ending of Kichikuou Rance has Rance breeding humans like cattle, something far worse than anything else he's ever done.
• More Popular Spin-Off: Two major examples. The Rance series is technically a spinoff of Little Princess, but became Alicesoft's most popular series. Alicesoft itself is technically a branch company of Champion Soft, an old Interactive Fiction developer that was going defunct.
• Narm Charm: Sex scenes are usually set to outrageously over the top rock music and tend to have hilarious dialogue that makes them hard to take seriously. Unless they're set to appropriate music (Yamamoto Isoroku's 2nd sex scene with Rance) or evil music (Fiend Nobunaga/Xavier raping Kurohime, the rape orgy of Uesugi Kenshin and Naoe Ai).
• Nightmare Fuel: The first Evenicle, though relatively lighthearted, has some of these moments, who are also mixed with lots of Squick.
  • Early in the game, Colpis gets gangraped by a group of Outlaws. Due to the divine laws set by Eve, this makes Colpis herself an Outlaw, and marks her with a black ring. In desperation, she attempts to cut off her finger to keep the black ring away from her. When stopped and told that the ring will just reappear, she begs Aster's party to cut off all her fingers and toes. It still won't help.
    • The fact that Eve's commandments are flawed enough that people can be turned into Outlaws against their will, through no fault of their own.
  • The aftermath of being turned into an Outlaw. Due to Eve's laws, they're no longer considered human and they become outcasts.
  • Later, the party sees a recording of experiments in distilling potent drugs made from getting monsters to indulge in their most horrible and feral instincts, namely, by starving one of both food and sex into a ravenous maniac, then locking it in a cell with an innocent girl, begging for someone, anyone to save her, as it first rapes, then cannibalizes her.
  • Eventually, the Snake Crest disable Eve's commandments, which shatters every single Outlaw ring and encourage humanity to indulge in its darkest, most beastial desires in a world with no consequences. Civilization totally falls apart in places, where all-too-literal orgies of rape and murder take place in the streets.
• Once Original, Now Common: The original Rance games were considered amazing at the time for being H-games that featured actually sophisticated gameplay rather than just sex scenes. By today's standards, not only are the graphics dated, but the gameplay is hugely underwhelming and boring, to the point of making the first three games nearly unplayable by modern gamers. Up to the point the remake of the first game did a total overhaul on gameplay due to just how dated the original became.
• Periphery Demographic: Their tendency to have incredibly rich and well-developed back stories attracts a lot of people from outside the Eroge community.
  • The games actually attract a rather sizable female audience, to the point where Alicesoft gives them a small nod via special White Day wallpapers.
• Play-Along Meme: Those who have played Rance 4.1 and 4.2 will usually insist that Sill and Pink Mask are two different characters, following Rance's logic that "That can't be Sill! Sill's at home!"
• Player Punch: Expect to encounter them at least once per game, more if you are playing the open-ended ones. Examples include Kolpis' "involuntary damnation" in Evenicle, and failing to rescue Sill in Kichikuou Rance (which can hit especially hard if you've played Rance I through IV and Rance 4.1-4.2). Rance X dishes them out in droves, but the biggest one would be during the epilogue, where Bird, finally driven insane by his inferiority complex over Rance, shows up at the victory celebration lamenting his inferiority to Sill, before sporting a creepy look and mortally wounding her with his Arm Cannon in front of Rance, cackling madly as he escapes, having finally scored a victory against Rance. Meanwhile, Miki begins losing control of her Little Princess persona for good...
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: Quite a number of people couldn't care less about the game's narrative, chosing instead to focus on the gameplay.
• Ron the Death Eater: Sill gets some of this from fans who see her as getting in the way of more popular characters like Uesugi Kenshin pairing up with Rance.
• Sequel Displacement: Due to it being the first Rance game to receive a Fan Translation and giving the series' presence a foothold in the West, many outside of Japan believe Sengoku Rance was the first, if not the only installment in the series.
• Squick: Demon Nobunaga/Xavier raping Kurohime. There's Parental Incest and there's Villainous Incest, and then there's this. For added squick factor, Kurohime is a product of rape from the same man.
  • Lessened somewhat if you remember that Xavier is possessing Nobunaga's body at the time. It's still disgusting, but it's technically not incest.
  • Played Straight in Rance X: Part Two after Rance becomes the Archfiend, using his Heroic Willpower to keep his destructive instinct in check. However, his control over his destructive and sexual urges eventually weakened, leading him to stake out and continually rape Shizuka and Nagi instead of other innocent women over the story. However, the current bodies Shizuka and Nagi had actually came from an unborn child between Rance and Shizuka, with which the pregnant Shizuka transferred hers and Nagi's souls to in Rance IX to save the latter's life, reverting both to children and physically becoming a part of Rance's progeny.
• Strangled by the Red String: Several see the relationship between Rance and Sill to be this.
• Take That, Scrappy!: How else could you explain Maitrea from Mamatoto (really someone who looks identical to him) getting brutally murdered after being outed as a villain in Rance IX?
• Tear Jerker: Sill's Heroic Sacrifice and Rance's following Heroic BSoD are legitimately heartfelt moments, and mark one of the only occasions when the player gets to see Rance in a moment of complete vulnerability.
  • Kouhime's rape scene from the same game is also made to be as disgusting as possible to make the player feel even more heartbroken.
  • Rance's mourning of Sill if she dies in Kichikuou Rance, where he breaks down into tears, places his most prized possession, a beautiful rare pink shell onto her grave and says that it always reminded him of her hair. He then admits that he always tried to reign himself in when she was around and, now that she's gone, he's not going to let anything hold him back. This can potentially lead to him Jumping Off the Slippery Slope, murdering Miki to gain her power, and destroying everything as the Archfiend.
• That One Boss:
  • Oda Nobunaga in Kichikuou Rance. As he is a Fiend in this game, he can only be damaged by Rance, Kentarou or one of the recruitable Fiends. While this isn't that bad, the arena size of 400 means that the unit attacking him needs to have 400 troops or less in order to damage him while Nobunaga himself has over 2000 troops and is incredibly damaging. At the same time, Nobunaga sends out his two ninja assassins Gekkou and Shinobu to attack Leazas, causing them to occasionally permanently kill off one of your units between turns. One of these units can be Rance, which results in an automatic game over, making it an indirect Timed Mission.
  • Kakaro, the final boss of Mamatoto is incredibly difficult. Not only are his health points and defense much, much greater than anything you've ever fought before, but his body is separated into multiple parts besides the "main" one, all of which have different highly damaging attacks, one of which hits the entire party. While taking these additional parts out may seem to take first priority, they respawn the turn after they're destroyed, meaning the best solution is to simply ignore them and tough it out. Along with this, he spawns about five incredibly strong foot soldier units every turn and, since your best fighters will be concentrating their attacks on the main body, will only increase in number as the fight goes on. This, combined with the insane health and defense of the main body itself, once again makes the fight into a Timed Mission where the player has to figure out how to do enough damage to kill him before he wipes out your entire party with his infinitely spawning henchmen.
  • Gurigura in Evenicle is an absolute pain. First of all, the fight is part of an Escort Mission, and your escortee is as fragile as tissue paper. Second, Gurigura has a One-Hit Kill attack - and the first move of the battle is always her using that attack on your tank, which always succeeds. You have no way to revive defeated characters at this point. Her magic defense is through the roof, so your Squishy Wizard is utterly useless. The fight boils down to hitting her repeatedly with Aster and praying she doesn't pop her One-Hit Kill on the escortee (she can't hit the back row with her regular attack, but that move can).
• That One Sidequest: Really good characters tend to involve doing this before recruiting them.
  • For Sengoku Rance:
    • Trying to recruit Nogiku from the One-Eye house involves recruiting Akashi Kazemaru and going through a whole series of events to get Hibachi. The fact that Kazemaru has no relevance to Nogiku at all means this sidequest is also one Big-Lipped Alligator Moment. It doesn't help that trying to conquer the Akashi house means losing the first three battles against them. You cannot vassalize the Akashi house to complete this sidequest; you must conquer them.
    • Trying to recruit Hojou Sooun, especially after the first playthrough. It involves recruiting Nanjou Ran and a very long series of sidequests. The problem with recruiting Ran is that you cannot have both Sooun AND Ran in the same party. If you fulfill certain conditions before the 5th gourd has been broken, you get the Ran IF route. If you fill those same conditions after the 5th gourd has been broken, Ran dies, but you get Sooun on the next turn. The reason you can't have both is that Ran's body holds one of Demon Xavier's apostles. Once Xavier takes control of Oda Nobunaga, Gigai/Suzaku will come out of her, killing her. While this in itself may not be the worst thing, you have to wait several turns after attacking the Houjou house to even try to capture Ran. You won't be able to capture Ran until you have viewed all CG events related to Sooun's disappearance. And once you do recruit Ran, her affection level is at "Hate", which means you either have to spend several turns trying to get her affection to "Trust" or give her plenty of affection boost items. Oh, and if you fail to clear the Oil Dungeon before the Demon Army appears, Sooun will be lost for good due to the aforementioned fact about her body holding one of the Apostles. In all, a long and winding series of tasks for one of the best Divinner units... or an IF route.
    • Recruiting Seigan. You either have to either be fighting the Tenshi sect when the Honnouji event becomes available, or he joins you when the Demon Army appears. The former means you have to deal with uprisings WHILE fighting the Tenshi sect, while the latter is not a guaranteed means of recruitment.
  • For Kichikuou Rance:
    • Recruiting Aristoles Calm involves ignoring any and all combat with his unit while invading Helman, turning down the alliance with the Patton Faction (which is not only ridiculous because it gives you four very strong units, but also because Patton is one of the main characters of the entire series) and then agreeing to accept the aid of Convert Tax, Aristoles' self-admittedly shifty scumbag of a second in command who is no longer working with Aristoles at the time.
    • Recruiting Galtia in the same game requires doing the seemingly innocuous and time-consuming Martina Curry cook-off sidequest, then allowing Galtia to take four of your own territories from you.
    • Recruiting the Seizel sisters is also quite hard, though only because the dungeon you need to complete to find one of them is really hard to find.
    • Recruiting Cafe Artful. Chances are, you won't get her unless you use a guide, and even then it's incredibly infuriating. You first need to find the Lady Caravan in one of your conquered territories, while this doesn't seem so bad initially, the caravan will randomly appear in any of your territories, meaning you'll have to go through the tedious task of checking all of them until finally finding it. Then you need to do that two more times, while also having the item given to you by British (whose location on the map is a tiny pixel) and information from Ho Raga (Which costs a search point and requires you to sacrifice all of the soldiers from one of a set of Bishōnen commanders, all of whom are very good units). Even the walkthrough complains about how random and tedious the entire ordeal is.
• Tough Act to Follow: This is the problem Alicesoft had after the huge success of Kichikuou Rance, which not only saved them from bankruptcy, but is also the biggest game yet with loads of characters with their own endings, huge amount of lore and an open world map completely free for the player to choose. As a result the staff temporarily put the Rance series on hold and created Daiakuji instead, which managed to become a success in its own right.
• Unpopular Popular Character: Kayblis is seen as a pathetic being and very unpopular in his army yet is very popular with the fans because of those traits. He actually got third place in the poll for male characters of Rance X.
• Viewer Name Confusion: Aristoles' name is often misread as "Aristotles" among western players due to being spelled similarly to "Aristotle", though this isn't a problem in Japan, where the two names are written more distinctly.
• The Woobie: They seem to have a particular talent for writing these.
  • The most legendary example is Kouhime from Sengoku Rance, who experiences far more than a twelve year old ever should. She's so sympathetic that even Rance starts to act more paternally to her over time rather than his initial plans for Wife Husbandry.
  • For the biggest series-wide example, Rizna Lanfbitt was just an average citizen of Zeth and the childhood friend of its future king, until she was trapped in a Pocket Dimension for over 30 years, which caused her beautiful appearance to stop aging. A gentle but naive person, she was constantly taken advantage of and sexually abused by other people who also got themselves trapped in the same dimension, which requires at least one person remaining inside, that her body even became hypersensitive to arousal. Barely remaining sane with the companionship of the friendly Puchi Hanny Kagekatsu, she learnt how to defend herself and eventually encountered Rance, whom she resolved to Pay Evil unto Evil and finally escape. Yet, her kind nature got the better of her again as she was reluctant to sacrifice Sill, but Rance managed to escape with her and Sill regardless. Things started to look up for her when she returned to Zeth, being placed in her now grown-up childhood friend King Gandhi's care and acquiring medication to control her arousal, also helping Rance on several occasions to repay him for his help, who predictably takes advantage of her each time to have sex with her. Unfortunately, in Rance X, she was canonically kidnapped by the Fiend Medusa who violently raped and brutalized her, with Rance finding her too late in a badly wounded and catatonic state. She would remain in intensive care for the remainder of the campaign, with little hope of recovery. In Part 2, Rance, having offered to become the next Archfiend to free Miki and let her and Kentarou return home, kidnaps Rizna and attempts to heal her by making her a Fiend. While she regained consciousness and mobility, she lost her sight in exchange for new powers. Though she now loyally serves Archfiend Rance, she refuses to harm humans as much as she can, much like Silky. Only after the Archfiend system was ended for good was she finally able to return to normal.
  • Aristoles Calm, Commander of the Second Helman Army is also this. He's a good man who wants to rid his nation of corruption just as much as his best friend Patton does, but his love for Sheila Helman, Queen of Helman, makes him try to change it from the inside rather than start a revolution like Patton did. As a result of their different methods of achieving the same ideals, the two friends are forced to fight on opposite sides, with no hope of a peaceful resolution to the conflict. This gets taken to its logical extreme in Kichikuou Rance, where the player can save him from his canonical death and recruit him only by killing the entire Patton Faction and using Sheila as a hostage to force him into servitude. There's no way to give him anything better than a very Bittersweet Ending.