Sengoku Rance

I get that this is an erotic game but the MC is too weird for my tastes. You play from the perspective of a foreigner with the goal of taking the virginity of the noble women across Japan, including a noble child he's waiting to grow up in 5 years...He also has a slave girl he physically abuses. There's an early H-scene with his slave girl where she has no choice but to please him. She doesn't enjoy it until she magically does. For this entire H-scene scene the MC is mean to her and could care less how she feels. He's still mean to her afterwards too. I tried another visual novel recently with the same problem. It just completely takes me out of it because I'm not interested in this type of "mean and perverted MC" kink or whatever it is. 2 stars just because the game idea would still work if the MC was more likeable.

The rape-iest game ever. The strategy game is okayish, you've seen hundreds of time the Archers / Warriors / Magicians combination by now, but everything works just fine and there are nuances to the genre. The "adventure" is more or less the search for the most cringe rape pics possible, with the good sense of warning you against blatant child-rape (let's consider only teenage-looking girls rape, attempting the pre-schooler route leads to game over because there are limits, you know). I'm not sure the whole Rance saga is as edgy as it thinks it is. There's a fine line between giving the customer what he wants - rapes, obviously - and utter contempt from the developper to the players. Most stories arcs are very basic, in favor of the quantity of rapes (some of it is consensual because they raped character somehow "fall in love" with the rapist, a nice touch). Is it worth your time? Beating the main course once is a good 30 hours of gaming, playing everything there is should be a solid 200 to 300 hours. So I guess there's that. Is it time well spend? Not sure.

I hesitated a while on buying this game, since I knew the Rance series to have some... unpleasant sex scenes, to say the least. Having just finished my first playthrough of the game, I can confirm that yes, most of the sex scenes are dubiously consensual AT BEST, and often feature our "hero" explicitly raping these poor women. Setting the copious amount of rape aside, the story and characters are mediocre. There are many characters, but all of them feel shallow (to be fair, a *lot* of the text in the game is in the sex scenes, which I spam clicked my way past after realizing they had zero appeal for me, so it's not totally impossible that I missed actual character development buried somewhere in the longwinded drivel about Rance's "hyper weapon" and "imperial juice", but somehow I doubt it). The strategic gameplay is cool at first, but gets tedious after a while. Without compelling characters or an interesting story, by the time I finished my first playthrough, I felt like there wasn't anything to do in the game besides grind for 100% completion (which takes multiple playthroughs). It's also a lot less freeform than the interactive map makes it look - for the most part, there's a clearly intended order in which you're supposed to fight people (and sometimes this is enforced mechanically - ie, you literally have no choice but to attack the Hara clan first). It might be worth it if you can get it on sale for at least 75%, or if you're the kind of person who actually *wants* to see the rapey sex scenes (please get help or something), but otherwise I wouldn't bother.

It's literally just a game where you play as a guy who always wins and bangs every girl ever, because his devs make it impossible for him to lose no matter how stupid he acts. The gameplay is like a budget title, and the story is full of enough filler to make Naruto look fast-paced. You also are going to want to mute the BGM if you have functioning ears. Really, if you have any interest in the H-scenes, just look up the CGs on some booru and spare yourself from wasting time on this game. There's nothing else of value, and even then the H-scenes are about as formulaic as you can imagine. Frankly, the only reason this game is popular is because it's "a classic", but that's just because it was mediocrity at a time where there were slim pickings. It does not hold up today and isn't worth your time, even if you are a basement dweller.