Wow, how long has it been?

…3 months?  Huh.  I had it pegged as longer.  LET’S FINISH THIS!

Where did I leave off?

Oh, yes… Chapter 4.  I just saved Maria.

Moving on, there’s a sidequest to pick up Athena 2.0, an optional artificial girl.

Rance encounters an old witch who’s making a homunculus, and he agrees to take her out for a test drive.  There’s just one problem…

You end up having to go back and forth between the town and the tower to get Athena fixed, first by giving her nipples, then by giving her a working vagina.  Totally worth it.

Battle-wise, Athena is probably the most well-rounded unit in the game.  She has decent power, just slightly lower than Rance, has good mobility and long range on her attack, and she has pretty average survivability.  The only real problem with her is that she has a level cap of 1.  That is, she can’t ever level up, so she’ll always be exactly the same throughout the game.  Which is fine because her level 1 stats are on par with level 40s at the very least.

Continuing on, the gang meets up with a sleeping dragon, and they agree to get some medicine for it in exchange for a tower key it has.  No clue how the hell a dragon got its claws on a tower key, but whatever.  Along the way, they fight Ralga, the succubus from Rance II.  They also bump into Shizuka, who basically says “fuck this quest” and hides behind an magic barrier so she can focus on studies.

Anyway, they get the medicine, they bring it to the dragon, they get the key, and it’s off to Chapter 5.

The next tower key is in possession of a strange woman named Chao.  She begs Rance to slay a demon named Atlanta; if he does, he gets to have sex with her and get her key.  Naturally, Rance agrees, prioritizing in exactly that order.

Before long, Atlanta shows herself and captures Kanami and Leila, trapping them in mirror shards.  The gang travels all over the tower looking for shards, saving Kanami and picking up Fake Mage Clothes.  With the new clothes (and kicking out any non-mage characters from the party), Rance can now cross Shizuka’s barrier.  Rance decides to interrupt Shizuka while she’s in the process of infusing herself with third-level magic.

Honestly, I just can’t say no to more Shizuka.

Despite Rance’s best efforts to make life worse for her, Shizuka’s experiment succeeds, and she now has level-3 magic.

With Shizuka in tow, the gang can now break through a magic barrier and find the final Leila mirror shard, then seemingly defeat Atlanta.

They return to Chao, but before they enter, they manage to eavesdrop on her monologuing and find out she’s the real Atlanta, and they defeated one of her doubles.  Rance decides to pretend they don’t know anything to see what her aim is.  “Chao” tells the group how to get to Atlanta and says she’ll meet with them there.  A spell prevents everyone but Rance from entering the room.  Rance summons Ferris as a precaution, then follows Chao in and completely forgets the fact that he knows it’s a trap.

Chao then reveals that she is Atlanta (surprise, surprise) and that she did this to find a new host for her master, the Dark Lord Lexington.

Atlanta tries to force Rance to drink the soul of Lexington so he can inhabit Rance’s body, but Ferris interferes and breaks the spell on Rance.  Rance immediately counterattacks by taking the soul of Lexington away and threatening to destroy it if Atlanta doesn’t do as he says.

And that means taking the key away from her and continuing on with the quest.

…

Yeah no, he also fucks the hell out of her.  C’mon, this is Rance.

Thus ends Chapter 5.

At the start of Chapter 6, Bitch approaches Rance and offers to give Io to him in exchange for the remaining keys.  Rance figures he can just steal the four keys back from Bitch later, so he happily accepts and spends a few hours torturing Io.  Meanwhile, Bitch unlocks the door to the Toushin Toshi Upsilon, ordering it to destroy all of Helman’s enemies.  Upsilon responds by swatting Bitch away, causing him to get decapitated upon slamming into a wall.  Dayum.

The surviving members of the group are Freak, a Tousho himself, and Hubert.  They escape, and we learn that Freak was one of the original mages who created the Toushin Toshi.  He turned on his leader when said leader went out of control, and he sealed all the others away until he could find some way to control them.  He didn’t destroy them because they could still be useful weapons against the Demon Lords if they attacked again.

Meanwhile, Rance has finished doing whatever to Io just in time to protect the town from waves of attacking monsters.  After defeating them all, Rance leaves half of his party to protect the town while he goes on to the tower.  He encounters Epsilon, who is too powerful to beat, and he is forced to retreat.  The group bumps into Freak and Hubert and allows them to help.  Freak says that Epsilon uses a priestess for a power source, and that killing the girl should significantly weaken Epsilon.  Rance is against killing girls even if it’s to save the world, so Freak suggests destroying the 8 magic columns that store power for Epsilon instead.  After 8 lengthy battles, all columns are destroyed, and the group saves the girl, Alicia.

The group returns to the town and finds the defending girls were defeated by the Tousho Dio, who kidnapped the priestess Cynthia.  Upsilon will now be able to use Cynthia as a power source, but it should still be much easier to deal with.

In the battle against Upsilon, Rance calls Ferris to rescue Cynthia, weakening Upsilon.  Rance decides to teleport everyone out and wait while Upsilon runs out of power, but Sill gets left behind, and Upsilon uses her as a new source of power.  Great.

Everyone charges into the tower and challenges the powered-up Upsilon once more.  Ferris is called again, but Upsilon is prepared and knocks her out.  After a lengthy battle, Sill uses her Fire Laser to break free, and the rest of the group gangs up on the weakened Upsilon to defeat him.

I have to say, the Upsilon fight is easily the most strategic fight in the entire game.  It involves a lot of moving in and out and taking advantage of priority rules.  It would be a LOT easier if I bought a lot of healing items beforehand, but I manged to pull it off with just three.

With Upsilon defeated, the entire tower shakes.  Merim tells everyone they can escape and rescue everyone in the town with the landing crafts, but Rance stays behind to get Sill.

So Sill’s okay, and the two head to the landing crafts.  One problem: they’ve all been taken.

With no way to escape, Rance figures he’s going to die fucking, so he orders Sill to strip.  Kanami shows up to interrupt and inform them that there’s one final landing craft used by the Helman army, so they go over there and escape.

And so, everyone returns home, the people of the town return to the surface, and Rance and Sill have another night of endless sex.

The end.

*sniff*

So, not sure where the story goes from here.  No cliffhanger like at the end of Rance III.

So, what’s next?  Chronologically, Rance 4.1 and 4.2 are next.  Kichikuou Rance is a What If? scenario after 4.2.  I’ve got all three ready to go eventually.  What I don’t have is the direct next installment, Rance 5D, nor do I have Rance VI.  That’s the only gap left between me and Sengoku Rance.  Ah well…

Here’s the problem with Rance 5D, however.  The English translation has been completed, but the translator isn’t releasing it.  Why?  Because they’re trying to work out a deal with MangaGamer.  MangaGamer recently released Beat Blades Haruka as the first official English AliceSoft title, and the hope seems to be that if it sells well enough, we could get more AliceSoft titles out in the west, which would include the Rance series.  So hey, more power to ya.  Once I get a stable job, I may just purchase Beat Blades Haruka myself.  I mean, it’s a successor to Beat Angel Escalayer, so there’s an added plus there.

Rance games officially released in English.  I dunno about you, but I’d spend real money on it.  Let’s do this, people.