Well, after weeks/months of playing for probably 80-100 hours total, as well as a few recent all nighters, I have finally finished this. Probably would've gone faster if my Japanese was better at the beginning of my playthrough, and this is despite Rance's simple prose, which only has a slight spike in difficulty in the last act of the game. I consider Rance's prose to be among the easiest from renowned VNs (if you can call this a VN, it's debatable, but it often gets put into that group). In any case, it's always been the plan for me to only play 03 and maybe X, depending on if the translation arrives before I finish IX, in Japanese.

To call this an improvement on 01 and 02 is a huge understatement. Not only did they take all the good gameplay elements of 01 and made it into a simple, yet satisfying system that I generally didn't feel much of a need to grind for and also happen to prefer to random encounter systems, or at least wasn't bored with in the slightest, but it has a great soundtrack with a good mix of 'videogamey' and guitar tracks. Here's a few music tracks I especially liked:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21io-c605NQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtjYwBSQ3Ho
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihZHdxC6yFY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhYNeqgwXGs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-saWTLCJfg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdFNoHLOSks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeARZXoUx80
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ky8CiMTtUNY

And this game has style, man, it looks so good during gameplay, transitions and overall visuals. Genuinely one of the most stylish JRPGs I've played. They also took all the cool characters from 01 and 02, like Lia, Shizuka, Maria, etc., and put them in this, making pretty much everyone playable, too. The story is a major upgrade over both 01 and 02, which were small-scale and unambitious, mostly filled with "haha, sex!" humor and shit just happening (not that this isn't, but this has a lot more serious and emotional moments). It's also nice to see Rance have more empathy.

I kind of want to say I've been sold on Rance, but it's more like I've been sold on the series' potential. While this game and its story are fun as hell and well-paced (whereas 01 was too long for what it was going for, and 02 felt like an eternity despite being extremely short), I still feel like it's a little simplistic and unambitious for me, especially after the torture of 02 and 03's length being over 40 hours on average (in your native language!), though I recognise that part of this is due to this being a remake of a 1991 JRPG. I will say though, the worldbuilding is good in this, and the characters are a lot better written and more nuanced than in the first two games, but the character writing still leaves a bit to be desired in terms of depth. It's very much the usual high fantasy or JRPG tropes that you see now and then, not top-tier JRPG material, though still well-executed for what it is, and like I said, fun. So despite it being a common consensus that this is in the Rance top 3, usually with two of X, Kichikuou, IX or Sengoku taking the other spots, I probably won't end up having it up there. And if this is an indicator of how I'll feel about the series until IX or even X... uh oh, because I'm determined to get to X, one of the most ambitious works of fiction ever.

I'm not looking forward to playing 4, 4.1, 4.2 and 5D, so I'll probably knock those out ASAP (I'm actually playing 4 as I write this, it's dreadful, I already miss 03's overall quality; 5D sounds even worse from what I know of it) to get to the allegedly good games like Kichikuou and VI. Well, at least the bad games like 02 are very short compared to the liked ones. The series has really good reviews across the board between VI and X, as well as with Kichikuou. I will also miss voiced Rance, for some reason this is the only game to have voiceacting in the series.