This review contains spoilers
Kichikuou Rance was already the seventh game to release from Alicesoft in a series that started with a goofy adventure game that strongly emanated the energy of some shit a few friends threw together for fun. The characters of Rance and Lia in their early incarnations bear a fair bit of resemblance to Ataru and Lum from Urusei Yatsura in appearance, behavior, and their whole relationship dynamic, there are numerous very overt references to Gundam, the later Rance 3 is pretty similar to the game Emerald Dragon in its plot structure, gameplay, and even some of the new characters introduced to the point of being more or less a parody (though I'd honestly say Rance 3 is the better game here). None of them really had anything substantial to say and their main draw was the morally callous protagonist who murders and rapes and fucks shit up for everyone. And Rance himself did become a popular character for this even in those early years.
The first hint of a real shift in tone for the company's games to my knowledge came with Toushin Toshi II in 1994, a story about a man in a committed relationship with his girlfriend thrown into a series of increasingly dire circumstances often leaving the player forced to choose between doing some reprehensible thing that could betray her trust or to not and make things harder for yourself, culminating in the Sans Undertale judgment scene but done over twenty years prior. Also like Undertale there are no real consequences unless you decide to be as evil as possible, but the game seems very at odds with and uncomfortable with itself in a fascinating way. As with Rance a lot of the sex scenes are rape by the protagonist, but here you can always choose to not do it and the game constantly condemns you if you choose to, despite no extrinsic reward for not doing it. There's no content to replace those scenes, but the game doesn't want you to see them.
Kichikuou Rance ('Kichikuou' is often translated as 'Brutal King', but 'kichiku' most literally means something like cruel and uncaring) then builds on that unease, now placing the character of Rance in a position of great authority over a nation's army and presenting a very open-ended conquest strategy game that displays, in great detail and at times in pretty startling ways, the consequences of his actions on the world and its people. There are around two-hundred characters in the game with their own subplots running parallel to the rest of the game, and most of those subplots have multiple possible conclusions with often unpredictable conditions. Each playthrough concludes with the game informing you of whether you got the 'good' or 'bad' outcome for all these characters, placing specific emphasis on this part of the game. It's frankly shockingly complex for a game from an eroge developer and I don't know if I've ever seen something quite like this emulated anywhere else. The strategy gameplay itself is not very complex at all and it's mostly just inoffensive, but it doesn't really matter. It's sort of more an adventure game told through the structure of a strategy game like Nobunaga's Ambition than it is a strategy game in itself.
The story culminates in the revelation that the world was created by a god who derives pleasure from watching people suffer, serving as a rather direct stand-in for the audience viewing the world through Rance's perspective. If we're to take this to its logical conclusion then it could be read as a statement of resentment on the part of the developers or writers that Rance was a popular character, which would explain quite a lot about the tone shift. The consequence of all this is a game hostile to its own violent porno power fantasy but also unable to entirely get away from it, so you can see the rape porn if you want but then also the game tells you explicitly that you're ruining people's lives and maybe you've worsened some poor girl's crippling drug addiction because you did that or maybe they killed themselves because of you or etc., whereas in the games before and since it happened largely without consequence to the victims.
Was this actually convincing to anyone who was playing these games uncritically? I honestly doubt it, for however much I respect the attempt. But what interests me is that these types of scenarios, decisions, and potential outcomes even exist in this game whatsoever, a degree of potential for horrific behavior and consequence that's virtually nonexistent in the entire medium including other eroge, in a medium that's supposed to be defined by the player's ability to make decisions. And the reason for that is obvious; the presence of this content makes the game an extremely hard sell and it can never be ported anywhere. But if you're able to get over that then there's really nothing else like this.
The first hint of a real shift in tone for the company's games to my knowledge came with Toushin Toshi II in 1994, a story about a man in a committed relationship with his girlfriend thrown into a series of increasingly dire circumstances often leaving the player forced to choose between doing some reprehensible thing that could betray her trust or to not and make things harder for yourself, culminating in the Sans Undertale judgment scene but done over twenty years prior. Also like Undertale there are no real consequences unless you decide to be as evil as possible, but the game seems very at odds with and uncomfortable with itself in a fascinating way. As with Rance a lot of the sex scenes are rape by the protagonist, but here you can always choose to not do it and the game constantly condemns you if you choose to, despite no extrinsic reward for not doing it. There's no content to replace those scenes, but the game doesn't want you to see them.
Kichikuou Rance ('Kichikuou' is often translated as 'Brutal King', but 'kichiku' most literally means something like cruel and uncaring) then builds on that unease, now placing the character of Rance in a position of great authority over a nation's army and presenting a very open-ended conquest strategy game that displays, in great detail and at times in pretty startling ways, the consequences of his actions on the world and its people. There are around two-hundred characters in the game with their own subplots running parallel to the rest of the game, and most of those subplots have multiple possible conclusions with often unpredictable conditions. Each playthrough concludes with the game informing you of whether you got the 'good' or 'bad' outcome for all these characters, placing specific emphasis on this part of the game. It's frankly shockingly complex for a game from an eroge developer and I don't know if I've ever seen something quite like this emulated anywhere else. The strategy gameplay itself is not very complex at all and it's mostly just inoffensive, but it doesn't really matter. It's sort of more an adventure game told through the structure of a strategy game like Nobunaga's Ambition than it is a strategy game in itself.
The story culminates in the revelation that the world was created by a god who derives pleasure from watching people suffer, serving as a rather direct stand-in for the audience viewing the world through Rance's perspective. If we're to take this to its logical conclusion then it could be read as a statement of resentment on the part of the developers or writers that Rance was a popular character, which would explain quite a lot about the tone shift. The consequence of all this is a game hostile to its own violent porno power fantasy but also unable to entirely get away from it, so you can see the rape porn if you want but then also the game tells you explicitly that you're ruining people's lives and maybe you've worsened some poor girl's crippling drug addiction because you did that or maybe they killed themselves because of you or etc., whereas in the games before and since it happened largely without consequence to the victims.
Was this actually convincing to anyone who was playing these games uncritically? I honestly doubt it, for however much I respect the attempt. But what interests me is that these types of scenarios, decisions, and potential outcomes even exist in this game whatsoever, a degree of potential for horrific behavior and consequence that's virtually nonexistent in the entire medium including other eroge, in a medium that's supposed to be defined by the player's ability to make decisions. And the reason for that is obvious; the presence of this content makes the game an extremely hard sell and it can never be ported anywhere. But if you're able to get over that then there's really nothing else like this.