Kichikuou Rance

Kichikuō Rance (鬼畜王ランス Kichikuō Ransu, "Brute King Rance") - a "what-if" spin-off not part of the official Rance timeline. It was released in 1996 only on Japan.

This game is not part of the official Rance universe timeline, forking off after the events of Rance 4.2, as a "what-if" episode. Rance leads a band of bandits which is attacked by the Imperial Patrol, who captured Sill. Rance marries Lia, queen of Leazas, becoming king to take revenge and rescue Sill. It was fan-translated to English by anonymous 4chan user Arunaru on 2014. He was subsequently hired by MangaGamer to translate other games of the series.

Directed by TADA. Published by Alicesoft.

• 0% Approval Rating: If Kayblis wasn't the strongest monster around, he would be the loneliest one. All of his subordinates despite him and only obey him out of fear. The cherry on the cake is his crush Kamilla rejecting all of his advances.
• 100% Adoration Rating: Every Hanny loves King Hanny. Being the progenitor of the entire race helps on that.
• Adaptation Distillation: Sort of. The whole series had been planned out by this point, but AliceSoft didn't know if they'd be around long enough to finish it, so what they did instead was make a What If...? game that boils the entire latter half of the series down into one epic adventure.
• Anyone Can Die: If you count certain Nonstandard Game Overs, there isn't a single mortal character whose survival is guaranteed. But even discounting that, there are very few named characters who can't meet their end on-screen. Even your playable commanders aren't necessarily restricted to dying in battle - plenty can die in events as well, including Rance himself.
• Author Avatar: King Hanny is one for TADA. He shares her fetish for Meganekko, and is universally loved by his creations, and a noble individual.
• Back from the Dead: Wenlina can resurrect a person, but only one time a year and only if the person died recently.
• Berserk Button: Descoco is nothing but cordial to Rance during his time in Shangri-La... but the minute Rance insults his weight, Descoco tries to kill him.
• Brutal Bonus Level: The Creator phase, accessed by defeating Kayblis while controlling every territory in the game, pits you against an army of angels who can permanently capture cities (as in, you can't take them back once they're captured) and will randomly level two cities each week, bringing their defense down to 0 and increasing their field size. To clear this phase and get the Golden Ending, you must acquire four statues and bring them to the Ancient Ruins, where you will face a gauntlet of bosses before finally confronting Rudrathaum himself.
• The Bus Came Back: British, the adventurer imprisoned in the thieves' hideout in the first game, returns here on an expanded role.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Some commanders, such as Soul, Patton, and Somita, will take penalties when deployed on the battlefield, and will thus only really see use in dungeons. Since you can only send one unit into a dungeon at a time and only go on one dungeon run per week, most of these dungeon specialists will end up collecting dust.
• Darker and Edgier: Compared to the rest of the series, the art style here is grittier and more detailed, Rance's Nominal Hero status is taken much more seriously, and many of the game's antagonists make him look like a saint by comparison even then. It is telling that Kichikuou is the only installment in the original timeline to feature bad ends, both for individual character arcs and for the game as a whole.
• Defiant to the End: Camilla tells Kayblis to his face that she would rather die than become his woman. Once she realizes that she is indeed about to die, she kisses Reincock right in front of Kayblis, and clings to him even as Kayblis is beating the two of them to death.
• Deus Sex Machina: The cure for Greening Disease is semen, something that's only discovered after Rance sneaks into Green Village and rapes Caroly. After they're both examined and both test negative for the disease, many more patients sneak into Rance's tent to have sex with him. Because there are too many to handle on his own, he eventually deploys his whole unit into Green Village to help cure the remaining patients, and the disease is eradicated within a week.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • People affected by the Greening Disease are often said to commit suicide out of despair, since the illness' cure was never found.
  • Eleanor will kill herself if Rance abuses her too much.
  • If you manage to defeat Camilla through brute force, Rance will rape her, leading to her killing herself.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Rance is a Punch Clock Hero, yet he is put off by Aoi being a sex slave addicted to sex.
• Evil Versus Evil: Subverted. Though Rance and Kayblis are not much afar on morality, their alliances makes their conflict much more grey than it is, since Rance's allies are mostly good people and all of Kayblis' subordinates obey him out of fear.
• Final Death: If one of your commanders is defeated even once, they're not coming back. Enemy commanders, not so much.
• Grand Finale: It was supposed to be one for the series. The game's massive sales made AliceSoft's luck turn around, and they retconned the game into an alternate timeline to allow more Rance games to be made.
• Happy Ending Override: Allowing Kayblis to become the Archfiend will remove all good fortunes from the post-game report, presumably because he killed everyone who would have otherwise gotten a happy ending.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: Somita leads a magically oriented unit that specializes in dungeon exploration. On paper, this doesn't make her sound like a very strong commander, especially for how late in the game you get her, as you can only send one unit into a dungeon at a time, meaning she can't be accompanied by any melee units to protect her. However, she is indispensable on the Rising Dragon Mountain, where she will make quick work of the dragons who are more than a match for even your tankiest physical units.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: The encounter with Ruberan that caps off the prologue is not meant to be won, though it is possible with enough grinding and luck, and in fact leads to a unique ending.
• If I Can't Have You: Seeing Camilla protecting Reincock with her own body is the last straw for Kayblis, who ends up pulverizing them both to a literal bloody pulp in a blind rage.
• King Mook: The appropriately named King Hanny, which apparently fathered all of his race.
• The Load: Mars the Great is one of the weakest commanders in the game, but has to be recruited in order to take the city of Mars without a fight. And after being in your army for a few weeks, he will abduct one of your female commanders to bring her back to his home planet with him.
• Loads and Loads of Characters: There are over 150 characters in the game, and that's just the ones with unique portraits.
• Mutually Exclusive Party Members:
  • Recruiting Aristoles, and by extension Rolex, requires you to refuse an alliance with the Patton Faction. Strangely, the code shows that Aristoles and Patton get a stat boost when deployed together, suggesting this wasn't originally planned to be the case.
  • The royal guard captains are an entire succession line of mutually exclusive party members. Julia will replace Leila if the latter dies or is married off to Nobunaga, and Aviator will replace Julia if she dies or is offered to the Hanny King.
  • Speaking of which, offering Julia to the Hanny King is required to recruit him, meaning he also cannot be in the army with Leila or Julia. He will also refuse to join you if you've recruited the Kaiju Prince, and likewise, recruiting him disables the beginning-of-turn event in which the Kaiju Prince joins.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Kayblis of all people cries after he kills Camilla.
• My Rules Are Not Your Rules: Enemy commanders will often survive if you defeat them without actually winning the battle. Sometimes even if you do win, they'll just flee and have to be fought again in a different city. What's more, the Monster Army can capture multiple cities per week, even though you are strictly on defense for the rest of your turn once you capture a single city.
• Nothing Is Scarier: Due to the limited soundtrack (1-3 themes for each army, three themes used in dungeons, and Rudrathaum's theme), particularly ominous scenes will be dead silent. This also serves as your only real clue about Pi-R's trap, as the silence overrides the Monster Army's usual theme when his unit attacks.
• Puzzle Boss: Downplayed; while most Fiends can be defeated through conventional means (sans La Saizel, who will always run away when she takes damage, and Kesselring, who will always revive until his weakness is exploited), most of them also have a weakness that will allow you to either significantly weaken them or defeat them outside of combat altogether.
• Stone Wall: Due to their small troop counts and getting relatively few opportunities to level up throughout the game, allied Fiend commanders don't serve much purpose other than to be nigh-indestructible meat shields against attacking enemies. Miki is the most extreme example in the game, having almost no offensive power outside of a special attack that rarely works, but boasting 30,000 HP, nearly a thousand times that of the final boss.
• Timed Mission: You will spend most of the game under pressure to do one thing or another in a timely manner if you wish to minimize fatalities in your army. From the moment the prologue ends, you are given a hard time limit to rescue Sill and Soul from Helman. Should you succeed, you get a few weeks of respite before Milli falls deathly ill, after which you have, at most, 40 weeks to fetch the cure from Zeth, forcing you to either hurry up and finish conquering Helman or fight a war on two fronts if you want to save her. A lesser example also occurs in the Monster Realm, where if you can kill five Fiends before Silky goes off to fight Kayblis (which happens three months after you kill your first Fiend), she will reduce him to 2 HP, turning him into a Zero Effort Boss if you've already taken out his guards or can do so before he recovers.
• Token Evil Teammate: Rance lacks a lot of heroic qualities, a lot of his allies can have flaws, but it pales in comparison to Liz, which is outright an evil sadist that wanted to marry Rance because he raped her on revenge because she tortured random girls to the point of utter despair. Of she wasn't infatuated with Rance she would firmly be a villain.
• The Unfought: Downplayed with La Saizel. She will constantly attack your cities throughout the first half of the game, but will always flee as soon as she takes damage, and ends up deserting the Monster Army before you ever reach the Monster Realm. Further downplayed with Camilla, who you can properly defeat, but you need to make a conscious and deliberate effort to do it before Kayblis kills her first.
• Unwinnable by Design:
  • If you deploy Miki against Pi-R's unit, she'll be captured and raped to death by Kayblis, who transforms into the Archfiend mid-coitus. Congratulations, you are now fighting a Nigh Invulnerable boss who can capture four cities per week and wipe out fully manned units by himself. To add insult to injury, it's possible to fall for this by accident due to Miki's usefulness as a meat shield, and a Wrong Genre Savvy player might assume this is how it's supposed to go down and save in their usual file before they realize it isn't.
  • Chaos can no longer be acquired once you enter the Monster Realm. If you can somehow get all the way up to the Creator phase without him, you will be unable to learn the locations of the statues required to open the God Gate, effectively locking you into a Nonstandard Game Over. Acquiring Ho Raga's statue also requires you to sleep with Kouhime enough times to learn of Rudrathaum's existence before reaching the Creator phase. Because entering the Creator phase is only required for the best ending, however, this is downplayed.