So for a RanceIV "review".
I know the game is old ('93 is venerable), but that can only excuse so much.
TADA says it well himself:
Weapons and Armor
Except for Rance, you don't need to pay much attention.
The items sold in the stores are all half-baked, so there is no need to force yourself to buy them.
My recommendation is to set only Rance or Sill to manual control [and let everyone else be on autopilot]
The game is very old and the progression of the game is not very easy to understand.
Even for the final fight, I had all characters except Rance on auto, and I only needed to keep him on manual so I could stuff his face with seirogans (item use being a free action means there is 0 challenge). The game is really painful to control with dropdowns that move around as you click them, having to go up and down 20 different submenus to compare stats of different weapons is just baffling. And it has that really old school design with lots of identical graphical elements that are repeated 50 times, but one of them is quest important.
The soundtrack is pretty cool though, lots of catchy tunes. For the artstyle I really didn't like it at first, but it kinda grew on me, although some CG's just look awful. I prefer this version of Merim over the later ones, she actually looks like an adult and not a midget.
I think I will be happy for having played this come rance9, already there was some "ohoho, so this is the first time [] was introduced". Although I am also retroactively disappointed by how mediocre toushin are in X. I hope Paraffin has a large role in 9, I feel the whole "sect goes insane and declares war on humanity" could be really interesting to flesh out.
I was surprised at how quickly Athenas creation happened, considering how the later games treat how unique she is. But I guess this is just how the older games went, they were a lot briefer than the more modern titles. Also surprising to me was how little Rance has changed, I was always told he was way more evil in the old games, but I really didn't get that feeling here. He shows concern for cute women, considers men to be at best beneath his contempt and secretly wuvs Sill.
Now to detox from Rance until 9 comes out.