Today on the blog, we have a special programmer’s corner for
Rance Quest Magnum from Toufu Guy!
Hi!! It’s toufu guy – I’ve been working on
Rance Quest Magnum as its programmer for the last year-ish, and am so proud that
Rance Quest Magnum is finally reaching the Western world.
There’s a lot of stuff going on in this game, and I just wanted to make sure I’m giving some big tips so you can enjoy this game to its fullest. Some things are new, and others are can be a little buried.
TADA Mode
Some of us just aren’t very good at video games
In the nearly 10 years since
Rance Quest Magnum initially came out, the
Rance Series Director, TADA, has spent plenty of time agonizing over the game and what could be even better about it.
He has even released several patches, on his own time, that gently tweak mechanics, or adds in new characters. In the most recent patch,
3.860, which the MangaGamer version incorporates, TADA completely re-did the easy mode from the game into a simpler format.
Since the game’s original easy mode came with some heavy nerfs (such as permanently locking you out of post-game content if you enabled it even once), I would never recommend using it.
However, TADA’s re-implementation simplifies it into a “2x mode” that gives 2x exp and 2x gold with zero downsides. In my opinion, it drastically improves the playability of
Rance Quest Magnum as the experience lets you keep more characters at viable levels with less grinding, and you can afford more gear to try different combinations of gear. The team decided to dub the 2x mode as “TADA Mode” out of respect to TADA, and you can enable it from quest 13 – “Alice’s Mansion.” (TADA Mode is disabled by default, so you will have to visit Alice’s Mansion after the first quest to enable it.)
New And Improved “Quest” Ending
Rance Quest Magnum features a lot of character develop-wait, not like that!
As many of you may be aware,
Rance Quest Magnum is actually a two-part feature! The original
Rance Quest released on August 26th, 2011, with the Magnum expansion releasing on March 24th, 2012.
The Magnum expansion expanded on both the story and mechanics of the game. The additional story in the Magnum expansion is its own story arc with a finale overshadowing the original Quest ending. However, it puts the Quest ending in an awkward position since they actually have some mutually exclusive content. In the Magnum expansion, Alice told the player to just remember that parts of the ending happened, and other parts didn’t.
Here, TADA comes in to save the day again. In TADA’s 3.860 patch, he comes in with surgical precision to create a branching path so you can choose whether to experience the original Quest ending or to segue into the Magnum campaign. This does mean you will have to beat the final quest of the Quest campaign TWICE to be able to reach all of the content in the game.
Custom Characters
Well, well, well, if it isn’t the famous adventurer, Ranceko!
Rance Quest Magnum has no fewer than 68 characters available throughout the game (with potentially a few more available for those willing to challenge World 2 and World 3).
With that many options available, AliceSoft built a robust character system that lends itself well to custom characters. By buying a “Character Ticket” from Frostbuy, and then heading to quest 129 – “Alice’s Guest” – you can create your own character.
In my example, I created a returning character from
Sengoku Rance! All you need to do is have a 196 x 232 png file of the character’s face, drag it into the “Face CG” sub-folder of your SaveData folder (
\AliceSoft\Rance Quest\Save Data), and you’re ready to go!
There are a multitude of classes and skills available to you when you first create your character, so feel free to have some fun with it!
Here is the picture used in the above example.
Feel free to include Ranceko in your own adventures!
Advanced: Custom characters start out rather generic, and can pale in comparison to the likes of Rance, Kenshin Uesugi, Shizuka Masou, and Bernard Ceramité.
There is the additional quest 106 – “Dark Alice’s Pay2Win Room” – where you can teach your custom character more advanced skills to be competitive with even the strongest of the main characters in
Rance Quest Magnum. Be wary though, when Dark Alice says “Pay2Win,” she is going to ask you for some
serious amounts of gold!
Data Collection
Various stats from the beta team
One of the coolest components of
Rance Quest Magnum to work on was actually implementing the “Data Collection” feature. All across the world, people will play the game in different ways, and some completionists are going to push themselves to reach the very ends of what the game has to offer.
The data collection collects statistics from everybody who consents to it, and from there you can see the spread of how strong all of the different Rances are and how many days have been spent playing through everything
Rance Quest Magnum has to offer. If you want to participate, you can always go to
Config -> Other 2 -> Connect to network to enable data sharing.
Rance Quest Magnum is a game that teaches you how to enjoy life
All in all,
Rance Quest Magnum is a huge game with a lot to offer, and I hope everybody is excited to finally get their hands on this absolute classic.
Rance Quest Magnum is available for pre-order exclusively on MangaGamer.com!
