Adelheid

About
Adelheid (アーデルハイド, Āderuhaido) is an unproduced erotic role-playing game developed by Alicesoft.

Adelheid began development following the second failed attempt at making a fifth entry in the Rance Series as a form of stress relief for the series' director TADA. Frustrated by the growing demand for games to feature spectacular visuals and effects, TADA sought to make a game that was both graphically and mechanically simplistic yet enjoyable to play, citing titles made for the Nintendo Gameboy as his primary inspiration. He handled all aspects of its production himself in his free time, and aimed to write a scenario that was roughly the same length as the first game in the | Dragon Quest series. Work on the game was put on hold when a third attempt at a fifth Rance title began, but resumed around half a year later after this project also fell through.

Adelheid was first revealed to the public in the 13th issue of the Alice's Battery Bomb newsletter. Along with giving a basic breakdown of its plot and gameplay, TADA revealed in this statement that the script had grown larger than he had anticipated, comparing it to the second Dragon Quest in length rather than the first. He also clarified that it would not be released as a full retail title and that he instead hoped to include it on the Alice CD for the then-upcoming See in Ao. It failed to meet this deadline and was not featured on the disk.

A second update on the status of Adelheid was published in the 14th issue of Alice's Battery Bomb. In it, TADA revealed that he had done almost no work on the game in the time since the previous update. Despite this, he assured readers that it was almost ready to be released and that the primary reason for the delay was that none of Alicesoft's programmers were available to make the final adjustments to its system. TADA ended the statement by saying that he aimed to release the game on the Alice CD packaged with the company's next major release Yoru ga Kuru! A third update later appeared in the 15th issue of Alice's Battery Bomb, which featured a profile for a character named Yukina.

Within a month of the third update, TADA gained the motivation to develop a new full-length game unrelated to the Rance series known as Daiakuji. Placing his full attention toward this new game, he put all work on Adelheid on hold, causing it to miss the deadline needed to be included on Yoru ga Kuru!'s Alice CD. While no further official statements were made about Adelheid following this, TADA addressed the future of the game when asked about it in the Haniho Q&A Corner on the official Alicesoft website, claiming that he would resume work on it when he had free time. Contrary to this, Adelheid was never mentioned again by TADA and remained unreleased by the time he retired from his position in game development in 2019.

In January of 2022, nearly twenty years since it had last been referenced, TADA revisited Adelheid as part of a retrospective on his career for his blog Haniwa Development Office. He revealed that he still possessed the most recent build of the game and had played around in what had been completed of it to remind himself of the experience. He also elaborated slightly on its design and influences and posted the first ever full-color screenshot of it.

Story
On a certain continent, there was a mass outbreak of Haniwa. The King ordered the Hero to exterminate them. However, in order to defeat the Hanny King, a Holy Glasses Girl was needed...

Gameplay
Adelheid was described as a simplistic top-down role-playing game closely inspired by similar titles released for the Nintendo Gameboy. Its combat was said to be similar to that of | Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru, with battles being fully automated and dependent entirely on the player's stats surpassing those of the enemy. All of the game's enemies were finite and would disappear permanently after being defeated in the style of | Xanadu. TADA compared the game to a puzzle, with the player needing to perform a series of specific linear steps to clear it.

While the game's protagonist was an unnamed "Hero" (勇者, yuusha), the player was intended to amass a party of a total of 12 different characters across the game. Only one of these additional characters was shown in the few screenshots made publicly available: Rance, the eponymous star of the Rance series.

Though no explicit images from the game have ever been shown, TADA stated that it would contain erotic content during its initial reveal. Notably, the screenshot depicting Rance as the player character has a counter reading "Number of girls raped" (犯した女の数) in the message window, indicating that at least one objective required him to assault multiple women.

Trivia

 * The word "Adelheid" is a Dutch/German female name meaning "nobility" and "noble-ness". It is phonetically similar to the title of the game | Hydlide, one of the earliest action role-playing games ever released. Many of Adelheid's known gameplay mechanics resemble those of Hydlide.
 * The appearance of the "Hero" character strongly resembles the main protagonist of the game | Dragon Quest III, whose design is synonymous with fantasy heroes in contemporary Japanese pop culture. The game's simplistic story, in which a Hero is entrusted with a vaguely-defined quest to save the world by a King, also evokes the plot of the original | Dragon Quest.
 * In addition to Hannies, screenshots from the game reveal Yankee Guy Monsters and Pixie Fox and Magisco Gal Monsters as having been enemies.
 * The locations named in the screenshots include "Pocket Castle Castle Town" (ポケット城 城下町, poketto-jō jōkamachi), "Kalar Forest" (カラーの森, karā no mori), and "Mysterious Continent" (謎の大陸, nazo no tairiku)
 * The name of Yukina's sword, Sasanishiki, is derived from [| a variety of Japanese rice].