Rance VI: The Collapse of Zeth

About
Rance VI -The Collapse of Zeth- (Rance VI -ゼス崩壊-) is the sixth installment of the Rance Series, released in August 27th 2004.

Despite the fact that 5D was released earlier, Rance VI is usually considered the beginning of the new Rance timeline set after Kichikuou Rance, due to the much bigger scale of the game along with the fact that it takes place in LP0004, leaving the year LP0003 where Kichikuou Rance would have taken place as "the missing year", since the canonical events of that year weren't adapted into games. It was also from this point that many things of the lore and the setting were better established and given further detail.

VI is a turn-based dungeon crawler RPG with a unique system that limits the amounts of time a character can be deployed in battle, forcing the player to strategically organize how to use the characters through the dungeon in order to get to the end with the most optimal party, since it features dozens of playable characters with a different skillset that work better for different circumstances.

It is often considered to be one of the best, if not the best, of the series due to its well-written and developed plotline, vast array of characters, fun and adicting gameplay and really interesting setting.

Story
Set in the year LP0004, Rance and Sill travel to the Magic Kingdom Zeth because they ran short of money again. However, After offending a high-ranked magic user in the kingdom of Zeth, Rance is ironically thrown into the slave camp while his magic-using slave Sill is treated as a VIP. Vowing vengeance, he joins up with an underground resistance group called Ice Flame. Zeth being a nation of Magic, has a strong prejudice against those who cannot use magic. Ice Flame is a now small organization with the mission of bringing equality between mages and non-mages, whose rights are pretty much non-existance. Rance joins in order to get his revenge against the mages of the government of Zeth, and be reunited with Sill "while he's at it".

Trivia

 * A poster of Big Bang Age is seen in one of the mazes in Rance VI.