Rance: The Quest for Hikari


 * This article is for the 1989 original. For the 2013 remake, see Rance 01.

is the first installment in the Rance series, made originally for PC-98. The game is available as freeware. The game was translated by HGTP Translations in 2010.

Gameplay

 * Main articles: Game Mechanics and Walkthrough

Rance -Quest for Hikari- is an adventure game/RPG hybrid that heavily focuses on the exploration system.

The game's PC-88 port featured distinct art, monsters, and stats, and also included a new questline.

Story

 * Main articles: Story and Characters

Keith, owner of Keith's Guild, offers Rance a job worth 20,000 gold in reward from the Blanc family to find and protect their daughter, Hikari Mi Blanc, who was kidnapped with no subsequent demands made. Assisting him in his search is Zeth-born caster slave, Sill Plain, who was also kidnapped from her rich family and sold to Rance in exchange for his life savings. Through separate means, they both work together to solve the mystery behind the kidnapping, and eventually discover that the case is much larger than it seemed to be.

Specs

 * Development team - Bacteria 88
 * Genre - Multi-selection Adventure game (it's really an RPG game built on an ADV engine)
 * Scenario - TADA etc
 * CG - Hakase ("Professor") etc
 * Music - Ichitaro
 * Graphics - more than 120
 * Text data - more than 70,000 Japanese characters
 * BGM - more than 5 songs

Patches
The freeware English release by HGTP Translations can be downloaded here.

The updated Rance I Rebuilt patch can be downloaded here and applied to the HGTP release.

A version of the PC-88 port, built as a mod of Rance I Rebuilt, can be downloaded here.

Trivia

 * The girl on the cover of Rance I is Tomato Purée, who isn't even featured in the game. Instead, she makes her first appearance in the sequel, Rance 2.
 * Along with Rance 2, the digest edition of Rance I is included in the special disk that came with Rance 6. The digest was translated by 2.0 Translations. The translation patch can be downloaded here.
 * 24 years later, in 2013, this game was remade with a revamped gameplay system and modern day audio-visual quality, titled Rance 01. This is the 2nd Rance title after Rance 02 to be remade with modern day specs.