Literally every major plot point in the game involves a sexual assault of some sort, whether molesting a maid to get her to give up a key, extorting sex from a castle worker by threatening to turn her in for theft, sexually torturing the queen's handmaiden to find out where the queen has gone, or raping the game's putative villain as a manner of "justice." In between these events, the player has the option to "assault" literally every female NPC he meets (and essentially all NPCs in the game are female, almost always scantily clad even when it doesn't make sense), including battered and traumatized women that they're theoretically there to rescue. When Sill complains about these repeated rapes, and the pain they cause, Rance says, "if you do it lots of times, it will start to feel good." Still, Rance has a momentary pang of conscience in his inability to bring pleasure to his slave and wonders if he's doing something wrong, but fortunately he quickly concludes that "no, Sill must be frigid." During one act, she says "Please stop" and his response is "Like I would stop doing something so fun! Take that.and that!" The player is of course treated to an image during this scene I will not be showing any such images from the game during this review. He "purchased" her from an "amoral warlock" and "she has a spell on her that makes her obedient to orders." To increase his own magical abilities, Rance is invited to engage in various sexual behaviors with Sill. To take a glaring example, Rance has a magic-using "assistant" named Sill Plain, who is actually a slave. There's no reason to play this game except to be entertained by the sight of sadism and suffering. And like I Spit on Your Grave, it's made artlessly. I was prepared to not care about that if the gameplay was any good. Going into Rance, I knew that it was an eroge game and that there would be sex and nudity.
The key line in Ebert's short review comes towards the end: "I have never condemned the use of violence in films if I felt the filmmakers had an artistic reason for employing it." His condemnation of the film is not so much that it contains rape and murder-after all, he gave Sudden Impact three stars three years later-so much as that "it is made artlessly.there is no reason to see this movie except to be entertained by the sight of sadism and suffering." Ebert's review describes his disgust with both the film and the audience members who were hooting and commenting at the screening he attended. It's a film about four men who rape a woman three times, and the woman gets revenge by killing all of them one by one. I've never seen the film, but I know enough from Ebert's review that I would never want to.
In trying to figure out how I was going to talk about Rance, I was reminded of Roger Ebert's 1980 review of I Spit on Your Grave.