Alice Soft games made freeware

[Scythe]

Link: http://retropc.net/alice/

Alice Soft has provided most of their old titles (30 games) as freeware, including the early installments of the well known Rance RPG series. These are mostly RPGs and multiple choice adventure games, pretty much all of them erotic in nature.

Caveat: All of these games are in Japanese. They require you to either run Japanese unicode (or whatever it's called) or run the programs in Microsoft AppLocale (what I do). Also, working knowledge of the Japanese language is highly recommended or most of these games become pretty much unplayable.

I didn't provide screenshots, I'm trying to get all of them downloaded and tested. So far I can say the old ones are pretty hard to play with my limited Japanese.

There are requirements to hosting them that I don't think we can provide, even should we want to, but for the freeware hunters out there this could be interesting (old) news.

[Pater Alf]

Sounds interesting! Were any of their games ever translated? I ask because I have no knowledge of the japanese language at all and some of their games seem to be quite nice...

[Scythe]

To the best of my knowledge, not a single one of these games were ever translated, though there might be unofficial translations out there (check Hongfire perhaps). However, their later Rance games, at least #6 was pretty easy to figure out. Sadly, it was not released as freeware (still sold, I guess).

[Scythe]

If trying to play the old Rance games, this site is useful:

http://alicesoft.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Rance_series

[Scythe]

If anybody's wondering what the fuss is about (actually there is no fuss), there is now a fan translation of the original Rance - Quest for Hikari. If you want to see what Japanese adult games looked like in 1989, you can find it here, along with translations for (not free/abandonware) Rance 02 official 2009 remake and Rance 8, Rance Quest demo: http://rancetranslationproject.blogspot.com/

There is also a fan translation of the most excellent strategy RPG Rance 7, Sengoku Rance: http://yandere.gray7.com/?page_id=90 I'd say it's worth finding and buying the game with this translation, it's certainly been worth the 300+ hours I've put into it.

With Rance 8 being released in Japan this month, that makes Rance the longest running adult game series in the world!