Speaking of translation issues: the Rance series actually had quite a bit of translator drama...
The first Rance game that got an English translation was Sengoku - that one got a fan translation in 2009.
Sengoku became an instant hit in the West, so of course people were eager for more. Not to mention that Sengoku's main route (and canon ending) end with a pretty big cliffhanger.
Rance Quest, the sequel, came out in 2011. So you'd think that the fan translators would get to work with that one right away, right?
Welllll... they did. But then that particular fan translation circle struck a deal with Mangagamer, and then they were like "Nope. We're gonna sit on this translation until Mangagamer decides to publish it. Go buy Beat Blades Haruka if you want Mangagamer and Alicesoft to even consider the idea of selling a Rance title in the West".
The translation was like 95% done at that point, so... as you can guess, people were salty.
To make matters worse, it wasn't until 2021 when the English version of Rance Quest was released. The Western fans got blueballed for a full decade.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg, really...
Other fan translation outfits decided to cope by translating the older Rance titles instead. One group did the old versions of Rance 1, 2 and 3, along with Rance 4 and a few other minor games, while a different group did Kichikuou Rance in 2014. Neither of those groups had been involved with the Sengoku Rance fan translation.
So, what happened next? Tons of drama and slapfights about the 'proper' transliteration of names, that's what.
One of the most visible and annoying results of this is the name of the town カスタム, which would render to 'kasutamu' if you go for the most literal transliteration. But it's also clearly a non-Japanese name (like most names in the Rance series), and as the Japanese scripts are ass for rendering anything in any language other than Japanese, this is where the headaches start.
Now, rendering カスタム as 'Custom' would be a pretty natural choice, right? The Rance series is full of gratuitous tongue-in-cheek English anyway. And indeed, this is also how the original Sengoku Rance translation and the Kichikuou Rance fan translation rendered this name.
...except the translator of the group who handled Rance 1 through 4 apparantly had a bug up her ass about this one as she insisted on transliterating this as... 'Kathtom'. Which is borderline impronouncible and doesn't even make sense.
Mangagamer's official translations ditched that bullshit and reverted to 'Custom'. So 'Custom' is what the town is called in both the earliest translations and all of the official translations. But
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still insists on calling the town 'Kathtom' because apparantly nobody there got the memo yet....and then there's the lovely little fact that some of the other official translations are being slow-walked as well.
Lerd0 already mentioned that the translation of the Rance 3 remake is taking forever. That one's not even that big of a loss, because there's still the fan translation of the original version of Rance 3. The remake is a nice little extra (and it does contain some tweaks and retcons), but it's not like you're missing out on major plotlines this way.
But then there's Rance X... which is the grand finale of the entire setting. The scale and scope of this game are absolutely massive, covering the entire continent and including as many characters and factions as possible. Oh, and did I mention that Rance X is actually two games?
Rance X hasn't been translated yet - and there's absolutely no way that we'll see a Rance X translation before the Rance 3 remake's translation is done... and that translation is being slow-walked too.
Right now, those are the only Rance games that haven't been translated yet. But even so, we'll be very, very lucky if we'll get to see a Rance X translation before the end of this decade.
TL;DR: at least almost every Rance game has been translated by now, but don't go count on being able to play Rance X anytime soon. With the current situation and Mangagamer's track record, learning Japanese would probably be quicker...
