Rosenkreuzstilette Freudenstachel

After a million delays, I was really starting to lose hope in this game ever coming out, but it finally got a release on October 20th!  Rosenkreuzstilette Freudenstachel is the sequel to a 2007 game called Rosenkreuzstilette, which I'll abbreviate as RKS from now on.  It is a Megaman clone doujin game with a fair bit of Castlevania influence as well.  It features an almost all-female cast with voice acting and some of the best music I've ever heard in any doujin work.  It and Megamari are easily the two most well known Megaman styled doujin games.  The main gameplay in RKS is very similar to standard Megaman fare: there are initially 8 robot masters(or German girls, in the case of RKS) which can be tackled in any order, and then afterwards comes the Dr. Wily fortress stages which are usually a bit more difficult.

I was a huge fan of the original RKS, so a good portion of this review will just be comparisons of RKSF to the original game.  In RKSF you take control of Freudia, who was a boss from the 1st game.  She was easily one of the most popular characters from RKS, and even had her own cool duel theme!  She has most of the standard post-Megaman 3 options that Spiritia, the main character of the first RKS has: she can jump, shoot, and slide.  However, the main difference in the two lies in the shot.  Freudia's Freudenstachel weapon can rapid fire if the shot button is held down.  The shots come out in a sine wave pattern, which make it very useful for clearing out enemies during stages.  But since the Freudenstachel has a rapid fire mechanic, it can't be charged!  Which means that trying to do the equivalent of a Buster only playthrough against bosses is very difficult, since the damage she'll be doing is miniscule.  For some reason, the Freudenstachel also has its own weapon meter, though it's a bit misleading because it implies that she has limited ammo.  Even if the weapon meter is completely drained, she can still fire off shots: she just can't hold down the button to rapid fire anymore.

Another minor difference is in special weapons.  Like Tia, Freudia gets special weapons after defeating each of the initial 8 girls.  But since Freudia is the ice girl of the game, all of her special weapons are ice-themed versions of the other girls' powers.  They're still pretty cool and distinct though.  I do want to give a special mention to the Kopiekreisel weapon(the one obtained from beating Trauare), which I thought was completely useless at first.  It has poor range and a short active time, but it has a very unique ability of doing TONS of damage to any enemy that is in a guarding state.  A lot of the enemies and bosses in RKSF use shields or have attacks that make themselves invulnerable, so the Kopiekreisel can be really strong when used right.

All of the characters from the original RKS return in this game, and most of them have received redesigns!  The new designs look really good, and in particular I'm a big fan of the new Trauare, Zorne, and Sichte.  There are also some new characters introduced who also have some pretty good designs.


Freudia in Eifer's stage.  The bloodthirsty Gargoyle is originally part of the background, and will wake up if you get near it

On to more gameplay related topics, I feel that one of the biggest improvements that RKSF has over RKS is in its level design.  In the original RKS, some of the stages felt way too short, and I really felt that the first half of the game with the 8 girls was weak overall.  In particular, I felt that some of the girls' stages like Zorne's and Liebea's were really flat and uninspired.  That was not the case for the 2nd half of the game, and I wouldn't be surprised if the developers had spent more time working on the second half than the first.  There were still some great moments in the first half though(like the battle with Freudia), but the level design was just really uneven.  RKSF does not have any of these issues, as all of the levels are interesting.  I was also very happy to see RKSF step up the difficulty level from RKS.  The platforming segments are trickier, and the bosses have much more varied attack patterns.  My first playthrough of the game was so embarrassing, as I died over and over to certain bosses trying to figure out their movements.  There are also some segments of the game that feel more like playing a Touhou game than a Megaman one, lol.

Like RKS, RKSF also has a special mode that lets you play as a different character.  In RKS, it was Grolla, and in RKSF it's Pamela.  Pamela is easily my favorite of the new characters introduced in RKSF, so I have no probems with this!  She plays like Zero, as she has a three-hit sword combo, can charge her sword, and has the ability to dash and climb on walls.  But she takes double damage compared to Freudia and doesn't get special weapons after defeating the girls so she's stuck with only 1 weapon for the whole game.  Like Grolla, playing as Pamela is a lot of fun because you can just blaze through the platforming segments with the dash and wall climbing ability.  Bosses become much more difficult because you have to get in close to attack and you take extra damage.  So you can think of this as the Hard Mode of the game.

As far as complaints about the game go, I don't really have any.  I feel that RKSF improved upon RKS in almost every way.  I should mention that the original RKSF release is quite buggy though: my game crashed a couple of times in my 1st playthrough.  So be sure to patch the game as soon as you can if you get it.  Right now, the newest patch is 1.02a, which can be obtained on the official site.  Something I also found weird was that later on in the game, there is a boss that can be defeated instantly if you hit it with its weakness.  It is pretty funny, but I'm not really sure why it's in the game.

To wrap up, everything that made RKS great is also in RKSF, so go buy the game and play it if you haven't already done so!