Rosenkreuzstilette (

2007

) ½

What sane person could look at the landscape of gaming and conclude that there just aren't enough Megaman games? In addition to the six main games on the NES, there's a spin-off series, Megaman X, that started on the SNES and has 8 entries. There are also six Megaman Battle Network games and four Megaman Zero games. That's only looking at the main series too, and not counting all the myriad spin-offs, ports, and remakes out there. In total, there are more than a hundred games in this franchise! Taken altogether it constitutes a veritable avalanche of cyan. Even in 2007, before Megaman 9 [2008], Megaman 10 [2010], and Megaman 11 [2018], it seems hard to believe that anyone could possibly want more Megaman games given the sheer number of options available to them. So I have to hand it to developer [erka:es] who saw this saturated market and decided that they could compete too by making a game that was virtually identical to the old NES Megaman games. The only real difference is that [erka:es] has replaced the robot masters with anime girls and given the resulting game the extremely cumbersome title of Rosenkreuzstilette (seriously, it's times like this that I'm glad I do written reviews, not video reviews). Rosenkreuzstilette's mere existence is all the more impressive, because it's unique selling point, being a Megaman game with cute anime girls, was arguably already covered by Megaman Legends [1997].

It may sound like I'm down on Rosenkreuzstilette, but nothing could be further from the truth. Originality is overrated. It's not that innovation is bad, or that it's something that artists shouldn't continually strive for, but it's far from the only important thing to look for when evaluating a work. It's great that there are games expanding the range of the medium and pioneering new genres but there's something to be said for the games that do almost nothing original and instead opt to take an existing concept and polish it to a mirror's sheen. If you lack the former the medium stagnates and everything starts to feel the same and if you don't have the latter each new innovation gets made and then discarded before it can be used to its full potential. Even the best games, in this case, Megaman 2 [1988], have room for improvement that can only be reached with careful iterations by people who understand what makes these games great. The guys who put in that work may not be as praised as the visionaries, but in my mind, they are just as vital.

To be fair, the game's plot is more elaborate than most Megaman games. It taking place in a fantasy world where magic exists but until recently it's practitioners were persecuted by the ruling theocracy. About a generation ago though, the Magi revolted against the church, and after a grueling war, the two combatants reached a compromise where Magi who loyally served the church would be tolerated and become Rosenkreuzstilette: the Blades of the Rose Cross. Apparently, I'm not the only one who thinks this title is a bit of a mouthful, as the order is frequently abbreviated to RKS. The player takes on the role of a member of the RKS, one Spiritia Rosenberg, several decades after the founding of the RKS. Trouble is brewing and while returning back home after a long mission abroad she discovers that the other members of the RKS, led by Count Michael Zeppelin, have revolted against the Church and have seized key points across the whole country. Spiritia heads out to figure out what is happening and quell the revolt. All the story is delivered in the style of a visual novel with still images of the characters speaking to each other from either side of the screen. This works pretty well, but unfortunately, each boss has a dialogue scene before fighting them and if you get a game over (which happens a lot in this game, because it's really fricking tough) you'll have to click through the whole thing again when you get back to the boss arena. Fortunately, there's an option to play the game in “Arcade Mode” where the dialogue is stripped out and you get right to the action.

The character designs are all over the place. This is supposed to be a Germanic-style fantasy world, but some of the RKS members' costumes look way more like contemporary fashion. Like the one girl who wears what looks like a speedo one-piece and the other that goes into battle wearing a hoody. There's also one boss that looks like a ten-year-old dressed up as a succubus (if you haven't guessed by this point, yes this game comes from Japan), who feels out of place both for reasons of good taste but also because none of the other characters are sexualized to the same degree. Indeed, none of the character designs really seem like they are from the same world. Rather, it seems like they are all just things that the illustrator thought looked cool at the time. Nothing has been done to give them a unifying theme or make these girls look like they are part of the same pseudo-military organization. They are all certainly unique but their seemingly random nature detracts from the immersion.

Being a Megaman-clone the structure is very predictable. After a short prologue stage, you're brought to a stage select screen where you're given a choice between which of the eight levels you want to tackle first. Beat the boss and you'll unlock their weapon, which you can switch to on the fly. Once all eight bosses are defeated, the path to Dr. Wiley's Count Michael Zeppelin's castle opens up. From there the game becomes a linear progression of stages, each topped off with its own boss. Then, before facing off with the final boss you have to clear all 8 starting bosses again, one after the other. About the only way that Rosenkreuzstilette differs from the old Megaman games is that after clearing Zeppelin's castle there is a plot twist and a second multi-part castle stage starts up, ending with the game's true final boss.

It's not just the overall structure of the game either that Rosenkreuzstilette is borrowing from Megaman, it's even specific obstacles and level themes. Take Luste Teuber's stage for instance, which is set high up in the air and features bird enemies that drop exploding eggs and fan enemies that can blow you off cliffs if you're not careful. These are the same enemies that can be seen in Airman's stage in Megaman 2 [1988]. Indeed, one of the last obstacles in the level is a series of moving platforms where you have to destroy the enemy riding on them before you can safely jump to the next, exactly like the sequence that precedes Airman's boss arena. Some of this copying is even more overt, like the first stage in Count Zeppelin's castle, which has some tricky jumps that are pixel-perfect copies of identical sections in the first level of Dr. Wiley's Castle in Megaman 2 [1988]. Other stages do a much better job of incorporating new ideas while keeping the core recognizable. Liebea Palesch's level, for instance, is modeled off of Elecman's stage in Megaman [1987] but includes several obstacles and threats that are completely different from what was in the NES original.

Of course, not every stage is just a knock-off of an existing Megaman level, some are utterly unique with no precursor in any Megaman game (well at least the ones that I've played, there are more than 100 of them remember). The highlight of these has got to be Schwer-Muta Casasola Merkle's stage which is loaded to the brim with tricks and traps. There's even one on the very first screen, where if you follow your natural inclination to go to the right you'll almost certainly blunder right into an instant death trap. That's to say nothing of the numerous fakeouts and traps sprinkled throughout the rest of the stage, from blocks that look solid but aren't to one-ups that will lead to your certain death if you try to grab them. There's even a trap that relies on your knowledge of old Megaman games, where a creature that resembles Eddie, the helpful item dispensing robot from Megaman 4 [1991], appears and drops a power-up that will hurt you if you touch it. If the whole game were like this, it would just be an insufferable troll game like Trap Adventure 2 [2016] or I Wanna Be the Guy: The Movie: The Game [2007]. However, when it only happens in one level, it's a rather charming break in the action. Moreover, it shows that [erka:es] is capable of a lot more than just copy-pasting ideas from Megaman.

This game is seriously hard. I'm somewhat ashamed to admit it, considering how much time I've sunk into old Megaman games over the years, but Rosenkreuzstilette kicked my ass. The fact that it took me five or six tries to clear the prologue boss speaks for itself. I got into the swing of things after that, clearing the first few robot masters anime girls with unpronounceable German names, without much trouble. From there though, things got considerably tougher. Before long I was falling back on the old standby of looking up which boss was weak to which weapon and tackling the stages accordingly. Sure, you could theoretically beat all the bosses with your starting weapon, but I sure wouldn't want to attempt it. This is, of course, perfectly in keeping with the old Megaman games which, while not especially difficult for their era, were still hard enough to inspire multiple songs lamenting their less forgiving moments. Just about the only break this game gives you comes in the form of an item you can use to restore your health completely at any point, the equivalent to the E-tanks in the old Megaman games. Unlike the old Megaman games these items stick around in your inventory after you get a game-over screen, so if you run into a couple of nasty spike traps you won't lose them.

Rosenkreuzstilette is faithful to a fault in its imitation of the old NES Megaman games. Some things were better left in the past, and nothing in this game is more archaic than the password system. Instead of being able to save your game like every game since 1991, Rosenkreuzstilette takes you to a password screen where you're given a grid of numbers and letters. At least the old Megaman games would have a page in the back of their instruction manual where you could write down these passwords and always have them at hand. This adds nothing to the actual fun part of the game and only means that if I lose the notebook where I wrote down all the passwords I'll have to start the whole game over from the start.

Less frustrating is the game's decision to include a limited lives system, which while it has fallen out of favor in recent years, fits quite well here. The stages are all short, and since running out of lives only kicks you back to the start of the stage (rather than the start of the game) the penalty for a game over screen is still somewhat forgiving. The eight main stages, with one notable exception, are all pretty manageable as well, so after a few times, you should be able to tackle anything they have to throw at you. The above-mentioned exception is Freudia Neuwahl's stage which uses the one-hit-kill lasers that were unique to Quickman's stage in Megaman 2 [1988]. The difference here is that here there are way more lasers and a way smaller margin for error. It felt like something from I Wanna be the Guy: The Movie: The Game [2007] rather than Megaman [1987]. That this absolute beast of a stage was topped off by a boss who was, without doubt, the hardest of the eight robot masters magical girls. Even knowing her weakness and having two energy tanks, I still barely managed to scrape by with a win. Still, this is the exception that proves the rule, as for most of the rest of the game the limited continues didn't bother me at all. Well, at least until I got to some of the later bosses in the castle stages anyway.