How do I see Freudenstachel?

Yea, two Rosenkreuzstilette posts in a row.

Not sure if I've really played enough of Rosenkreuzstilette Freudenstachel to give a full heads-on review, so I'll just list my own personal pros and cons.

=Pros=

*State-of-the-art visuals, scenery and sprites.
*Great character design.
*A very in-depth storyline.
*Decent level structure.
*Music selection is much improved over the original game I found myself shedding tears of joy over Trauare's level theme.

=Cons=

*Japanese vocals got repetitive; I found myself muting them.
*Once again, enemy sprites (and some items, tiles, etc) are flat-out taken from other games, re-colored, and just scaled to a larger size. Some of these edited sprites do not fit with the gothic structure of the game as a whole, coming off as cartoonish, and it seems like it wants to cram in "I'm Mega Man 11", with stuff like Strudel's Not-Rush ice sculptures as if we didn't know this was a Mega Man clone from the start. There is a clear difference between tributes/refrencing and theft. Just see Trucks and Skulls. I see no Birds with extensive shading and higher quality in that game.

EDIT: Okay, I see where I may have gone there. Remember when I showcased Fegaman in a previous post? Well, that game uses the original unaltered sprites from both Super Mario and Mega Man, but unlike Rosenkreuzstilette, Fegaman has the balls to admit it's a non-profit fan game and credit where all its material originated, while WOMI never put in "Original Concept © Capcom and all respective owners" on the [erka:es] startup screen.

*Controls seem a bit slippery at times, especially in underwater segments. Freudia seems very heavy and hard to control in water while Cheep Cheeps (yes, the Mario enemy, with the same design) attempt to drown you. I dunno; swimming just worked out so much better in Mega Man 8.
*Schwer-Muta's level is flat out filled with trial-and-error segments, filling it with severe fake difficulty. Thankfully it's not a bad as the first game, but having to fall down a pit that looks bottomless and a quiz room that asks "What classic Mega Man weapon does Freudenstachel allude to?" somehow brings it up a notch. Real difficulty, like those featured in MegaMari, are more welcome.
*Freudia is presented with no new abilities that the protagonist of the previous game, Spiritia Rosenberg, didn't have. No crouching (ala Magical Doropie and Darkwing Duck, the later being a Capcom game), and no 8-way firing abilities (like any Contra game, or Bass in Mega Man 10).
*Taking a cue from the Mega Man X games, upgrades aside from the item that gives you Beat Strudel that enhance Freudia's power, speed, and other factors.
*Freudenstachel uses the same Mega Man 4 passwords (yes, still no proper save feature, despite Mega Man 8, 9, and 10 having such) as the original, yet follows the "Doc Robot" patterns with the Schwarzkreuz. While not what I'd like, Mega Man 3's passwords would allow support for remembering which of the four Schwarzkreuz were defeated.
*Many, if not all, of Freudia's learnable powers seem next to useless, in ways similar to Mega Man 5. This is where I mention Rockman 4 Minus Infinity, where the abilities you learn from the Robot Masters in this game are true upgrades over the Mega Buster, with at least one advantage over the weapon you start with, thus making you want to use those when necessary rather than sticking to your default weapon. Try for yourself and see what I mean.
 *In contrast, any weapon should have a good effect on any boss, with each having resistances to specific (between zero to two) weapons and a weakness to one weapon, which this one weapon should deal double damage.
*A pop-up help screen should be present detailing all the nooks and crannies of every power up accumulated thus far, including upgrades if present. See Rockman 4 Minus Infinity.
*No W-Tank (recovers all the energy for one weapon) or S-Tank (recovers all life and weapon energy for all weapons) support, just your basic E-Tank.
*Lack of shops, present in every Mega Man game since 7.
*Lack of any additional game modes, the biggest being "Challenge" and "Endless". Has WOMI ever played the ninth or tenth Mega Man games?

Just a quick reminder, these are my personal opinions, and I'm sorry if you don't like them. But as I say with people making Breakout clones, it would really, and I mean really help if you played more than just the official Mega Man games and maybe one or two fan clones. Rosenkreuzstilette was the first of the series, so it was fair to expect so little. But there was a massive four-year gap between this and Freudenstachel, so I was hoping for some true balls-to-the-wall gameplay that at least gave out new enemy types with appearances not used by Nintendo or Capcom. While I did enjoy getting it, and it does have it's moments of fame, the first few minutes afterwards of playing and having to think "Knockoff graphics" and "Unimproved concepts" killed the joy for me. Honestly, a big disappointment for me after all the hype, but that's not to say others, like yourself won't enjoy it. If you liked the original you'll certainly love the second, but as for someone that had to mod the first game to get some enjoyment, I can't really say a vanilla Freudenstachel is for me. -___-

Here's your Freudenstachel fan-made fan kit.

Every graphic from the game in one convent download. All else I mention; I do not want to get a good old C&D for pirating copies of the original game. If you want it badly but are unable to reach DLsite for the stupidest of reasons, there's not much I can do but recommend other Mega Man clones or at least ones with a similar but not identical gameplay style.

http://www.mediafire.com/?899gf5w90n92i5q

Oh yeah, a one-panel fanfiction. Should be tolerable, especially considering how the girls speak in their native language.

What?, you thought they were going to be talking in Japanese?

How NOT to "update" an iOS Game.

Seems as if some don't know how to give out changes to games without destroying the feel of prior versions. The subject for today is Atomic Ball from Meritum Soft, which recently turned from an addicting and appealing Breakout clone to a cash cow money-sucking creature with a similar gold/currency system alike hits such as Temple Run, Draw Something, and the Circus Atari reboot, requiring you to pay much more than you would have before just to unlock all its features.

See for yourself, an epic(?) comparison of 1.0 and 2.0.

Freudenstachel: DISCO NIGHT START

Yep, THE Rosenkreuzstilette sequel Freudenstachel is finally live. And I personally found it more enjoyable than the previous game.

I'm not giving out full opinions until I play enough of the game, but a quick summary: Music is much more fitting into the levels than before (of the ones I played thus far), and WOMI even inserted a few Super Mario Bros. references alongside the plethora of Mega Man ones. Now if only there was a proper crouch mechanism as well as a standard save feature so I don't have to take screenshots of the password screens.

But that's not harming the fundamentals in any way. Give it a whack, I say, we waited four years for this!

Collect your copy here. Just please don't go messing about the site and stumble upon a NSFW section.

Freudenstachel; LETS PARTY

Corrected a few things based on advice from TDOMMX.
And corrected some more.


After me and many others having to wait four years through development hell, the well-hyped sequel to Rosenkreuzstilette will be released this Saturday. And even if I'm not demonstrating my levels of excitement as much as most of the fan base, I am eager to dive into Freudenstachel and give it a closer look.

Keep in mind I'm not going to play just one level and then write up a negative review with no valid criticisms present, as I did for the first game, I'll give an in-depth look though the prologue stage and the initial eight levels (planning to conquer at least half of them, either up to the boss or boss included) before I cite my opinions. And before you ask, I do have early thoughts on the game based on pre-release screens and information (many of which I got from following the blog Schwer and Schwer Alike) which I'll go over quickly in my own perspectives.

The game, as you probably all know, is a Mega Man clone playing under the viewpoint of Freudia Neuwahl, whom was a boss in the first Rosenkreuzstilette (and the only of the eight to share unique traits and have a significant place in the plot), going on to battle a crew of black-magic users (Word along the Grapeline calls them "Dark Magi") known as the Schwarzkreuz, or Black Cross, led by Pamela Arwig, in addition to dealing with the same girls from the first game Spiritia Rosenberg had to defeat herself, alongside newcomer Dolis taking the place of Freudia in an all-new environment raging with plant-life and Guts Man lifts. All the levels of the returning characters look similar with almost identical tile sets, but with new layouts, making Freudenstachel seem in ways a "1.5" entry and in others a true sequel.

Excluding Liebea and Schwer-Muta, the other Magi users have undergone a "timeskip" in their clothing, now being presented with more advanced outfits (i.e. Trauare Wrede looks more like a warrior, Sichte Meister shreds her clothing for no reason, and Grolla Seyfarth, another fan-favorite, gets upgraded armor and now carries the sword of her deceased grandfather, Raimund Seyfarth, which Raimund's spirit possesses. And of course not to mention the implants. *slaps myself*. Rather than taking their weapons ala Spiritia, Freudia upgrades her main weapon, the Freudenstachel, by combining it with one of her friends' after they fall, thus transforming it into a new weapon (aside from changing the color of Freudia's hair ribbion and cross-shaped blood-stain). Fans speculate that Iris Sepperin, the final boss of the original will return, and much like Grolla from the first game, Black Cross leader Pamela Arwig will become the protagonist in her own side-quest.

This is where my words may become slightly more severe, but please keep in mind I'm not trying to do any harm to the series in any way, just voice my thoughts. For one thing, while perhaps doing the following crucial to the story and the Dark Magi's plans and having new attack methods, why reuse seven of the eight initial bosses when you could have said bosses being new recruits to the RKS, with ID numbers RKS10-12, and 14-17 respectively? With how well WOMI designed the original cast and how many talented Japanese artists volunteered to create Strudel, Dolis, and the entirety of the Black Cross back in '08, the addition of new characters would enable the series to expand further, but in defense, this does spark some "quantity over quality" issues where it's better to have a few characters done well than a bunch with little to no proper backstory given, thus preventing us, the players, from connecting socially to these new characters. If anything, the Black Cross could be larger with five additional members, the runner-up eight (of course including Eifer, Schirach, and the Refrakita Twins) serving as the main bosses with Pamela Arwig afterwards in her own fortress. Again to speak out against myself, this'd render Dolis useless, making her a throwaway character at the last second, and with all this drama about Freudenstachel's tough development process, I'd say not waste a good character. Bottom line, I say keep things the way they are. so we don't have to go through another two seasons of guessing and crazy rumors. Just hope it's done right so the fanbases don't go raging on like Legends 3. Seems Capcom is really diving into some deep chit, so now we need to have the fans fill in after the great Inafune departed from Capcom.

I'm not going to bring up the whole "it's unoriginal bla bla bla" scenario, as I've said what I need to more than enough, whenever it be deviantART, Twitter, or this very blog. Though to add fuel to the fire, one other source for how a proper Mega Man clone could be done right, are all these ROM hacks of the original sextet of NES Mega-Man games, regardless of if it's a Japanese or English person doing all the modding, though for this instance, the one I'm going to bring up is Rockman 4 Minus Infinity, which features a good number of unique twists to the original formula, such as the sloped surfaces that normally didn't come until Mega Man 8, Quick-man lasers that don't kill immediately but appear a little quicker (whenever this is good or bad is up to you) and shorter wait times between death and restarting a level. And not to mention the custom soundtrack for Minus Infinity, while not original compositions, fits very well with their assigned stages. Other hacks would induce alternate game modes, like the "Endless" series that puts you through random rooms where the goal is to survive, and not to mention time attack in Mega Man 9 and 10.

With non-hacked games, there's Fegaman. Just Youtube game footage and just see how heart-pumping it is. Or just look below.



On a similar topic, I want to bring up that a while back, I figured out how to create mods for the original game with the assistance of TDOMMX's RKS Data Archive Decoder and some guides from Ravy Comics (Link to his RKS pages), mainly music and sound modifications, to ones that were a little more intense and went with the stages a single tune was assigned to. A few examples as to what this mod did are below.

*The sound effects are changed to ones that sounded more realistic, and when a Magi user fired off her weapon, the sound it makes is like a basic real-life gun being shot. Later versions eventually had me using equliveant sounds from both Mega Man and Darkwing Duck, though long after I decided against it, as the realistic sound effects made me chuckling every time I fired off a weapon.
*Zorne and Sichte's stages use music from both Super Monkey Ball and Super Monkey Ball 2.
*Schwer-Muta uses the factory music from Kirby 64.
*the Iris Palace bosses use the "armored boss" theme from Super Mario RPG.
*Others I don't really recall from memory, but all the songs were defiantly modded.

Soon after I posted the modded OST on Grolla's Dungeon, so anyone who owned a non-pirated copy only had to replace the needed files to execute the mod successfully. The download itself wasn't the full game, and I never intended on posting the game as a whole. The most I'd see myself doing is just posting everything in the game's "data" folder that could be modded easily pre-decompressed, no .exe file or anything like that.

With that said, Freudenstachel contains files compressed in a different format, which makes the RKS decoder useless in attempting to extract everything. Via e-mail, I got in touch with TDOMMX, and based on what he stated, the Decoder will not be updated due to the extensive amount of piracy the tool had inadvertently caused (Why work on something that'll make it worse?) Even if I could somehow rip all that the game has without some complex tool and still mod it for my own enjoyment, I'd keep the mods to myself if it's for the goods of the bigtime followers of the series' development, and I respect TDOMMX's final thoughts on the scenario, not wanting to force him into a very detailed project. Unmodded or not, I'm sure Freudenstachel will still remain enjoyable even without me gutting everything out.

I'm leaving one final song to end the post.

Not tired yet? Here we GO~~~

Well suprise suprise. This blog's going to get another update. But first, some info regarding the "Aozora Nudity Omake". Once again, this blog is meant to be for all audiences, so for anyone interested, refer to a prior post for proper information. Why I'm bringing this up is ever since I first posted on this series, I added three more characters to the roster, but unfortunately for many, this is an all-men update, as you can probably see below.

Since I want to avoid making Super Justin: the Blog dedicated to this one subject (and quite frankly a pesudo-weak one at that), this will be the only other time you will see me posting in regards to the Aozora Nudity Omake. If you're in dire need of receiving any character updates past Neku Sakuraba, Kohtaro Kuga, and Dante, representing The World Ends with You, Shikigami no Shiro/Castle of Shikigami, and Devil May Cry respectively, I'll gladly keep anyone that contacts me via e-mail (superjustin@optonline.net) informed on either male updates, female updates, or both. And since I tend to do these types of art at a faster pace (since well, they're done for mostly my enjoyment, but I still show them off for anyone that is into these as well), I may be able to accept character recommendations. Keyword: May.

So that finishes up that story arc. But I'm not done. As I reported on Twitter, I seem to be going through a severe artist's block thanks to the Nudity Omake series. This is causing me to have a bit of trouble on which character of the Aozora's Adventure series I could attempt next that just about anyone could enjoy. Of course it very likely will not be one of my female characters since all of the major females of the series are already done. I am leaning towards Keanu, since his simple appearance may make it a bit easier to accomplish drawing him in comparison to a few others (I won't state any examples). And it'll be your basic profile art. No sexy action scene, though I'll try to do a decent background that's not some abstract design. If you want anything sooner, you can follow my other projects on external sites. I'm sure you're bound to get something if you search my name.

Pay attention to what gets inside your magic gauntlet.

Made for Rosenkreuzstilette ~Freudenstachel~'s hyped up release in exactly two weeks from today.

Aozora Nudity Omake. The Basics.

Take note I still want to keep this blog as a whole PG-rated. So I'm only going to display the parts that can be considered "safe for work" on this blog.

As anyone that probably knows about me on deviantART, recently I had posted last month two images; combined featuring eight characters of my home series, Aozora's Adventure entirely nude with enlarged butts. The first of these was dedicated to male characters, the second featured female characters (and was drawn so people would avoid spreading rumors that I may be homosexual. As an artist, I accept the structure and beauty of both genders.)

To avoid criticism regarding these being put on deviantART in excess numbers; I'm going to privately distribute future entries via e-mail upon request from anyone interested. Just e-mail me (superjustin@optonline.net) and specify which characters you'd like me to send for your enjoyment. At this moment, I have Ichigo Kurosaki from Bleach, Nami and Nico Robin from One Piece (the series' logo appears twice because Ichigo splits them), Neuro Nogami from Majin Tantei Nogami Neuro, Masane Amaha from Witchblade, and Madeline from Pirate Madeline, the last of these being a webcomic I read regularly, alongside T.L. Welker's Heartcore (whom it's protagonist, Amethyst Lashiec may get the treatment of this series early on, unless Word of God doesn't recommend it). I can send you renders of all of one specified gender, one character; or the whole lot. Of all things, please tell me if you're legal age to view these, I don't want to give these out to minors. :B

For ones questioning why the men have feminine butts, these are mostly done for my personal enjoyment, not to be taken seriously, but I'm still displaying these so others can see what I'm doing in my spare time, and this could count as filler while I try to figure out which of my characters I should draw next in basic, safe-for-work form, with shading and everything. I promise this will not become the only thing I'll do until the day I die.

Not-so FUN FACTS: I'm still sick with the coughing up mucus and everything, and earlier the day I'm typing this, two of these stupid water beetles invaded my air conditioner, and I ended up ripping apart my window so I could spray just about an entire bottle into parts of the window. Didn't work, so I relied on myself to exterminate the little pests, only to leave my room smelling up badly; and now I'm freezing while I try to air out the rotten smell. I don't think it's helping.
A real FUN FACT: Rosenkreuzstilette ~Freudenstachel~ is stated for release on October 20th, but I will be unable to mod it with a new soundtrack and less asian-esque sound effects since the decoder from TDOMMX of Darkside Translastions cannot be updated to support it. I believe purchasing a digital copy online will net you some extras, like bios for the characters, as this sample of Luste's profile shows.