This is neat game. Its a Mega man clone with a very different story and conceptualization. Yet it really does play like a classic Rockman. A lot of attention to detail went into different aspects of the game to recreate Mega Man. Some people frown upon this game because it looks like a rip off, but the whole thing is so darn artsy. It has a great sense of humor and cleverly inserts references to both the Mega Man games and other popular series. This is exactly what you'd expect a fan work (doujinshi) to look like!

The game also has some lovely twists in it.. There are secrets, cheats, cute anime girls, and a arcade version without dialogue/banter and a more verbose mode for those of us who just have shit taste and like anime filler regardless of what its about :)

It's about magical girls and waifu-ism.

The basic premise is that rather than robots you represent a group of these female witches who are essentially the last remnants of magic users from ancient eras. These people were born with 'the gift' and are doomed to ostracization, but the Blade of the Rose Cross offer each other support.

Why only women? No more questions!

It's not a very serious story or premise and I thought that was okay. The only complaint I have of this game is that the release I played was a real bitch to get going on a modern western system for some reason. I fumbled around with it for maybe an hour and wasn't sure if i could get it to work. Turns out installling some japanese language support (as recommended by the japanese vendor of this software) was the trick to getting it to work.

I couldn't seem to get the game to have widescreen resolution, but I was thrilled it's been translated and plays with a joypad out of the box. For some reason the game was running slow for me than what I saw in videos. About half speed to maybe 66% That made it a bit easier (and I am certainly not complaining)

The game has an awkward save system as well as the classic mega man password system. You can continue a stage after 3 deaths as many times as you like. So, you really can just keep pushing and wont find yourself at the beginnning of the game. This was one of my favorite things because I could NEVER complete those games without cheats and this one I actually could, and did! I was worried though towards the end that the final boss would be impossible. You must make every shot count and cannot miss but there was a trick to doing it right (that I saw in a video.) The game is not terribly hard. It wants to challenge you but wants you to win.

This was a lot better than I had expected it to be. The theme and style was really good. It looked a bit like a 32x/Turbo-CD game with some redbook audio/voiceover stuff coming from CD mixed in with some nice filter effects like fog and stuff in the background.

I believe I had read that generally the second game is liked more than the first, so I look forward to it.

I would totally recommend this game to capcom fans of yesteryear. It ain't shovel knight but the girls in it are really cute, and the whole thing is pretty darn creative for an indie game.

Finally, there are two main versions of the game (excluding more current japanese patched versions not avail in english) and I played the "[erka:es] The Best- Edition". The one on steam is a later version with some differences. It would seem the Steam one has better gameplay improvements in addition to working out of the box (I'm going to assume that) in addition to having subs for the voice overs. While I did not play the Steam release, I would be inclined to conclude it is the actual best version.