I've been playing MoF on hard for a week now, and it's really fun. What surprises me is that I feel that this game's hard difficulty is "harder" than other game's, but maybe it's just an false impression.
Also, NOW I understand why people always complain about VoWG. Holy moly, I already managed to get to Kanako's last spell 4 times now, and every time I just lose all my lives (though the best ammount of lives I've managed to store in until that was 2). I'm planning to try to gather up more lives for stage 6, so I can get more tries at that spellcard.