into an engine obviously not designed for them to keep you company. The only story to speak of is one long, drawn out cutscene at the beginning, whose dark composition only served to send you further into a dark, brooding depression from which there was no escape. The game was only marginally better. You played an executive, who for some unknowable reason, had a giant knife strapped to her suddenly blue arm, who fought these oddly penis shaped(and coloured) beasts for no real reason anyone could tell. After traversing the nearly barren complex(a feat made harder by the constant attacks by enemies whose strength increases as you head towards the exit), you play for a little longer before having your soul crushed by a bleak and certain ending. The battle system was a miracle of Dragon Warrior style simplicity, without any of the things which made the battle system in Dragon Warrior any good. Attack. Defend. Item. and there were maybe a dozen items in all scattered around.

In Nietzsche SE, the strange blue arm is gone, replaced by a gun. The barren complex has had some NPCs added, and at least one game ending bug lurks within one of the NPCs. A new menu item in the battle system, magic, boasts two generic spells. And a cutscene has been tweaked.

Wow, I know I got my moneys worth for that SE label!

The game is based on the aging quagmire of hacked together graphics demos and scripting tweaks known as the JRPG engine. This lends the game some degree of pureQB street cred(except for the keyhandler), but little else. The scripting system is as robust as a wine glass in an opera house, with the slightest error causing a full system crash. The vaunted "Battle Script" feature is probably the worst designed piece of garbage ever placed into a real-time battle system, so archaic that no game made with the engine has any spells significantly different from one another, because nobody can handle it's strange, java-like syntax. Even worse, the much lauded graphics engine has a variety of badly fixed quirks which show up as disappearing sprites at the top of the screen, among other things.

Controls are inconsistent, with the escape key bringing up the menu on the main screen, but acting as a "go back" button in battles. Other than that, they are acceptable, owing mostly to the ASM keyhandler which is pretty hard to do wrong. The game allegedly has gamepad support, but it hasn't really been tested this time through, since I'm in Windows 2000, which doesn't have DOS gamepad support.

The graphics are horrible. There might be a way to pussyfoot around the fact, but the fact remains. While Quest for a King, whose graphics make up the vast majority of the sprites, has had a few minor upgrades in terms of art style since the release of the first Nietzsche, Nietzsche SE hasn't had the benefit of any art upgrades at all. The game is exactly the way it was, grapically, after the 48 hour competition. It's graphics are bland and ameteurish, obviously not the work of an actual artist, but of a feeble weekend warrior.

The music would be a high point, if any of it was original. There are a couple good songs used in the game, driven by the MusicSlave windows/dos midi shim by Nekrophidius, but they're all taken from Quest for a King, and the lack of variety in even that hurts this game considerably. The game only takes about an hour to complete at most, but by the time you've finished it(if you were to torture yourself enough to do so), you'd have turned off the music. There's only so many times you can hear the same few bars played over and over.

In this end, this is a pathetic attempt at a game. It was made in 48 hours with a few more hours tacked on for "polish", and it shows. The only thing saving it from a 0 is the fact that there could someday be a sequel or another remake. May god have mercy on the souls at One Man Army Games, for unleashing this pox upon our community.
 

--SJ Zero didn't want people to think he was biased.