Goblin Slayer Another Adventurer: Nightmare Feast is a strategy RPG developed by Apollosoft and Mebius. It is a spinooff story that takes place in the same universe as the hit-anime, Goblin Slayer. The Anime went on for two full seasons and a supposed third season which has yet to be confirmed for a release.
The game puts the player in control of a young girl given the role of "Guild Master" to deal with all forms of dangerous tidings. People go to her in hopes of achieving safety from the ever-growing threat of goblins and other terrifying threats. Though the story is humble and not earth-shaking, a lot of memorable characters are met along the way.
Utilizing the many facilities such as the shop, guild, and micro-management of all sorts of wannabe guild members, Nightmare Feast manages to be a passable experience to check. Of course, as with most anime-adapted video games, a lot is left to be desired, Goblin Slayer is no exception. Where does it go wrong? Find out in our Goblin Slayer Another Adventurer: Nightmare Feast review!
The Goblin Slayer himself, for those familiar with the anime as well as several heroes from the original anime, do join you on your adventure, however, Goblin Slayer himself comes with many limitations on what you can do with him. For starters, you are unable to edit his equipment, but he still levels up and learns new abilities much like everyone else.
This felt somewhat obtuse once you recruit him several story missions in, but any time he speaks, you know you are in for a snicker. He hates goblins, he obsesses over their complete and utter destruction and not a single thing will sway his obsession. One would ask, does he have an actual name? Well, not only does that never get discovered, but none of the playable characters, or any character for that matter have a name.
The hero, Guild Master is called Guild Master even when you examine her character sheet. Some recruitable characters have very strange names due to this design choice, one archer I recruited for example was simply named "Gemstone Lover", and a tank-type character I had was called "Superior Steel."
Due to ESRB's rating of giving Goblin Slayer a "T" for teen rating, it's safe to confirm that there are no goblin rape scenes. Sadly, it's true. The most iconic scene in the first season gets no lip service in this game at all.
The gameplay is kinda hit-or-miss for a SRPG, especially with a lot of more prominent competitors like Triangle Strategy, Tactics Ogre, or the timeless Final Fantasy Tactics games. Some battles allow you to have as many as 10 units in the fray, which certainly does allow a lot of player expression in choosing which of the many recruitable characters to place on the board.
One very strange but welcome feature is how close you can zoom in on the perspective, allowing you to appreciate the decent Pixel sprite art of the characters, and on the flipside, zoom out to see most of the large battlefields. The flow of battle is where things become a little head scratchy.
Controlling around 10 characters sounds good, but it becomes extremely tedious. Enemies are often placed very far from your retinue, causing a lot of the battle to be just you dragging every single one of your units across the field one by one via the range of how many tiles they can move. It gets annoying very fast as nearly every battle has enemies spread so far apart.
Once you begin to engage with the enemies, you will quickly learn that they are quite powerful if you play on the standard difficulty. If the guild master dies, it is instant game over. Goblins and enemies alike will always aim to gang up on the weakest of your characters, quickly dispatching them if you place them poorly, and surprise you with very devastating ranged attacks, so plan carefully.
Healing resources are usually very scarce and can be costly when you purchase them from the guild item shop. I was pleased by this as it made consumables have more of an impact on the game. Having units perish in battle in most cases is an acceptable loss.
Boss units usually will one-shot your characters and in most cases. It will be nearly insurmountable to keep a lot of your melee fighters standing because of the sheer amount of damage enemy units will start doing fairly after the early stages of the game. Grinding is possible via optional training missions, but the experience gain curve will quickly curb benefit once you out-level the available training missions.
Unlike in Final Fantasy Tactics, players can overcome with sheer power and wise utilization of managing characters via tinkering. I regret to say that Goblin Slayer has very little tinkering and character building aside from choosing which units you wish to commit to, and the very minimalistic gear upgrading feature which is very sparse.
The music in Goblin Slayer is decent. The training missions had a very mellow but enjoyable sound to them, as well as some of the story missions. The sound effects on the other hand certainly left a lot to be desired. A lot of the attack animations you do don't feel impactful because of the very weak sound effects.
Goblin Slayer Another Adventurer: Nightmare Feast was never supposed to be a game that aims to be true greatness. It's from an anime that fell off very fast and hearing about this game was the only thing that made me even remember it ever existed. I'm glad it did because it was a pretty unique and enjoyable experience despite its shortcomings.
Much like Triangle Strategy, both games suffer from having to compete with Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre. No SRPG has ever or likely will ever come close to achieving such greatness. You're better off revisiting those two classics if you need to scratch the strategy RPG itch.