Review: Goblin Slayer Another Adventurer: Nightmare Feast Lacks Bite

Goblin Slayer is a light novel series which has attracted controversy due to its extreme violence and shocking content. But while the source material has been dealing with book bans, Goblin Slayer Another Adventurer: Nightmare Feast has been in development. Now it’s arrived, bringing with it an original story set within the same universe.

You play as Guild Master, a princess returning to her kingdom after some time away. However, she is reluctant to take the throne and devotes herself to running the local adventurers’ guild instead. Much of the story follows her efforts to recruit new members to the guild while a growing demonic threat grows in the dark corners of the world.

The game is a tactical RPG, clearly inspired by older games like Final Fantasy Tactics. It has an isometric view, characters are all sprites and the environments are low poly.  It’s old school almost to a fault, with every aspect being about as standard as you’d expect from a game from the SNES/PlayStation eras. You fight on a grid, you have a range of units in different classes and you need to organize your party in a way that maximizes damage to the enemy and minimizes it for your side.

Sadly, it doesn’t do much beyond that. It’s the most standard definition tactical RPG you could possibly imagine, seemingly going through the motions by looking up the foundational elements of the genre and leaving it at that. About the most original mechanic is a dice roll to determine just how damaging a critical hit will be. However, this mechanic showed up so sporadically, even when I scored criticals, that I often forgot it was there until I got a dice jump scare again.

This isn’t to say Goblin Slayer Another Adventurer is a bad game. I enjoyed the battles while they were happening. Good positioning proved to be a genuine challenge and my units felt squishier than I first expected, which led me to play more carefully and methodically. There was a degree of satisfaction every time I managed to isolate an enemy unit and whittle its health down while his teammates struggled to get close to me.

There’s a wide range of classes to choose from, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. You have warriors, rogues and barbarians for melee damage, while archers and mages provide support from the rear. Each class type feels noticeably different too, with the rogue’s range being an obvious benefit while archers are some of the best units for getting early damage because of how huge their range is.

Even among different units within a single class, these units all feel unique and interesting to play with. While some abilities are shared, they all get their own unique traits. Some warriors started out much more useful than others, with wider-ranging attacks and more powerful defensive capabilities. It allowed me to build some diverse squads which were ready for anything, and I would often agonize over my choices at the start of a battle.

But if this all sounds like generic positive things anyone could say about any other game in the genre, you’d be correct. Goblin Slayer Another Adventurer plays everything so safe and never once did anything notable with what it had to offer. It even lacked counterattacks, which felt like a huge absence.

Despite being generally enjoyable, combat suffered two huge flaws outside of being generic. The first of these was how unwieldy the enemy range information was. It was only available when looking over the whole map and couldn’t be turned on while moving characters. This involved a lot of leaving the enemy range view, selecting the unit you wanted to move and remembering which specific tile you felt was the right place to send them. Or the reverse, where wanting to double check the enemy range while moving a unit required backing out of two menus and then pressing another button.

The second was how little value spells and extra abilities were given. Battles were often long, with your party vastly outnumbered. This would be fine, if your party didn’t have a laughably small arsenal of special abilities. Characters often start out with 3 spell or ability points, sometimes even as low as a single point, so no matter how good these abilities are, you either use them up too early while thinning the herd or get so paranoid about not getting to use them, you save them and never use them. Either way you’re mostly hitting stuff over and over with basic attacks which gets a little tiresome. I have a mage, let me throw fireballs!

The story of Goblin Slayer Another Adventurer fares a little better. Guild Master is a plucky yet naive character who throws herself into saving her kingdom from goblin attacks with an enthusiasm and optimism that’s almost detrimental to her survival. Case in point, one of the first missions of the game sees her recruiting a vampire lady who isn’t exactly shy about wanting to do what vampires do. This is a decision often questioned by other members of the guild too, although Blood Princess does manage to show a surprising amount of restraint about exsanguinating everyone.

Mostly, anyway, and this is where one of the least appealing aspects of Goblin Slayer Another Adventurer comes in. Guild Master has made an agreement that she will allow Blood Princess to suck her blood in exchange for helping with the adventures. This leads to a number of scenes where Blood Princess brings up the bargain and they almost go ahead with it. However, these scenes have a disturbing sexual overtone that I found unpleasant.

This is nothing new for vampire media, as vampiric temptations have been used as a metaphor for sexual avarice countless times in fiction. My objection doesn’t lie in the presence of sexy vampires, it lies in how clumsily overt it is. When the deal is first proposed, Blood Princess even outright asks if Guild Master is a virgin, entirely unprompted and in the middle of an otherwise ordinary conversation. And it keeps happening constantly throughout the story. There’s a leering desperation to the way it’s handled, when a more subtle approach would have worked much better.

Away that plot point, the overarching story suffers a little from telling and not showing. The main quest implies a sense of urgency from goblin and demon attacks while most of the big stuff seems to happen off screen. This is mostly down to the low budget presentation, which seemed to afford some character sprites and not much else. The city is under attack from goblins? We’ll have a character mention it before moving onto another mission. Demons pouring out of a portal? Trust us, it’s happening. We don’t even get a dramatic still image of the action to heighten the tension, like plenty of visual novels do for these moments. It leads to an adventure that feels a bit lacking in drive.

That said, there is a Polar Bear Priest, so there is still plenty to like about the writing. Character interactions were generally entertaining and there was some genuine intrigue cropping in Guild Master’s backstory. In fact, this is the strongest aspect of the game in my opinion. It’s also fully voice acted (exclusively in Japanese), and the performances are generally excellent.

Ultimately, Goblin Slayer Another Adventurer: Nightmare Feast was an odd one. While I did enjoy the battles and most of the character interactions, it also didn’t do much to make itself stand out. It certainly has appeal for fans of old school RPGs, but I can’t help but feel it could be doing a lot more.

Goblin Slayer Another Adventurer: Nightmare Feast is available for the Switch and PC.