Gobline Slayer: Another Adventurer - Nightmare Feast

Mixing visual novel and strategy RPG elements, Goblin Slayer: Another Adventurer - Nightmare Feast takes the lore from the popular (if controversial) fantasy tale and weaves it into an mostly unrelated story with a brand new cast of characters. Goblin Slayer has always been very practical with its character names, so your character, a young lady returning home after the death of her father, takes over the local adventurer guild and becomes known as Guild Master. As such, you'll need to protect the land and its citizens from the troublesome goblins that infest the area. In your first task you investigate a local derelict castle, wherein lies a sleeping vampire known as the Blood Priestess. Bizarrely your character earns the loyalty of this beautiful monster by insisting that she's as much a citizen due her protection as anyone else, and the pair become a powerful fighting force, one employing weapons, the other magic.

I was slightly surprised at the first few hours of the game, seeing as the Strategy RPG element is used as what appears to be a bolt-on to the more dominant visual novel aspect of the game. It's a very slow start as you're introduced to the characters through static screens, and though these are fully voiced, if you're impatient like me you'll be reading far more than listening.

Unfortunately the game is so committed to the story that it really doesn't offer any gameplay for much of the first hour, making the RPG element feel like a bit of an afterthought - you'll defend the Blood Moon Princess in your first fight, but it's a long time coming and there's no tutorial, so you're left figuring things out mid-battle. It's an inelegant introduction but relies (like other aspects of the game we'll come to) on the player being familiar enough with RPG's that you're able to just muddle through it. That's not an issue for me after 30+ years of playing games, but others might struggle. It's also a dramatic shift after half an hour of a visual novel.

The retro-style sprite work hits all the right notes

When the combat does arrive, you'll find yourself in a traditional SRPG grid system, with weapons and magic at your disposal. You have limited move points within the turn-based combat, so your objective is to outflank and overpower the enemy, which often significantly outnumber you. You have access to "Fate" and "Chance" abilities that can be equipped and, when activated, require a dice-roll for success. These abilities might be increased damage, better defence or negating certain elemental attacks entirely, adding a little depth to proceedings as well as a nice graphical flourish that recalls many hours spent playing traditional RPG's.

The mission objectives are straightforward enough - defeat all enemies on screen, defeat a certain unit or ensure a particular character survives an encounter, but it's always a case of managing the area, deploying units effectively and using your brain to outwit the enemy. In this the game is quite successful, never anything less than competent and on occasion very exciting as you scrape through superior forces by virtue of having managed your resources and kept your guild in top shape.

Back at the guild, you'll want to promote classes to unlock more character options, upgrade weapons and manage any elemental upgrades which are essential assets against certain enemies. The aforementioned side quests provide plenty of loot in order for you to manage this, so there's little to limit your progression or ability to create a squad that fights as you wish them to.

The game does start to get quite difficult around the halfway mark, so you'll want to take advantage of as many side quests as you can in order to reap much-needed rewards that will aid you in the main campaign.

While the more interesting options take a long time to actually arrive, once you get going you'll find character classes, skills and upgrades that will make combat more interesting and your squad more personalised. You're also able to buy new gear for your team, as well as buffs, healing items and even traps that can be deployed on the battlefield. It all works very well and even becomes quite addictive, but unfortunately the opening few hours are so slow that I can see a lot of gamers giving up before they even arrive at the good stuff. This is a shame because the meat and potatoes of the game are very solid, but the story feels disjointed from the action.

Another issue in the game's management is that adventurers will constantly arrive at the guild which makes managing them a pain as you can't filter them for easy access. This makes the rather simple interface feel a bit overloaded once it has too much to manage, and really needed some refinement. It's not game-breaking, just frustrating where it shouldn't have been.

Is there a Mr Slayer in the building?

One of the main draws is the Goblin Slayer association, and yes you will meet the mighty warrior and can even utilise him in battle, but you can't upgrade him like the rest of your characters, so he's really just a guest unit rather than an integral part of the game. In one sense that's clever, as keeps him separate from the narrative in a way that won't make a mess of his own story, but in another sense it feels like a slightly cheap cash-in. Record of Lodoss War: Deedlit's Labyrinth managed to avoid affecting the main story by having the adventure take place in a dream, so honestly sidelining the main characters is hardly a new trick in gaming. Fans might feel a bit disappointed by this sleight of hand, but honestly the new characters (eventually) have enough charm to carry the narrative.

However, the game does suffer from an over-reliance on your familiarity with the Goblin Slayer story. The narrative here is very limited in terms of options, so you're really just moving things along a pre-defined path. However it really doesn't explain very much while doing so - if you hadn't seen what the goblins are actually capable of elsewhere, you'd just assume they were pretty standard enemies here. The Goblin Slayer's visceral hatred of the goblins therefore seems a bit overkill, and you won't pick up on why certain characters act the way they do without knowing their backstory. A few lines of dialogue or flashbacks would have been useful to round out the experience, but the game almost demands a level of knowledge that seems designed to keep new players out of the loop.

As a whole there's a solid tactical RPG here, hidden initially by an overlong visual novel element that can make it quite frustrating. Actual play time is subsequently shorter than it appears, and if the story doesn't do much for you then it becomes a bit of a drag. Obviously fans of the franchise will take more away from the game than newcomers, but it would have been smarter to use the game as a potential bridge to the series rather than just relying on existing fans to bring so much with them.