Developed By: Apollosoft, Mebius
Published By: Red Art Games
Categories: SRPG, Visual Novel
Release Date: 11.15.24
Price: $39.99

The Goblin Slayer anime isn’t one of the best that I’ve ever seen, but it does a great job at being entertaining. Even so, I was not expecting it to get a video game adaptation, let alone one released in the west. Yet here we are. 

Most anime games that I’ve experienced fall under one of two genres, fighting or visual novel. Nightmare Feast does have a lot going on as a visual novel, but it’s also a fully-fledged SRPG like Fire Emblem or Disgaea. I love both of those games, so I decided to give this one a chance.

I really enjoyed the combat for the most part. As I said, it’s like Fire Emblem and Disgaea but it’s simpler with fewer mechanics. This was something that I liked because it made the game more accessible despite being a very niche title. 

Combat is your standard grid-based RPG where you control a team of adventurers that you recruit to battle against hordes of goblins. Each member of your party can have a variety of weapons, arts, and spells to use in battle. 

However, the gameplay when it comes to combat is a bit unbalanced if you ask me. It’s super easy to recruit new members, you can basically start with as many as you like and build whatever party format you want. But the combat itself is difficult. I died so many times once I left the tutorial battle and unless you can heal a ton, you’re going to lose a lot too. 

There’s also a fatal flaw with the game when you’re playing on the switch. The sprites and environment look great when in combat, but movement is terrible. There’s a slight delay on every action and it’s easy to overshoot or undershoot where you want the cursor to go.

It’s still manageable though, and the combat mechanics themselves are simple, you just need to force your way through the enemy AI. Combat is one of the three main aspects of the game, the next is the visual novel side of things, which is where most of the story is told.

Boy is there a lot of story. It took me around 30 minutes to get to the tutorial battle and another 30 to get to the first quest battle because of how much exposition was thrown at me right at the start. It was good exposition though, with much of the story, setting, and characters being introduced early on.

As a fan of anime, I always want a game adaptation to feel like an extension of the anime. The Goblin Slayer game does a great job at this because the lore, story, and characters come together to form an original story that takes place in the same universe as the anime.

So if you’re a fan of Goblin Slayer, the game will feel like watching an entire spinoff because of all the extra content. The visual novel scenes also feature a ton of solid voice acting, which made these moments feel more immersive. One downside however is that the character portraits are horrible. It’s like each character only has a few models that are nearly identical to each other.

Lastly, you have the guild management side of the game. This is very barebones because it mostly serves as your base of operations. This is where you do things like take on quests, recruit party members, and access the shop. 

So, is Nightmare Feast worth it? Personally, I think this is one of those rare anime games that could appeal to fans of the anime but also the general SRPG audience. Because it’s an original story, it’s not blocking those who haven’t seen the anime. In fact, there aren’t even that many major references to the anime. 

To those who haven’t seen the anime, it’s just another SRPG, and maybe they’ll like the story and check it out. For those who are fans of the anime, they’ll enjoy that it isn’t just a redo of stuff they’ve already seen while also getting a handful of subtle references.

The game is difficult and has very poor looking visual novel scenes but is enjoyable and has a solid story. For $40 digitally, Nightmare Feast is a solid pickup.

3.5/5