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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 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 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 ing 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 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.

The post Review: Goblin Slayer Another Adventurer: Nightmare Feast Lacks Bite appeared first on Siliconera.

Nippon Ichi Software's side-scrolling RPG, Battle Princess of Arcadia, is being made by Apollosoft. This studio formed when Summon Night developer Flight Plan closed. Apollosoft's first game was Blue Roses, which Nippon Ichi published for PSP in Japan. They also developed Ragnarok Tactics and Aksys brought that title overseas.

Check out our earlier report for more information about Battle Princess of Arcadia.

The post Ragnarok Tactics Developer Is Making Battle Princess Of Arcadia appeared first on Siliconera.

In less than two weeks Nippon Ichi and Apollosoft, a studio populated by ex-Flight Plan developers, are going to release a new RPG.

Blue Roses: The Fairy and the Blue Eyed Warriors blends grid style strategy RPG maps with classic RPG combat, sort of like Devil Survivor. When you run into an enemy the game shifts into 16-bit presentation where you can select attacks and boost damage by following quick time events.

The game takes place in a world where humans and fairies coexist. Rosche, the male lead character, works as a delivery boy. Alicia, the female lead, teaches young Blue Roses, a group of blue-eyed knights you lead. Players can select to either Alicia or Roche as the main character.

Blue Roses: The Fairy and the Blue Eyed Warriors comes out on September 16 in Japan. Plans for a release in North America have not been announced.

The post A Bunch Of Blue Roses Screenshots appeared first on Siliconera.

Flight Plan may be gone, but some of their staff are already working on another game. Blue Roses: The Fairy and the Blue Eyed Warriors will be the first game from Apollosoft, a studio formed by ex-Flight Plan staff, and published by Nippon Ichi.

This PSP game is a strategy RPG with turn based battles. Before you encounter an enemy you can pick two nearby allies to the fight. The screen switches to your usual good guys on the right and bad guys on the left interface where you pick commands like fight or skill. Skills can trigger quick time events where you can dish out extra damage by pushing the right buttons.

Apollosoft designed Blue Roses so the enemies have the same advantages. In addition to bringing allies into fights, enemies can also extend their attacks and make players hit a bunch of QTEs to defend.

Blue Roses comes out on September 16 in Japan. Plans for a release in North American release have not been announced.

The post Blue Roses Battle Video Shows Tactical QTEs appeared first on Siliconera.

Players start Blue Roses: The Fairy and Blue Eyed Warriors by picking either Roche or Alicia as their main character. The story changes depending which protagonist you choose. Similar to Luminous Arc, you can talk to party to build relationships with them. The ending you get depends on those relationships.

Apollosoft, a newly formed studio with staff from the Summon Night games, created a three-on-three battle system for Blue Roses. The game switches from an overhead map to a side view when you encounter an enemy unit. Teammates can link up for a team attack and you can deal extra damage by following on-screen button presses. Check out some combat footage in this newly released trailer.

Blue Roses: The Fairy and Blue Eyed Warriors is slated for September 16 in Japan. Pre-order it and you’ll get a 40 page visual booklet as a bonus.\

The post Blue Roses Has Two Stories, Multiple Endings appeared first on Siliconera.

Some employees from Flight Plan, the makers of Summon Night, splintered off and formed a new company called Apollosoft. Nippon Ichi is going to publish their first game, Blue Roses: The Fairy and Blue Eyed Warriors.

You just watched an animated teaser of it. Blue Roses is being made for PSP and slated for September 16. The official site doesn’t say much about it, but a leak from Rakuten, Japan’s Amazon, says Blue Roses has multiple endings and tells the story from the perspective of two characters.

The post Blue Roses Is Nippon Ichi’s Next Strategy RPG appeared first on Siliconera.