Official Review
From what I understand the game is a bit of a side story that contains some familiar characters but largely exists as its own thing. I was able to follow along with it well enough, but I was wondering throughout the narrative if I was missing some key context. The narrative is straightforward enough. You play as the head of a local Adventurer's Guild in a remote land. Your job is to recruit heroes and then take on tasks to protect the population from goblins and other monsters. Then, early on, you also meet a vampire that for… reasons… you enter into some kind of pact with and who decides to hang around and wait for you to beg her to suck your blood.
That story is told through visual novel-style cut scenes that can, admittedly, feel a little long. They aren't ever quite as extended as the VN sections of, say, Utawarerumono, but because they're nowhere near as compelling they feel much longer. Goblin Slayer's plot doesn't really do much other than drive you towards the next battle or introduce you to the next character. It's perfectly workable for what it is, it's just that it focuses on function over depth.
What I was surprised about was the tonal inconsistency of the game. When I went into Goblin Slayer, knowing it by reputation (and seeing that the game is rated R18+ in Australia) I was expecting something truly dark and grim. Like Berserk. What I saw instead was some pretty standard anime aesthetics. Sure, dark, violent and horrible things happen, and you could argue that the contrast light-and-bright aesthetic actually increases the impact of those themes, but I found it uneven as a result. As though the dark themes were there more for cheap shock value than because the artists involved in the project genuinely wanted to immerse players within a cruel and violent world.
Again, perhaps I'm missing a lot of context that gives Goblin Slayer the edge, and this property does have such an exceptional and vocal following that surely there must be something more in it than what we see in the game in isolation.
Thankfully the tactical gameplay is more compelling, albeit quite standard for the genre. You recruit a small crew of heroes, each with their own unique abilities, and then square off against a horde of enemies. The AI tends to be fairly mundane and enemies won't start activating until you get closer to them, so you can generally turtle your way around levels and engage with small groups at a time, rather than trying to deal with the whole lot of them charging at you. This is actually a good thing, though, because there is a difficult edge to Goblin Slayer.
I felt it the most with how limited it felt like your resources are. When you first acquire a healer, for example, they can only heal three times in a battle. That gets better over time, but you'll always feel like you don't have quite the resources that you need to be comfortable in a battle. Your characters tend to take more damage than they dish out, too, so it's very easy for characters to get knocked out if you're not careful with movement and positioning.
One tactical trick that you do have up your sleeve is Goblin Slayer's finest innovation: before a battle begins you're able to lay traps down. Then, by goading enemies into walking into those traps you can give yourself a substantial tactical advantage over them. You can also use traps to obscure lines of vision for archers, and manipulate the battlefield in a bunch of different ways. These traps are expensive so you need to use them wisely, but they can mean all the difference in application.
It is disappointing that there is so little to the game outside of these battles. You can do some side missions and grind up the loot and experience you need to promote characters through a reasonably robust job set. But the developers missed an opportunity here. You're managing an adventurer's guild! It would have been great to be able to have some light simulation elements thrown in for rewards outside of the main missions. As it is, the "guild" really just comes across as a menu system.
Goblin Slayer is a perfectly adequate tactics JRPG that people who have nostalgia for the genre back on the PlayStation will have a particular fondness for. Mileage may be slightly better for the fans of the anime, but even then I think the big problem this game has is that it's very superficial and shows very little interest in making any kind of statement or point. In other words, it plays exactly like an 'anime tie-in' game, and nothing more or less than that.
