Little Witch Academia: Chamber of Time looks and sounds
absolutely splendid and captures the feel of the anime perfectly. Too bad that
the gameplay is so dull you won’t want to actually play it. It is one of those
games you’ll want to like because the presentation is so fantastic, the
characters so great, and the writing is so fun, but it’s just so boring and
repetitive to play that it saps all of your motivation to keep going. Continue
reading our full Little Witch Academia: Chamber of Time PS4 review for all of
the details.
Game Details
- Publisher: Bandai Namco
- Developer: A+ Games
- ESRB Rating: “T For Teen
- Genre: RPG
- Pros: Outstanding presentation; great characters; good writing; fun slice of life school life
- Cons: Exploring is a pain; combat is boring; repetitive
- MSRP: $50
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While organizing the school library as punishment, Akko
accidentally opens a secret path that leads to a labyrinth under the school. A
side effect of opening the labyrinth is that time rewinds each day once the clock hits
midnight, so Akko and her friends are forced to re-live the first day of Summer
vacation over and over and over again “Groundhog Day”-style until they find
enough magical macguffins to break the spell and allow time to flow normally
again.
I have to admit that I haven’t actually watched “Little
Witch Academia” even though I love Studio Trigger’s other works. The game does
an extremely good job of easing you into the story and introducing the
characters, though, so I felt like I had a solid grasp on what was going on
pretty early on. I love the world they created. I love the characters. The
writing is really clever and just plain fun in almost every scenario. I got
drawn into the game even without knowing anything beforehand, which is a
testament to how well crafted the world and characters are and what a good job
developer A+ Games did adapting it.
Unfortunately, the gameplay is pretty disappointing here.
Part beat-em-up RPG similar to Dragon’s Crown, part visual novel, and part
adventure game as you explore Luna Nova, Little Witch Academia: Chamber of Time
is a bit of a mess with too many systems all stacked on top of each other and
none of them being particularly refined.
Half of the game is exploring Luna Nova to seek out items
and potion ingredients as well as interact with other students and do side
quests. Luna Nova is a labyrinth in itself and the map the game gives
you is kind of worthless since it doesn’t actually show your position on it,
only the room / hallway you’re in. You have to basically take a best guess
about where you actually are and navigate that way, which is a pain. Memorizing
the layout of the school is made difficult by the fact that it’s freaking huge
with multiple floors. It takes several minutes just to get anywhere in this
annoying maze and running around isn’t particularly fun. Even worse,
pretty much every side mission is a fetch quest that sends you to the opposite
side of the school. It is mindless and boring and repetitive. Basically, half
of the game is already a huge pain the butt.
What about the action RPG half of the game? Not much better.
When you get a key to enter the labyrinth (the actual dungeon labyrinth under
the school, I mean), you choose two other characters to accompany Akko into the
depths where you fight monsters side-scrolling beat-em-up style. The gameplay
here is mindless and boring, however, particularly when compared to the
recently released Dragon’s Crown Pro, and your CPU-controlled partners have totally
braindead A.I. that makes every encounter far more annoying than it should be since you can't count on them to contribute or do what you need them to do.
For another recent anime to game adaptation that actually
gets most things right, give Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet a look. It’s a ton
of fun.
Compounding the gameplay issues are a number of surprisingly
oldschool design decisions that don’t hold up particularly well these days.
Quick travel, to make exploring the school less annoying, requires you to spend
a form of in-game currency. Save points also require a special item to unlock
(but then you can freely use them afterwards). One note about the save system –
you don’t get your first save point until about an hour into the game, so don’t
make the same mistake I did and assume it autosaves somewhere – It doesn’t. Another
annoyance is that only characters that go into the labyrinth earn XP so you
constantly have to swap characters for every run so you don’t end up with
under-leveled party members later when you need them. The combat itself also
suffers from very, very precise hit boxes on enemies so you have to get in just
the right position for attacks to register.
All of this adds up to an experience that is just a pain in
the butt to actually play. Exploring the school is annoying due to a bad map
and mazelike design, but you HAVE to explore the school to do side quests and
find items and other stuff to upgrade your weapons and abilities. Combat is
frustrating and annoying due to bad A.I., clunky gameplay, and repetitive
encounters. Complaining about repetition seems kind of redundant in a story
where you live the same day over and over again (like, “Duh, of course it is
repetitive”), but it really pushes too far here. It just ain’t fun.
It’s a shame that the gameplay falls so flat because the
presentation is fantastic in Little Witch Academia: Chamber of Time. The
character models are absolutely fantastic and the distinct art style is
wonderful. The animation, even if there isn’t a ton of it most of the time, is
also extremely charming. There are also a handful of new anime scenes created
just for this game that look fantastic as well. Voice acting (only in Japanese)
is spot on perfect and the orchestral soundtrack is incredibly good.
Gameplay ultimately determines the success or failure of a
game, though, so even though it may be one of best adaptations of an anime ever
as far as presentation goes, the gameplay in Little Witch Academia: Chamber of
Time just doesn’t cut it. It’s boring and repetitive and full of odd decisions
that make it a pain to play to the point that even die hard fans of the
franchise will struggle to slog through it. Skip it.
Disclosure: A review code was provided by the publisher.
