Little Witch Academia: Chamber of Time Reviews
Little Witch Academia: Chamber of Time is heartbreaking. I'm a huge fan of the original anime, and this game does a tremendous job of capturing the heart and personality of that world. Characters look and sound incredible, and getting to explore their school and experience new adventures with them is a blessing. Unfortunately, obtaining that blessing requires a two-mile crawl on your knees through the jagged glass and thorny ivy that is the busted, broken, and simply not fun gameplay of Chamber of Time. Battles are aggravating and exploration is mind-numbing. For as brilliant as the narrative and artistic achievements of Chamber of Time are, it's weighed down by unpolished game design choices that simply make it no fun to actually play at all.
Little Witch Academia: Chamber of Time offers a simple and unique adventure for fans of the anime series, maintaining outstanding audio performance and animation, providing huge content and characters with different combat capabilities, but in contrast the events are slowly going on and the game suffers from frame rate problems from time to time.
Review in Arabic | Read full review
Little Witch Academia: Chamber of Time is a product made for the fans but they'd rather watch again the show than play this.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
It's quite sad that Chamber of Time so actively works against you in many ways. The tediousness of everything, from school exploration to combat, can really start to drag on you after a while, even if you do enjoy the story and characters.
Little Witch Academia: Chamber of Time may be a first decent title in the beloved anime series, but Bandai Namco takes into consideration a second game, the formula must be completely reworked.
A good premise that just doesn't match up to it's execution, much like one of Akko's spells.
While Little Witch Academia: Chamber of Time's repetitive and sometimes dull gameplay is a let-down, you've got to appreciate the amount of heart and detail that's been put into it.
Overall, Little Witch Academia: Chamber of Time is both a fun experience for fans of the series as well as a good introduction for others. While the gameplay is a bit repetitive, it is still enjoyable, and both the visuals and audio make it a joy to experience.
By the standards that I was forced to endure in my youth, Chamber of Time is several leagues ahead of the rest and has some delightfully enjoyable moments and some well-thought-out RPG elements to personalise your experience. By the standards of either the exploration or brawler genres today, it just passes through to warrant a look and a dabble before you get back to more immersive titles in your gaming library.
Overall, for an anime-tie in game, they certainly put in a lot of effort to make it an engaging experience as it could. From Akko’s animations to conversations and movement, it certainly feels like we are playing the anime instead of watching it. Everyone is also fully voiced, even the minor NPCs. The minor hiccups like the slightly misaligned camera, the mistimed lip syncing, and the awkward mesh between the anime look 3D characters and the normal-ish loom of the 3D environment only slightly dampen the experience.
There's maybe a third of a good game in here, weighed down by a mountain of big and ambitious ideas, none of them given the time and attention they needed to really function.
There’s a lot of potential in Little Witch Academia: Chamber of Time, the vast majority of which goes tragically unused. Though Chamber of Time looks and sounds gorgeous, the shallow gameplay, repetitive and needlessly complex missions, and framerate drops make it difficult to recommend to anyone who isn’t a diehard fan of the anime.
While it may not be the perfect jumping on point for those unfamiliar with the Little Witch Academia series and it is noticeably let down by clunky controls and some performance problems, if you can look past that there is a good game here in the Chamber of Time. It has an engaging original story, great customisation options to craft the party to your liking and addicting loot based dungeons. The game seems to be targeted towards those that are already fans of the series and if that’s you I think you’ll have a positive experience with Chamber of Time.
If you're a Little Witch Academia fan, you may enjoy it even if for the nostalgia. If not, I'm not too sure you'll enjoy it much. I find it pretty hard to think platform fighter fans would jump into this game and find it fun. It's very aimed at the fans of the anime and I can see that the developers hoped that simple fact would draw in the sales numbers.
Riddled with extremely tedious design decisions and frustrating technical hiccups, not even a believing heart can save this trainwreck.
Little Witch Academia: Chamber of Time is average at best, but it might hold some value for the fans of the franchise.
Review in Slovak | Read full review
The best thing I can say about Little Witch Academia: Chamber of Time is the good production value. Visually, the game looks very nice. Every line of dialogue is voiced. There are even short animated cutscenes every now and then. But this is all surface stuff. Dive into the game, and it becomes apparent very quickly that most of the focus on the game was just making it look good. It’s a game that barely manages to hold your attention for several hours stretched to almost 30. At a $60 price tag, I’d give this game a hard pass.
Fans of Little Witch Academia will find something to do here in Chamber of Time. There's an original story from TRIGGER that is genuinely enjoyable and the interactions between the likeable cast are all great. It's just a shame that every element of gameplay is so massively flawed in so many ways. The groundhog day style repeating story was so promising and yet it has been produced in such a terrible fashion. There are plenty of good elements to the dungeon crawling, yet the levels themselves are dull and frustrating. A big disappointment.
This could have been a good game with better choices, but instead it’s difficult to recommend to even the most rabid Little Witch Academia fan, much less the broader RPG-playing public.
Even hardcore fans of the series will struggle with this, and it's a shame because it looks so bloody good.