Little Witch Academia: Chamber of Time Reviews
This field trip to Luna Nova is more frustrating than fun, though fans of Little Witch Academia will likely find more enjoyment than others.
It becomes readily apparent that those who will enjoy Little Witch Academia: Chamber of Time the most will be existing fans of the series. The storyline and new animations are worth checking out, especially since the second season is still a ways out. Even then, they may be hard-pressed to deal with both the tedious exploration and the unreliable combat. For them, the game may be worth getting for cheap. For everyone else, this should be a pass.
Little Witch Academia: Chamber of Time looked interesting after the announcement, but turned out to be mediocre. It is unfortunate that Bandai Namco buried it in the forest of mistakes and shortcomings.
Review in Russian | Read full review
Little Witch Academia: Chamber of Time wasted the potential with low difficulty level and frustrating loading times. In effect, it is directed only to fans of the animated series.
Review in Polish | Read full review
Despite the beauty of graphics and sounds alongside the thriller, the game may sometimes become boring with similar phases. Some monsters and surrounding environments are vary, but not entirely, and the side-scrolling method becomes traditional after the first stage. The majority of innovation and thinking outside the box is at the stage of exploring the school and searching for keys and puzzles
Review in Arabic | Read full review
Little Witch Academia: Chamber of Time is a tale of two games. The storytelling is excellent and top notch, featuring the exact kind of humor and charm that fans of the series adore. The gameplay, however, lacks polish and can feel cumbersome, which is a bummer. While it won’t be for everyone, fans of the series who are willing to go through less than perfect gameplay likely will still enjoy it for its original story, which definitely does justice to the source material.
Even hardcore fans of the series will struggle with this, and it's a shame because it looks so bloody good.
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.
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.
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.
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
Riddled with extremely tedious design decisions and frustrating technical hiccups, not even a believing heart can save this trainwreck.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.