Little Witch Academia: Chamber of Time

Little Witch Academia: Chamber of Time

Genre: Action, Adventure, RPG

Developer: APLUS Co., Ltd

Publisher: BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment

Release Date: 15 May, 2018 (PC)

I wanted to start things off this week with something easily approachable and what better way to begin than with a friendly anime tie-in collect-a-thon and brawler?

Unfortunately having played this game for around 5 hours now my opinions are still somewhat mixed so let’s jump right in and see what if we can make some sort of sense out of the charming mess that is Little Witch Academia: Chamber of Time.

Even if you’re unfamiliar with the anime, you’ll quickly be able to make sense of the world of Little Witch Academia and it’s central character, Akko. She’s a loveable doofus, desperate to follow in the footsteps of her hero Shiny Chariot and make people happy with magic. Unfortunately, Akko sucks at magic for reasons that are revealed in the excellent TV series and I won’t spoil here.

Even though she’s hamstrung by weak magic skills, Akko manages to make friends at the Luna Nova Academy for Witches simply by being so gosh-darn likeable and trying really, really super hard at everything – a character trait masterfully demonstrated by her run cycle animation – just look at all that effort!

Through a combination of inquisitiveness and childish poking at things, Akko manages to screw-up time at her school. It is now stuck in a perpetual loop, doomed to repeat the same day until time is fixed. Fortunately, Akko isn’t alone and has managed to bring her friendship group into the loop with her – without whose various skills this situation would be doomed.

Akko must fix time and hopefully solve various other student’s problems along the way – whilst also finding out about the 7 Wonders of Luna Nova!

Being able to draw from the anime, Chamber of Time is able to use a host of already fleshed out characters to populate it’s world. The main group of Akko’s friends consist of best-pal Lotte, mushroom obsessed Sucy, feisty Amanda, taciturn tech-genius Constance, gourmand Jasmika and magic prodigy Diana.

Upon meeting each of these characters you’re invited to watch a recap of the character that you would know if you’d watched the anime. Whilst it’s certainly not necessary to have watched the show before playing the game, there’s no doubt that you’ll get more out of it if you have. Most of the NPCs in the game are cookie-cutter teachers and students and being able to fill in your own blanks helps to flesh them out – otherwise many of them may as well be quest-arrows rather than people.

Whilst the girls you use to form your party all have their own strengths and weaknesses, you can spec them out as you see fit to perform any role you choose. In the early game there seems to be no benefit to levelling the group as a whole, so you I just concentrated on my favourite characters from the show.

In order to set things straight again, Akko needs to collect a whole bunch of items from around the school and use her friends’ skills to put them to good use. The game at first seems to hold your hand very tightly, pointing you in the direction you need to go with some specific instructions and clear quest markers. This doesn’t last. If you are the kind of player who wants a big arrow to follow to guide you around the game world, Little Witch Academia is going to frustrate you a great deal.

One of the main issues is that time progresses as you walk around the academy or enter a dungeon. Everything that you can do and all the people you can speak to is effected by the passage of time throughout the day. In order to progress the story missions, not only do you have to work out what you need to get and who you’ve got to speak to, you also need to know WHEN they’re available in order to be able to find them on the map. This can lead to some frustration and back-tracking where you’re missing a key piece of information.

Further to this, navigating the academy is a nightmare. The map system is impressively useless and can take an awfully long time to get your head around. Locations looks very similar to one another, hallways are downright confusing and getting from one location to another is a chore. It takes far too long to unlock fast travel around the building and even then it is limited.

Far too much of the early stages of the game is spent wandering around aimlessly until time rewinds itself back to 8am and you begin your searching again. It doesn’t HAVE to be this way but it depends how quickly you grasp the movement system or figure out the information you don’t have to progress the events.

Akko and her friends find a dungeon to explore in order to find some of the materials they need to complete their tasks. Upon entering through a secret door using one of a collection of magic keys, the game turns into a side-scrolling brawler where your chosen witch and 2 others controlled by the AI will battle it out against a fairly decent array of different enemies.

Combat starts out dull. You have standard light, medium and heavy attacks and a small selection of elemental-type magics. For the first few fights however, the fights are just a mess of purple balls, characters flying around and collectibles shining, It’s difficult too know if what you’re doing is effective because your AI companions are spamming spells around and blundering into enemy attacks.

Grind enough for levels and equipment, start to unlock new spells and powers and the whole thing does eventually start to make sense but you never quite lose that feeling of being somewhat out of control of the battles. So far, the best tactic seems to have been to simply get my characters to the point where even the stupid AI decisions are mitigated by overwhelming power.

If you have a look at a few different reviews of Little Witch Academia: Chamber of Time, you’ll find some massive variance in people’s experiences and I don’t think this is all that surprising. The game starts off with some lovely animations and it’s easy to like the characters you meet. However the gameplay can seem aimless and underwhelming.

Given time, there’s a lot to enjoy here and there’s certainly a good 30 hours of game with the main quest plus maybe as much again with sidequests and secrets.

I can’t recommend this as a full price purchase for the average gamer – especially since some players are just never going to get into this at all – but at around the £20 mark for either PC or Playstation 4 you can certainly get your money’s worth. If you’re a fan of the TV series and just want to some more Akko and Co. related shenanigans then this is going to scratch that itch. Having watched the English dub myself though, I wish they’d been able to get the English voice cast in to record the dialogue for this as an alternative to the Japanese voice track.