While playing through this, I watched the entirety of the Little Witch Academia anime. It’s a short, sweet show about a young girl with a dream of becoming a witch, who unfortunately has a severe lack of talent for the art of magic. She goes to witch school, makes friends, learns about herself and her magic, blah blah, it’s great. I strongly recommend you watch it if it’s your thing.

LWA: Chamber of Time, on the other hand, is not great. It sucks and you should avoid it like the plague. It overstays its welcome by hours, it’s boring, tedious, not fun, poorly designed, and worst of all, does not respect the player or their time.

The gist is this: it’s the first day of summer vacation, the main character Akko finds herself stuck in a Groundhogs Day style time loop, brings along her “friends,” and saves the day. I say “friends” because while the show makes room for quirky characters with nuance, here everyone is mostly just an asshole or pushover. Despite being mean to you, everyone wants something from you or for you to do them favors.

The gameplay loop involves an exploring mode, and a battle mode. Exploring mode either has you going on way too simple fetch quests for said group of assholes to advance the plot, or go on more grindy fetch quests to farm items for said assholes to accomplish what I guess the developers assumed would pass as side quests. Sometimes you drink a potion to cast a spell to get where you’re going. Your reward most of the time is something that eventually leads to discovering better spells for your team, or a decoration for your base of operations. The battle mode is a beat em up jaunt through what appear to be very short, but incredibly tedious and boring side scrolling dungeons.

You only control one character at a time with the other two in your team controlled by what has to be the worst AI I’ve ever see in a game. Your teammates push enemies off screen regularly, causing you to wait for the enemies to come crawling back before you can do more damage, until they’re pushed offscreen again and you repeat this several times. The characters never seem to use their special abilities except in the worst possible moments, for instance, using a strong, long cut scene animated screen clear attack literally as the single enemy on screen is killed off by someone else. This happens constantly.

My team, unless forced to use someone else, was Akko, Diana, and Amanda. My favorite is that Diana would often use her powerful AOE attack, but face the wrong way, hitting no one and wasting my time even more.

There’s an overly complex item system, with enchantable items with names such as Yggdrasil Rod of the Waterfall, which at the end of the day, doesn’t matter much as long as you just pick the one with the best stats and good enchantments that match your spell elements. Equips are gated behind character levels, and I often found myself skipping changing gear as I leveled up, just because changing equipment is such a needlessly overcomplicated chore.

For no good reason other than padding the length of the game, you must go through multiple dungeons in their entirety several times. One of these dungeons requires you to select paths while riding a mine cart, with very few enemies to pass the time, no clear route indicated, nothing to tell you if you went the wrong way, and an enormous amount of dead space where nothing happens for minutes at a time.

The boss design in this game is some of the worst I’ve ever seen. The most egregious is a dragon at the end of the ice level. It took me over an HOUR to beat it. By no fault of my own, but again, because the mechanics of the fight are just slow, tedious, and designed like shit. The boss has an opening where you can attack him for what seems like seconds after huge stretches of time where he’s untargetable. You can make ice blocks by pounding X a million times, but this doesn’t help much. You would assume the dragon smashing into a wall of ice would have some impact or allow him to be hit for a bit, but no. Also, every time you pass through the “mash x here to make ice block” area, your other actions are interrupted by this, so good luck trying to jump or effectively cast spells without triggering the ice making. You have to experience this to fully grasp how freaking terrible it is.

Don’t play this game. It’s awful. Watch the anime. It deserved better than this.