When comparing Little Witch Academia: Chamber of Time vs NieR: Automata, the Slant community recommends NieR: Automata for most people. In the question“What are the best singleplayer games on Steam?” NieR: Automata is ranked 43rd while Little Witch Academia: Chamber of Time is ranked 153rd. The most important reason people chose NieR: Automata is:
The combat in NieR: Automata is fantastic. It has a hack-and-slash feel to it, with an emphasis on agility and showy acrobatics. With the fluid and responsive controls, you can switch seamlessly from using swift attacks with your weapon to devastatingly strong attacks as you combo them together. You also use customizable ranged missile attacks from your personal robot pod, such as powerful laser beams or a giant hammer attack. It can be difficult to win battles sometimes, especially on the harder gameplay settings, but it's worthwhile to keep at it and watch yourself progress and improve.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Funny story premise of the protagonist trapping her academy in a time continuum
The basis of the story is entertaining in how silly it is. The main character, a young witch named Akko, is so clumsy and irresponsible that she manages to accidentally get her magic academy stuck in a time continuum. She tries to solve the problem with her friends, who seem to be the only other ones who don't notice that the school is stuck living out the exact same day over and over again. It's funny seeing the other NPCs act like all is well when things are clearly wrong, and it's even funnier seeing how hopeless Akko is at figuring out the whole conundrum. The game never takes itself too seriously, giving you the chance to laugh over Akko's antics and the absurdity of the situation.
Pro Fun and flashy beat 'em up-style combat
Combat is satisfyingly fun with lots of spectacle. Playing as Akko with her group of witch friends, you delve into dungeons within the magical academy. Sidescrolling your way through dungeons, you use your wand to fire off colorful magic abilities against the hordes of goblins, skeletons, and other monsters. Enemies are relentless, filling up the screen with their presence as you fight back with quick bursts of spells like a beat 'em up game. Everything looks and feels great, keeping things exciting for plenty of hours of dungeon crawling.
Pro Accessible to newcomers who haven't watched the anime
Even if you haven't watched the Little Witch Academia anime, you won't be lost. From the beginning, the game introduces you to Akko's friends by showing you key scenes from the anime that give context to each character. The slower pace at the start also goes a long way to introduce you to the world that you're in, making sure that you really know who everyone is and how the time and magic lore works. You don't have to spend hours catching up on the source material; you can jump right into Chamber of Time and understand what's going on.
Pro Great anime visuals
The 2.5D art style and animations during cutscenes are wonderful. Characters look amazing, animated in natural ways and drawn with bright colors that stand out from the backgrounds of the school corridors and classrooms. Everyone's personalities shine through in their designs as well, with calm, collected characters looking put-together and in control, and more gregarious characters like Akko gesturing wildly or making funny expressions. Chamber of Time is a lot like an anime ported to a game, pulling off a unique and charming visual style.
Pro Fast-paced, action-packed combat
The combat in NieR: Automata is fantastic. It has a hack-and-slash feel to it, with an emphasis on agility and showy acrobatics. With the fluid and responsive controls, you can switch seamlessly from using swift attacks with your weapon to devastatingly strong attacks as you combo them together. You also use customizable ranged missile attacks from your personal robot pod, such as powerful laser beams or a giant hammer attack. It can be difficult to win battles sometimes, especially on the harder gameplay settings, but it's worthwhile to keep at it and watch yourself progress and improve.
Pro Unique storytelling with a real emotional impact
NieR: Automata's outlook on storytelling is incredibly special. To get the full experience, you have to run multiple playthroughs of the game, each of which offers a new experience and perspective. Your world view of the story events and characters expands drastically as you complete each playthrough, playing on your expectations to help you develop a deeper emotional bond with the protagonists and become invested in their plight.
Things take a real turn on your third playthrough, putting you on an emotional roller coaster all the way to the true ending. The plot twists and knocks on the fourth wall elevate the story to a truly unique place. Getting all the way to the very end can be a religious experience from how much heart and meaning you discover in the symbolism.
Pro It's got a hauntingly beautiful environment
NieR: Automata is set in a post-apocalyptic landscape after Earth has been overrun by hostile machines, and the artists really nailed what that would feel like. Abandoned and overgrown cities litter the landscape along with old refineries, graveyards, and eerie forests. When you add the beautiful soundtrack to the experience, it fills you with a bittersweet mix of loneliness and hope.
Pro Varied genre-spanning gameplay elements
NieR: Automata has different types of gameplay to keep things interesting. From the very start, you're on an on-rails bullet hell section, and then you switch over to the more traditional action RPG style of fast-paced combat. Things change up again not long after with some side-scrolling platforming from a 2D view. Later on in the story, there's a hacking mini-game where you navigate a tiny ship through a short puzzle, with the music changing to a charming retro sound to fit the theme and mood. This is a game that doesn't stay boxed in a single genre.
Pro An incredible amount of content
Outside of the main story, there's plenty of optional content to dive into. The side quests are the best way to get to know the characters and lore of the world, with some of them giving clever and subtle foreshadowing of the game's most critical events. There are also weapons to collect and upgrade, each of which offer nice little tidbits of lore after you get them to max level. And after reaching a certain point in the story, you get access to Chapter Select that lets you go back and replay whatever you want. You can easily spend 60+ hours exploring the world and still have much more to do.
Pro Gorgeous, ethereal soundtrack with amazing vocals
NieR: Automata's music is out of this world. It's so stunning and elegant in a way that nothing else can really live up to. The soundtrack manages to emotionalize the game through music, from the action-packed tracks with hard-hitting wind instruments and percussion, to the softer, somber songs that encapsulate the hauntingly beautiful environments and story moments you encounter. Vocals in the lore's indescribable language makes the music even more memorable, adding to the ethereal quality of the sound. This soundtrack is definitely one that you can go back to again and again without getting sick of it.
Cons
Con Some of the dungeons are boring
Not all of the dungeons are that fun to play through. Some of them are designed well with lots of traps to dodge and mini-puzzles to figure out, but others are just a drag. They're not inventive or exciting at all, with samey designs and almost no challenge involved with the enemies and bosses. They really bring down the quality of the exploration and gameplay.
Con Characters repeat the same combat lines over and over
The repetitive lines characters shout out during combat can easily get on your nerves. Each time you shoot your spells, everyone says the exact same line again and again, with little to no variation. It's so bad that you might want to consider turning off the voices altogether, and possibly turning the volume back up once you're finished dungeon crawling for the day.
Con Stiff controls for running and jumping
Running and jumping during combat isn't always intuitive. If you just run and stop, you have to watch your character skid to a halt before she decides to react to you controlling her to jump next. You have to chain the two actions together -- running and then transitioning to a jump -- to keep things smooth. Your character won't simply react in a timely way as she should, making things feel rigid.
Con Limited open world
Even though NieR: Automata is technically an open world game, it doesn't always feel like it. It's more that there's a big open space in the center of the ruined city you explore, with branches that lead off to vastly different environments, like a desert, a village, and a few other places. These locations aren't that spacious, either, and it's a bit of a stretch to even imagine all of these places being so close together in the first place. It's not too much of an issue as long as you find the story and combat engaging enough.
Con Second playthrough can get repetitive
Once you get to Route B, your second playthrough, you may find that too much is the same. There are some big differences, such as the new way you get to see things play out, but a lot of it rehashes Route A, your first playthrough. There's a ton of hacking you have to do as well, which gets pretty boring after repeating it over and over again. But if you stick with it, Route C and onward are absolutely worth the time spent getting to that point.
Con Some boring fetch quests
The pacing gets messed up when you're forced to run certain fetch quests near the start of the game. This is somewhat forgivable after the fun and action-packed introductory level, but the quests themselves are still a drag to play through. Some of the side quests can also boil down to the same thing. Even though these quests give a lot of useful information about the world, they're not all that fulfilling, and you may dread having to repeat them when playing through the game again.
Con Buggy on PC
Some players complain about the game crashing, freezing, their save files mysteriously disappearing, and more. As of June 2018, over a year after the game's initial release, there is still no patch to fix these problems. Not everyone on PC will have these bugs, but it's still quite prevalent. If you continually run into issues, your best bet is to find a mod or play the console versions instead of waiting on an official patch that may never happen.