I love this franchise and I was really looking forward to this game. Unfortunately it's not good. Chamber of Time is not a good game. I don't know if 1/10 is way to harsh of a score for this game because on the surface this game isn't absolute garbage. It has many positive factors to it, but I grew beyond frustrated at the inability to progress in the main story for lacking a specific spell. How do I get it? I still don't know. No guides are helpful, the characters don't tell me anything, there's no in-game hints. All I can do is assume the game is over and I'm stuck, and I'm done.
This game's biggest issue is on how vague it is. This is an RPG that seems to be played in any way you want but it also makes little distinction between side questing and story essential quests. What you may think is just a pointless side mission may actually be important. No one is any help.
Traversing Luna Nova or anywhere is tedious and time consuming and just boring. The game developers do give it enough personality by shifting around groups of students to give you quests or just talk to you and the game is surprisingly fully voice acted but only in Japanese with barely legible English subtitles! Despite all anime installments being available on Netflix English, BNE felt this was too niche to have a dub.
Though billed as an RPG it's more like dungeon crawler where you move around confined areas on three-planes in a 2.5D perspective. This is confusing and difficult to line yourself up with enemies and use spells and not waste your magic points. I don't like the whole three-plane side-scrolling game play in other games and I don't like it here.
On PS4 Standard this game's UI is terrible. Text is tiny, so good luck if you're a nearsighted person, the subtitles don't have any scale or drop shadow so they get lost in the bright animation and backgrounds. I've seen the game on PS4 Pro and PC where the text is still tiny but at least your button key isn't crunched off the screen! The sound isn't much better, weirdly dungeon music is super quiet it's barely audible (at least on a PS4-S and on TV, maybe with headphones it's better and I can't speak for Pro or PC), while over world music is so loud you have to turn it down or it will overpower the dialogue.
This really should have been a better game. I like how expressive the character models are, graphically it does great about braining the anime style into 3D. But the game controls poorly, the questing is nonsensical, the fights are tedious, the audio design is shoddy. BNE seemed to contract a third-rate-studio for this. It's a shame.
