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TL;DR: Little Witch Nobeta is good! 😭😭😭
I bought this game with low expectations. I did not expect much more than a Unity asset flip that happened to be cute and funny. That is not what this game is.
Little Witch Nobeta is a third-person action game that is closer to a souls-like than the vast majority of games that claim to be souls-like. You play as Nobeta on her mission to reach the throne room of the castle. She is guided by a black cat along the way.
The style of the game is very cute. Nobeta’s actions and mannerisms are funny. But don’t let that deceive you. The mechanics of this game are comparable to Bloodborne, and the world that Nobeta inhabits is darker than Demon’s Souls.
Nobeta is a witch. Appropriately, her attacks are all centered around spells. You start off with one element of magic and throughout the game you can find three additional ones. Everything is projectile based and each element has a different style of shot. One is like a shotgun. Another is a machine gun, and so on. Little Witch Nobeta is secretly a third-person shooter. The amount of spells you can cast at once is limited by your mana bar, with goes down with each cast but refills over time. Mana is also gained restored with each kill, or with Nobeta’s limited melee attack. You can also charge the spells, which grants additional abilities. After the first boss you gain the ability to parry, which also restores mana and does damage. The window is very tight however.
The game is not that hard. It is not easy, but it is doable on the standard difficulty setting. The advanced difficulty setting does nothing but make the enemies damage sponges, hit harder, and hamper Nobeta’s abilities. Just play on standard difficulty.
The varieties of enemies have slight weaknesses to different elements. But more so to different styles of attack, so you have to get creative. The enemy variations seem dull at first, but there are some twists that keep it interesting. The difficulty spikes as the game progresses, but it never gets too crazy.
In true souls-like fashion, the areas are interconnected by multiple routes. There are hidden walls in this game, hidden treasures, hidden movement mechanics, even hidden bosses. Exploration is immensely rewarding. Some areas seem like flattering fan versions of Demon’s Souls levels.
Saint statues are equivalent to bonfires. It is your respawn point, your level-up point, and your shop. You level up just like souls games, putting points into the stat or stats of your choosing. You can make Nobeta a glass cannon, or a tank, or a melee pure, or a balanced witch. There’s plenty to play around with here. Respawns are on a checkpoint system like all souls games, but there is little penalty for death. A feature that Little Witch Nobeta shares with the metroidvania Ender Lilies is that you can return to the last visited shrine at any time from the pause menu.
I think the story is what separates Little Witch Nobeta from the run-of-the-mill indie souls-like. The enemies and item descriptions in this game tell a story. The cut-scenes mostly do not, until the very end. The world of Little Witch Nobeta is extremely dismal. It is a world of intense racism, genocide, civil wars, caste systems, backstabbing, organ trafficking, grave robbing, torture, and slavery. I will leave the details for you to discover for yourself in the game. Like in the Souls games, the player character, Nobeta, is aware of these things but never voices her own opinions on them. She is very much involved, but in what way is left vague until the very end of the game.
There aren’t even a ton of glitches in this game. It’s hard to clip out of bounds or exploit the animations. It seems like the developer thought of everything. I tried to sequence break in a few places and there was an invisible wall. But not just any invisible wall. It was a magical barrier that had its own animations and Nobeta recoiled off of it quite cutely. There was a lot of detail and polish put into this game. It does not drag on too long when it runs out of tricks, although the very very last area fells a tad bit thrown together from watered-down ideas. But there is a new game+ and any costumes you unlock on one save file carry over to other save files.
Little Witch Nobeta is legitimately a good game!😭😭😭