Normally I put a picture of the game’s title screen here, but this game doesn’t have a title screen that really worked for the bit.  In its place, have a picture of my Switch 2 Dashboard.

After finishing Black Flag Resynced and Battlefield 6, then bouncing pretty hard off a couple of games that didn’t hook me, I needed something light and fluffy and that didn’t take up a lot of time.

I spent some time paging through my PS5 and Steam libraries, not really finding anything that fit the bill, and was *this close* to deciding that an Atelier game would fulfill the “light and fluffy” criteria even if it would probably be a bit longer than I was really in the mood for… and then I remembered that the Switch exists and that I have a solid shelf full of games for it that I’ve picked up on trips to Japan.

One of them was Little Witch Nobeta, a game I didn’t know much about other than that one of the voice actresses had made the mistake of saying that Taiwan was a country and enraged a lot of people who do not agree with that sentiment.  Apparently that was enough to get me to drop Y3400 on the game.  That’s like twenty bucks, which is a real bargain considering it’s $50 on the US eShop for no adequately explored reason.

The cover art made me assume it’d be light and fluffy and a quick glance at howlongtobeat gave me a Main Story estimate of 6 and a half hours and that was enough to lock in.

Nobeta’s default outfit.

I did not realize it was actually a soulslike.  Not a hard core one, by any means, but someone in Japan woke up one morning and said to themselves “What if Dark Souls, but cute?” and then MADE IT HAPPEN.  Well done.  Most mornings I wake up and my one resolve is to somehow make it to my desk to pick up my work headset and start taking calls. That’s the extent of my ambition.

That description is a little unfair, and I feel I should expand on it.

Ways in which Little Witch Nobeta is a soulslike:

• You’re in a creepy gothic castle.
• Stuff respawns when you rest at save points.
• You use the same currency for leveling your skills as for buying things.
• Stuff likes to kill you a lot.
• Managing stamina for dodging and sprinting is important.
• Bosses have big red health bars.

Ways in which Little Witch Nobeta is not a soulslike:

• You don’t drop all your souls when you die.
• It’s pretty easy, at least on the “Standard” difficulty.
• Gameplay is mostly 3rd person shooter style while most Souls games are melee heavy.
• Your character is adorable instead of some sort of monstrosity from the depths of a character creator.
• You have a cat.

You’re going to have to forgive me for that picture.  I know it’s super dark, but most of my screenshots involving the cat also involve big story spoilers.

It’s not quite as light and fluffy as I’d expected from the box art, and some of the story does get a little on the heavy side before wrapping up with a happy ending.  Stuff like dealing with a sarcastic talking cat, or unlocking a maid outfit, or watching Nobeta try to open doors by pulling on switches that are well out of her reach help to lighten the mood though.

It also has the best “do not walk forward if there is anything else you still want to do” warning screen I’ve ever seen.  Like, there is no mistaking what happens if you walk forward from this point:

As far as gameplay, I mentioned that it’s a 3rd person shooter – and, barring a melee attack you will occasionally use for breaking open chests, you will spend most of your time cycling through your choice of four weapons spells to fit the needs of the moment.

Fourth not depicted here.  It’s “Lightning”.

While the spells have elemental types, I didn’t run into many cases where enemies were immune to, say, fire.  Rather, the spells differ in what sort of gun they map to.  Fire is your shotgun, Ice is a machine gun, Arcade a semiautomatic rifle or pistol of some sort and Lightning is your sniper.  All of these also have a “charge” attack and these can be quite satisfying.  Lightning’s charge attack is an orbital nuke, for example, and the charged attack for Ice throws a ton of light spears at your target in a way that reminded me a great deal of Aldrich in Dark Souls III, with the exception that you’re the one doing the throwing instead of the one desperately trying to roll out of the way, of course..

Anyway, you have a character I will describe as World’s Best Daughter and you have  satisfying …gunplay? it’s spells, not guns, but “spellplay” doesn’t sound right… and this makes a solid core to build a game around.

The environments and enemies aren’t quite up to the same level of quality, though.  The castle is very gray, though occasionally you’ll go outside or have to navigate platforms over lava pits, and it’s very dark.  Many of the enemies are various colors of blobs that don’t particularly stand out.  There are some exceptions, like a sort of scissors-wielding puppet that is quite nasty, and the one room in the game where you encounter mimics and suddenly you’re fighting extremely mean treasure chests.  But mostly it’s blobs.  Some blobs float, some kind of inch around, some can disappear into the ground and pop out at you.  hashtag-just-blob-things.

The bosses are pretty neat, though.  I didn’t bother taking screenshots of the first boss, because he’s basically just a suit of armor, and I won’t show the final boss because it would be quite the spoiler, but I’ll show off the three bosses that come in between those:

You got your cute girl with giant creepy puppet.

Cute girl riding a very angry bear.

…and the obligatory boob monster.

Since it’s a game for the original Switch, it’s not the greatest looking game.  I wasn’t in the least surprised to see it running at 720p even on the Switch 2 in docked mode.  I doubt there will ever be a Switch 2 patch.  It IS available for PS4 and on Steam so those versions almost certainly look better.

While a Switch 2 resolution patch is unlikely, at least I saw the benefits of the beefy hardware in the newer console.  I’m not particularly sensitive to frame rate, but I understand that the game had some pretty bad frame rates on the older hardware and I saw very little of that.  One of the outdoor bits had some notable stutter, but at least it was during a part that didn’t have anything trying to kill you.

To sum up: while it wasn’t exactly what I expected going in, it turned out to be very much worth the price of admission.  I think I’ll keep going with the fluffy theme and see what else I have that fits.