Table of Contents
Release date: 2001
Developer: Griptonite Games
Now you may be thinking some variation of “why are you playing this game?”, and that is a valid question to ask. Or you are just saying “don’t support this franchise” which is also a valid thing to say. I actually can’t remember the real reason why I started. I think it’s because I made the mistake of playing this game when I was a smol kiddo, and so now I have to make myself remember it. Look all I can come up with is that I’m some variety of masochist.
Don’t get me wrong, some of the HP games are actually good except for the HP part. Licensed games can be good even when the book/movie/etc they’re based on is shit. Not today. On the surface it doesn’t look like it should be so bad, just sort of a poor man’s Zelda but also with digitized photo graphics. I’m all for games where you go around pushing buttons and putting things on switches and whatever.
There’s just a lot of things wrong with the gameplay, though, so I don’t know precisely where to begin and I’ll just have to go with what comes to mind. The combat is some of the worst I’ve seen so far. Harry takes like 3 kazilllion frames to cast the one combat spell you get to have because his animation insists on being dramatic, so it sucks for the same reason Shaq Fu sucks, combined with enemies that get to move twice as fast as you do and later in the game start taking multiple hits to stay down for the count. It’s very easy to start taking a lot of damage if you don’t just sit in a corner where they can’t touch you and camp them out. Harry’s movement in general is just kinda clunky, seemingly just to show off the fact that they added a lot of frames of animation, maybe.
There also just isn’t a lot of variety in what you can do. You only get 5 spells and 4 of them are all really just used for the “challenge” level for the class you learn them in and then forgotten until the final level where it’s like “oh yeah I guess I have that spell”. You still mostly just use your first spell to push things around. I guess the puzzles are simplistic because they want kids to be able to play it? But then Zelda is aimed at all ages too and it manages to be a better action-adventure game. But that is not where the challenge lies. The challenge is that you have lots of moving platforms and bottomless pits to deal with (and no, you cannot jump). And sometimes you’ll slip off the edge if you aren’t careful, especially when two moving platforms move into each other and you don’t get off with the right timing.
The best part is that if you die, you start the whole level again. From being bitten from what are apparently supposed to be garden gnomes, or falling into a hole, you might just have to start the whole entire level all over again, if savestates are against your religion. That could be… I wanna say maybe 10 minutes of gameplay you lost? There might not be game over screens but otherwise this is NES game levels of unforgiving lack of care about your time. I don’t know how else to describe the “dungeons” other than very drawn out.
But don’t worry! The developers seem to be aware that they got stuck developing a bad game, and despite probably being heavily micromanaged and crunched to hell and back by the world’s worst publisher and being spread thin having their best people developing the better GBC game, they have added… minigames. Don’t you just love mandatory stealth segments? No? Well… I mean maybe don’t play a game based on an already written story where part of the plot is that the main character sneaks out at night a lot. These are not level designs that are fun to hide around in though. Feels a lot more like luck, and also of course you go all the way back to the beginning of the chapter if you get caught, as well as losing points.
The Quidditch matches and stupid Simon Says style spell lessons, luckily, are not actually mandatory to win. You still have to play them, but if you don’t care about the points, you can just lose and the story still goes on. I didn’t know that but glitchless speedruns do it, so it’s okay. They are both terrible. “Hey dickhead wanna remember like 10 random directions” has never been a fun minigame in any instance of it existing, so I don’t need to elaborate on that, but the broom sport is… well, it makes more sense as a game than it does in the books at least. Just have to grab the shiny thing before you get beaten to death by the angry balls, or maybe just before the other guy does? Whoops, the controls make no sense. There are two control options and both of them feel weird as hell, though I think the advanced one is much worse and there’s absolutely no reason to use it. Then it’s just a matter of being annoyed trying to chase a thing that flies around while… going through hoops! Yes friends, we have literally taken game design lessons from Superman 64 and thought yeah that sounds like a good idea, do that.
If for some reason you still enjoy the franchise in 2021 despite everything, it’s still not even great for the story. You’d probably not be a fan of how it drops you straight off in Hogwarts without the prologue, though I guess that does mean it skips Diagon Alley and then you can pretend the book doesn’t have anti-semitic stereotypes in it. You will probably be annoyed that it misses out on a lot of plot details and some of them are just different (Harry’s reason for sneaking out at night or what he was doing when being caught, etc) at least compared to other adaptations that I ashamedly remember.
The one redeeming factor of this game is that you get to hit other students with spells, which I guess might give you 3 seconds of chuckling. If you hit teachers with it though you lose points. Which I guess makes sense because yeah I mean you kind of aren’t allowed to go around punching people in real life, and the game isn’t advanced enough to have teachers see you assaulting a student and penalize you for that. Worth mentioning that the points actually matter, because you can lose the house cup at the end of the game if you don’t have enough, as with I think all HP games. It doesn’t look like there’s any incentive to get the “good ending” in this one though.
It’s not even an open world sort of game. Stairs and doorways to areas the game doesn’t want you to go right now are blocked off by people asking “Shouldn’t you be studying?” or are locked (but your spell that literally opens locked doors doesn’t unlock them). No fun allowed, no procrastination, go do your fetch quest.
It’s not very often you see a game released across platforms and the less powerful platform is the better one… well, really the GBC game can be considered a different game entirely under the same name, but you should really just play that. Don’t play this game, if for some reason you were considering doing so. Not worth it. Not worth your time or patience. You deserve better than that.