![]() This, coupled with the amateurish voice acting, makes them feel the most juvenile out of all the different versions of Harry Potter games. These games, perhaps more than any other, go hard on the minigames. Just maybe don’t exhale into the microphone so much again while you laugh, Harry. I, too, find the idea of creating a book called “Charm You Own Cheese” to be an act worth remembering for millennia to come, very funny. They’re still a fantastic feature and their descriptions are now voiced over, with Harry’s voice actor reading them in-character and, occasionally, losing his cool at the ridiculous descriptions. Thankfully, the Wizard Cards are present in this iteration. Perhaps inserting a ridiculous amount of meaningless consumables is their way of padding out the playtime. Problem is, by the time I reached Fred and George in Hogwarts (the game begins in Weasley’s backyard) I already had enough to buy them all. The second puts beans everywhere, so much so that I had well over a thousand by the end of it, and has the player purchase a select number of cards with them. I do like the idea of a finite number of things scattered around the castle in theory, but there is a different game that did it better. A quidditch upgrade, a spell upgrade, or even merely a Wizard Card in one instance. ![]() The first has you collect every bean on the school ground to obtain a meaningless reward. ![]() PS1 had the best character modelsīoth games do a pretty awful job of utilizing their collectables. There are scenes added specifically for the sake of comedy, such as Harry getting chased by low-polygon cupids (if you get a game over in that section they surround Harry and sing a song for him about how divine he is) or a minigame where he catches Ron’s slugs in a bowl. The characters are cracking jokes left and right. The second game’s approach differs greatly. The voice actors breathe into the microphone, their thick British accents make for silly pronunciations and the script picks, chooses and adds to the source in a nonsensical manner. The first game does a poor job of retelling the story, however, as it attempts to approach it entirely seriously. The first game, however, does not.īoth titles have, on occasion, enough visual flair to hold their ground, as some screens have a very thick atmosphere, accompanied by a great soundtrack. Thankfully the second game, The Chamber of Secrets, leans more into it. ![]() Unlike their PC counterparts, they fall into silliness more so than anything else. PS1 Hagrid, anyone? It’s a sign of the overall visual quality the games look bad for their time and, by today’s standards, they just look funny. The PlayStation 1 Harry Potter duology is a series of short platformers, largely remembered for its poor character models. Some are better, some worse, but all are unique in their own way. In Part II, I will continue to focus on these three titles, this time on consoles. Carried by their unique and underappreciated gameplay, they remain to this day, my favorite version of the Harry Potter video game formula. In the first part of this retrospective, it became apparent that the PC versions of The Sorcerer’s Stone, The Chamber of Secrets and The Prisoner of Azkaban had proven themselves to be a set of very enjoyable games. ![]()
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