The movement feels stiff but is actually quite pleasing.

It's a bit weird of a game, but it gets on you.

I really enjoyed it, while it last.

I always loved how the games followed the films in more ways than one, even accidentally.

The two first films have the same director and thus the same style, and most of the kids don't really have any obvious changes in between them, neither do the two games. It's the third one when everything becomes different. New director, new style. The game has brand new graphics. It feels like the beginning of a new era.

It no longer just feels like a kids game that some team threw together on the backside of a month (until the end maybe), but it feels like an actual game that they spent some actual time on. It doesn't feel like I'm playing a straight-up kids game.

The opening FMV is absolutely epic. Real time was spent on the storytelling aspect of the game, and it makes it so much more rewarding to play. There's an actual style, and an atmosphere, and an aesthetic to it that feels genuine and unique. It feels like if the Chamber of Secrets game just grew up.

No quidditch this time around, though, which is a bummer.

There are less gaps in the narrative now. Philosopher's Stone and Chamber of Secrets were almost laughable when it came to that, but these guys actually try to capture the story told as closely as possible. I know it's just because I've read the book and watched the film, but scenes towards the end actually managed to give me chills. I do feel like there was a lot of stuff cut from this game because of deadlines, which sucks, but that's life, and they made it work anyways.

And they even go beyond that. With the previous games, the game might veer off a bit to tell the story in a way that fits the game, but this game adds segments and story beats that aren't even in the book or the film.

Even if their creativeness in its storytelling, and video game making in general, just kinda dies down towards the end (because of deadlines, I'm guessing).

Plus, the game is just better now because you have Ron and Hermione with you for most of the game, and you can even switch to their characters. You even have them with you into the spell challenges, which is more than cool. However, because they follow you this time around, you can't really rely on following them to places, so you kind of have to figure out which doors you're supposed to enter yourself. But not only do you get to play as the three characters, you also get different specific abilities with each character, like Ron being able to see hidden doors, and Harry being able to jump (cool ability, bruv). But it doesn't stop there; the different characters also have character-specific spells. That's really cool.

Also, I adore the character models and animations.

They reuse a lot of music from previous games, which is actually kind of a positive because Chamber of Secrets has my second favorite video game soundtrack of all time. But it's also sort of a bummer because the original music that is here is really good. I especially love the more melancholic and not super happy tone of some of it. And the more mysterious and majestic, and less fun and adventurous, music.

I will say that the pause menu is frustratingly slow. And I don't like how voice lines are interrupted when you pause, and they don't continue when you unpause. And only being able to equip two spells at a time is a nuisance.

And the last act is way, way too short.

But I love this game. It's a good ol' time.

This game ruins the best part of the last game which was the mappable spell buttons. Because it introduces Ron and Hermione as playable characters, you have to use a button to swap between them. That means you can only map up to 2 buttons instead of 3. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it means that pretty early on you’ll have to constantly pause the game to remap spells. Whenever you’re in a level that uses a variety of spells or abilities, you quickly run out of slots because each character can only map 2 spells or items at a time. I know these games are for kids, but would it really have made the controls too complicated for kids if they had to swap characters with the D pad instead of the buttons?

There's a handful of good things in this game and improvements over the previous two titles, which are hindered by a fair share of lackluster and downright inconvenient elements. In terms of story adaptation the cutscenes are doing the bare minimum, it's clear the game expects you to know either the book or movie because otherwise you'll have no idea what's going on. It's nice to have voiced cutscenes instead of still images, but when there's a lack of consistency with the story it seems kind of pointless.

Playing as all three characters is a fun idea, yet other elements of the game can spoil the experience. Any form of challenge is gone since the characters will tell you over and over again what you're supposed to do as if you have a short term memory. Switching between spells can get annoying fast because you're only able to equip two at a time and it's not something you can just solve by switching to another character, since they all have an individual set of spells. The ending is also very weak from a gameplay perspective with the lack of a proper boss fight that rushes through the finale with one cutscene after another, leaving very little to do for the player. The mini games are a nice attempt of offering more content after you beat the main game, but are generally quite underwhelming and repetitive.

However, the controls are good, the presentation and score are great for the time and make for an immersive experience any fan of the series can appreciate. Take that and the variety of spells between the three characters and you can still get some enjoyment out of the game by exploring Hogwarts and looking for collectibles if you don't let the previously mentioned inconveniences sour your experience.

Coming off the previous two games on PS1, this title is a massive improvement from those two games.

Instead of feeling passable, I'd say this game is actually "good" if not exceptionally flawed in places. It's more mechanically rich than it's predecessors and it uses it's three playable characters well to make each feel distinct from one another.

Can't speak for the Gamecube or Xbox versions but the PS2 port is held back by several glitches, nothing game breaking but all noticeable. Loading is also fairly time consuming which isn't good for a game as menu heavy as this one.

That said, it's a massive step up from Harry Potter's outings on PS1 and is undoubtedly where the mainline games peaked.

There's something about this particular era of games where the developers would make a giant castle/courtyard you can fly around that is completely empty of content. Like maybe 5% of it is interactable. It rules.

There's this balance between player convenience and realism in scale. Like you don't want the player to have to travel a long distance to get from one "fun" to the next "fun" so you abstract the scale and distance between the "funs". In the FF7 overworld, Cloud becomes a big cartoon boy and hypothetically is traveling very large distances with his thundering abstracted steps. The trade-off here being that you lose a little immersion, a little realism not in graphics but in scale. Games as an interactive medium promise worlds you can live in and can get a lot out of that scale if your willing to inconvenience the player a little. You've got to find the right balance.

The castle/courtyard in this game doesn't have much in it but the sheer act of existing on the Hogwarts campus at full scale is fun.