1/10
I can name, like, one kinda okayish mechanic from this game: lighting up bushes so you can continue to light up the lanterns, making a line until you get to the final thorny bush you need to burn.
It's hard for me to think of any credit I can give this game. The levels are too long, the gameplay too basic, the AI too poor, the enemies too aggressive, the visuals too underdetailed, the music...
This was one of the worst soundtracks I've ever heard. They go for an epic vibe generally, orchestral within the limitations of the console, but they tend to add one silly instrument and it is goes completely against the melody. There's some brass instrument in the first trial theme, and this incredibly goofy xylophone in the cutscene theme. For actual boss encounters, the music is comparatively lighthearted. I'm honestly kinda baffled that someone signed off on this. Maybe the compression just killed it? I find that hard to believe, but it's a genuinely mind-boggling soundtrack.
The levels are so long. And they get progressively longer for the first three after the tutorial. Then they get shorter afterwards, but entering a level and seeing a quarter of the game's entire collectible count is to be found in it alone sure is something. Some levels took me over half an hour, and this is a very easy game mind you. So much of this game is just overlong, dull, mind-numbing stretches of boredom.
There is a dance rhythm minigame I'll give them that. The same rhythm minigame, minus the dancing unfortunately, is used for the final battle. What a way to bring it back together!
The DS version in particular adds so many meaningless and awful time-wasters. Shitty touch-screen minigames like "scratch to find a matching card" or "click on the same colored candy" or "throw the bean to the left or right" are placed at random spots throughout the game, with characters often just casually standing in unattainable, dangerous places. The most egregious thing is the use of this duel minigame, where, at seemingly random points, when you hit an enemy with a regular spell, which I assume would simply damage it on the GBA, it turns into this minigame where you can either click, draw or drag your stylus around the screen to attack, and then defend against the enemy attacks. WHY? Why have a regular, top-down adventure game, and just have it so that something that should be a simple action, something that IS a simple, quick action for 99% of the game in fact, and just turn it into this long and repetitive section? It's like if Super Mario RPG kept the gameplay from Super Mario World, but once every 10 goombas you entered a turn-based battle with it instead. This blows so much, such a ridiculous decision.
One more thing they added in the DS version is this Tamagochi-like creature called "Niffler" which you feed or wash when it wants to with the stylus. Awesome. Glad time was spent on this. Any and all amount.
Goblet of Fire is, overall, the weakest showing for the Harry Potter games. The executive decision was that the one movie where Harry spends a lot of time on his own should be a co-op title. And with so little to go off of for the levels that aren't the trials, both the approaches taken by the individual teams (a very short game with few levels that you revisit to progress into a next one vs a longer game with the same amount of levels but having them take much more to beat the first time) failed to make one of the seemingly most gamey parts of the series—it is entirely about tournament games after all—good.
I can name, like, one kinda okayish mechanic from this game: lighting up bushes so you can continue to light up the lanterns, making a line until you get to the final thorny bush you need to burn.
It's hard for me to think of any credit I can give this game. The levels are too long, the gameplay too basic, the AI too poor, the enemies too aggressive, the visuals too underdetailed, the music...
This was one of the worst soundtracks I've ever heard. They go for an epic vibe generally, orchestral within the limitations of the console, but they tend to add one silly instrument and it is goes completely against the melody. There's some brass instrument in the first trial theme, and this incredibly goofy xylophone in the cutscene theme. For actual boss encounters, the music is comparatively lighthearted. I'm honestly kinda baffled that someone signed off on this. Maybe the compression just killed it? I find that hard to believe, but it's a genuinely mind-boggling soundtrack.
The levels are so long. And they get progressively longer for the first three after the tutorial. Then they get shorter afterwards, but entering a level and seeing a quarter of the game's entire collectible count is to be found in it alone sure is something. Some levels took me over half an hour, and this is a very easy game mind you. So much of this game is just overlong, dull, mind-numbing stretches of boredom.
There is a dance rhythm minigame I'll give them that. The same rhythm minigame, minus the dancing unfortunately, is used for the final battle. What a way to bring it back together!
The DS version in particular adds so many meaningless and awful time-wasters. Shitty touch-screen minigames like "scratch to find a matching card" or "click on the same colored candy" or "throw the bean to the left or right" are placed at random spots throughout the game, with characters often just casually standing in unattainable, dangerous places. The most egregious thing is the use of this duel minigame, where, at seemingly random points, when you hit an enemy with a regular spell, which I assume would simply damage it on the GBA, it turns into this minigame where you can either click, draw or drag your stylus around the screen to attack, and then defend against the enemy attacks. WHY? Why have a regular, top-down adventure game, and just have it so that something that should be a simple action, something that IS a simple, quick action for 99% of the game in fact, and just turn it into this long and repetitive section? It's like if Super Mario RPG kept the gameplay from Super Mario World, but once every 10 goombas you entered a turn-based battle with it instead. This blows so much, such a ridiculous decision.
One more thing they added in the DS version is this Tamagochi-like creature called "Niffler" which you feed or wash when it wants to with the stylus. Awesome. Glad time was spent on this. Any and all amount.
Goblet of Fire is, overall, the weakest showing for the Harry Potter games. The executive decision was that the one movie where Harry spends a lot of time on his own should be a co-op title. And with so little to go off of for the levels that aren't the trials, both the approaches taken by the individual teams (a very short game with few levels that you revisit to progress into a next one vs a longer game with the same amount of levels but having them take much more to beat the first time) failed to make one of the seemingly most gamey parts of the series—it is entirely about tournament games after all—good.