omg this one was a nightmare gameplay wise not much different then order of the phoenix on the ds just more vague a lot of the objectives are just like go fetch this where? idk ask around its kinda boring also the combat not only does it only happen like 6 times if ur not trying to complete side objectives in the entire story its also trivially easily
but none of that is why this game was a nightmare the real reason was this game just does not like being played i tried at first to play this on a psp emulator cause thats where i thought it would look best and run best and it did until it didnt it gets stuck on the loading screen before you reach hogwarts which is weird because this game is marked as playable on the ppsspp compatibility list but anyways i have 3ds i will just play the ds version its the same game so whatever and well i did and omg idk if i download a bad version of this game or what but this game hated me like items would disappear from my inventory character would tell me to go do things i already did and not allow me to progress i was just like wtf man so i just ended up following the "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince DS Any% in 1:18:14 (Former WR)" as a walkthrough on youtube and then i was able to pretty much finish the whole thing in under 2 hours... but at the end of the day i spent way more time on this game then i ever wanted

The DS version is exactly the same as the PSP version but with touch controls, so I cannot really justify completing it for the binge I'm doing. I played through every minigame just to test out whether they are different, and no, not really. The rail shooter section has enemies a bit further away sometimes because it is easier to aim at smaller objects with the stylus, but that's about it. The spells generally work better here, as button and analog combination tends to be a bit wonky in comparison. I had about half an hour of the game left before finishing, but my goal is to play the different versions of these games, not just play the same game several times for the sake of seeing, like, a different texture.

A nothing game. Takes the approach of Order of the Phoenix, in that it's mostly about running from one place to another, always doing fetch-quests specifically this time around, with only the occasional minigames serving as gameplay, but doesn't have that many minigames, and the ones it does aren't great. They are more difficult, however. On average at least, nothing really beats that one Gobstone minigame from Order. You do get rewarded with an occasional rail shooter segment or two (Half-Blood Prince really likes its shooter comparisons that's for sure), though it isn't much. Regardless, the gameplay is really mindless, and you'd really benefit from using the speedup option on an emulator.

Instead of going for prerendered backgrounds, the game has its own artstyle and environments, though it obviously takes a lot of the assets from the other games. It generally looks unimpressive, sometimes kinda funny, like a handheld JRPG from that era almost.

What is a bit frustrating is that the game does have spells for overworld use, and chooses to use them only for furthering the minigames. There is an Order-like game somewhere in there, but the minigame focus goes too far and upsets an already poor balance those games had.

(As of writing this, the most popular emulator hangs up on a loading screen early on. If you really want to play this, do try another emulator, and even if it has graphical artifacts you should still be able to get past the train sequence and yoink a savestate that you can use. The rest of the game works fine.)