The first PS2 title is a strong outing for the Harry Potter games, it really raised the bar in a lot of ways and provided a great deal of wish fulfillment. Most importantly, it has a fully explorable castle, and the game leans into that a lot.
The game is split in two: day activites, such as classes in which you gain new spells and quidditch, and night acitivites, where you do things that go against the school code, which largely just mean that you'll be sneaking around prefect which patrol the halls. At night you can also visit a shop Fred and Goerge set up, with additional cards, prank items and even a spellbook to buy for beans. This currency is a tad bit too scarce for my liking, but it's not a terribly important problem if you decide to complete the game.
This version of the story takes several major liberties in order to make both sections relatively short, meaning that, for example, in this iteration of the story it is never revealed that Lockhart is a conman. He's only ever seen twice, once in Diagon Alley and once during his class. Some liberties were also taken with the intro, having two tutorial sections in Weasley's household for the very basics and some minigames, and then the Knockturn Alley and Diagon Alley, which are largely about stealth and items. It's a very memorable section, similar to the portable titles, where the Alleys are much more expansive and you get to visit all sorts of shops and other buildings. Afterwards, you get to Hogwarts itself.
With a hundred cards to collect (every 10 increases your health), there is an abundance of chests, locations, secrets and even sidequests available once you begin the aforementioned Hogwarts day-to-day routine. During the day you can use everything you've learned to get closer to completion without too many threats. The problem is, everything is a bit too spaced out, and, just like in the RPG title of this part of the series, there is just so much running back and forth for some of these things. You go to the grounds and find these tiny objects, sometimes without any indication of where exactly they could be, and to return them to their owner, you either have to fly around the grounds or go all the way back up to the top of the castle, to your common room. You have to do a lot of this to win the House Cup, and without that, the ending just doesn't feel satisfying at all. It's a bittersweet design choice, having to do ardous tasks just for a short moment of satisfaction at the end. There are some minigames to go in-between, like gnome-throwing (every attempt costs beans and is also a bit too finnicky for my liking) and a genuinely fun version of Quidditch, but they're still very short bursts of variety.
Worth noting that the castle grounds are only fully open in the PS2 version, the Gamecube and Xbox ones may avoid this problem, as they simply teleport you across it to fit on the disc.
This particular part of the saga has probably the most video game potential, with several major encounters that can be turned into bosses and several areas that are only ever appear in it. It's a shame that a lot more of your time will be spent on these mindless, clueless searches, because the story sections are actually really fun. They're a bit more nonsensical than even your standard HP game section perhaps (Some spell challenges have BUZZSAWS in them) but this style of a game works so well with the extremely nefarious and oppressive nature of the Chamber of Secrets and Prisoner of Azkaban, where the danger is always looming, even though it is only felt as poignantly by Harry. The Basilisk is always waiting within the Hogwarts pipes, and you can hear its faint whispers if you listen in on the chatter, though it sometimes also speaks very loudly, directly to Harry. There are also spiders roaming the halls from day one.
And, as mentioned, the bosses should deliver, and they actually do! They're not fully polished, but both serve their purpose well enough. Aragog perhaps less so, it feels like he should be able to completely destroy you, but when you fall into a hole and go mano-a-spidero he is just very limited. The Basilisk, on the other hand, is fantastic, it slithers through the pipe holes in the Chamber, it can feel your presence, but it cannot see you—it was blinded by the phoenix beforehand—so it crawls randomly and you have to avoid its gigantic body. After each strike the sword (or a dagger: it's very short because it's actually a reskinned wand) falls out of your hand and the snake attempts to slither its way before you can grab it back. In the original book, and in the movie as well, this encounter is so cool because it's more so a stealth section—Harry is running and hiding and gets that one, big final blow in— so it's weird that they never utilize actual stealth—which is a core mechanic in every iteration of HP video games up to this point—but at least the gigantic blind snake boss battle feel is there in this one.
This game in particular is very fondly remembered by people who played it, and is considered one of the best, but I honestly think a lot of the other games have it beat, even back when it was released. Technologically it was rather impressive, and it was an absolutely awesome game to show around when HP was at peak popularity, but going back to it, it sadly hasn't aged very well. Other HP games have really switched their focus onto that exploration aspect after this one came out, and they do it a lot better, while this game, unfortunately, does it rather poorly. It feels like playing a tech demo, where a lot of the ideas for what to do with the assets and the castle itself were mere prototypes. However, as a Harry Potter video game, this is an impressive and ambitious title indeed. All it really takes for this game to seer itself into an impressionable mind is to use the broom, go for a ride on the Hogwarts grounds, and stare for a bit at the giant building in all its glory.
The game is split in two: day activites, such as classes in which you gain new spells and quidditch, and night acitivites, where you do things that go against the school code, which largely just mean that you'll be sneaking around prefect which patrol the halls. At night you can also visit a shop Fred and Goerge set up, with additional cards, prank items and even a spellbook to buy for beans. This currency is a tad bit too scarce for my liking, but it's not a terribly important problem if you decide to complete the game.
This version of the story takes several major liberties in order to make both sections relatively short, meaning that, for example, in this iteration of the story it is never revealed that Lockhart is a conman. He's only ever seen twice, once in Diagon Alley and once during his class. Some liberties were also taken with the intro, having two tutorial sections in Weasley's household for the very basics and some minigames, and then the Knockturn Alley and Diagon Alley, which are largely about stealth and items. It's a very memorable section, similar to the portable titles, where the Alleys are much more expansive and you get to visit all sorts of shops and other buildings. Afterwards, you get to Hogwarts itself.
With a hundred cards to collect (every 10 increases your health), there is an abundance of chests, locations, secrets and even sidequests available once you begin the aforementioned Hogwarts day-to-day routine. During the day you can use everything you've learned to get closer to completion without too many threats. The problem is, everything is a bit too spaced out, and, just like in the RPG title of this part of the series, there is just so much running back and forth for some of these things. You go to the grounds and find these tiny objects, sometimes without any indication of where exactly they could be, and to return them to their owner, you either have to fly around the grounds or go all the way back up to the top of the castle, to your common room. You have to do a lot of this to win the House Cup, and without that, the ending just doesn't feel satisfying at all. It's a bittersweet design choice, having to do ardous tasks just for a short moment of satisfaction at the end. There are some minigames to go in-between, like gnome-throwing (every attempt costs beans and is also a bit too finnicky for my liking) and a genuinely fun version of Quidditch, but they're still very short bursts of variety.
Worth noting that the castle grounds are only fully open in the PS2 version, the Gamecube and Xbox ones may avoid this problem, as they simply teleport you across it to fit on the disc.
This particular part of the saga has probably the most video game potential, with several major encounters that can be turned into bosses and several areas that are only ever appear in it. It's a shame that a lot more of your time will be spent on these mindless, clueless searches, because the story sections are actually really fun. They're a bit more nonsensical than even your standard HP game section perhaps (Some spell challenges have BUZZSAWS in them) but this style of a game works so well with the extremely nefarious and oppressive nature of the Chamber of Secrets and Prisoner of Azkaban, where the danger is always looming, even though it is only felt as poignantly by Harry. The Basilisk is always waiting within the Hogwarts pipes, and you can hear its faint whispers if you listen in on the chatter, though it sometimes also speaks very loudly, directly to Harry. There are also spiders roaming the halls from day one.
And, as mentioned, the bosses should deliver, and they actually do! They're not fully polished, but both serve their purpose well enough. Aragog perhaps less so, it feels like he should be able to completely destroy you, but when you fall into a hole and go mano-a-spidero he is just very limited. The Basilisk, on the other hand, is fantastic, it slithers through the pipe holes in the Chamber, it can feel your presence, but it cannot see you—it was blinded by the phoenix beforehand—so it crawls randomly and you have to avoid its gigantic body. After each strike the sword (or a dagger: it's very short because it's actually a reskinned wand) falls out of your hand and the snake attempts to slither its way before you can grab it back. In the original book, and in the movie as well, this encounter is so cool because it's more so a stealth section—Harry is running and hiding and gets that one, big final blow in— so it's weird that they never utilize actual stealth—which is a core mechanic in every iteration of HP video games up to this point—but at least the gigantic blind snake boss battle feel is there in this one.
This game in particular is very fondly remembered by people who played it, and is considered one of the best, but I honestly think a lot of the other games have it beat, even back when it was released. Technologically it was rather impressive, and it was an absolutely awesome game to show around when HP was at peak popularity, but going back to it, it sadly hasn't aged very well. Other HP games have really switched their focus onto that exploration aspect after this one came out, and they do it a lot better, while this game, unfortunately, does it rather poorly. It feels like playing a tech demo, where a lot of the ideas for what to do with the assets and the castle itself were mere prototypes. However, as a Harry Potter video game, this is an impressive and ambitious title indeed. All it really takes for this game to seer itself into an impressionable mind is to use the broom, go for a ride on the Hogwarts grounds, and stare for a bit at the giant building in all its glory.