The First Three Harry Potter Games | 2021 PC Review

here we have an intersection of things i love magic and abandoned movie adaptations there's nothing quite as immersive as spending hours performing actual tech magic resurrecting a triple feature of 20 year old harry potter games to run again how come kingdoms of amler can get a remaster but games people actually have nostalgia for are left to rot i mean do you want an answer to that question because it's a legal answer given that harry potter games are still being made it's fair to say warner brothers hasn't lost the rights to the ip but that doesn't mean they have the right to sell the games themselves which they contracted out to electronic arts who subcontracted with a bunch of studios to release a bunch of different versions of these games coinciding with the release of the films it might be a long time before some business executive finally breaks the legal ice and ponies up the cache to digitally release these games it's kind of disingenuous to say that these are all the same game considering they all had different developers they all followed the same general design document but all had different interpretations we're covering the pc versions of the series today because that's what's available the main issues you have to fix are basically just hardware compatibility due to a lack of future proofing the first two games came with safe disk which is drm like de nuvo except it didn't stop pirates caused performance issues and was a massive enough security risk that it was eventually blocked from running on modern windows well two for three but give it time the games are abandoned wear that means you can't purchase them anymore i happen to own disc copies from back in the day and use the aforementioned necessary cracks to run the software there's nothing wrong with cracking software you own to get around drm that prevents said software from running in the current age the first two games require some additional patching to run at a modern resolution not because they won't run but because the menu is in a fixed resolution and you can't actually start the game if you try to force anything above 1024x768 i also use directx upgrades for the first two games although the third game ran fine out of the box as for frame rates you can get up to 60 without anything wonky happening but apparently going above that causes issues with how the games time their voice lines the first game don't say it don't say it don't say it as the french call it harry potter and the wizarding school is definitely the worst controls-wise the action-adventure games you're clearly supposed to connect the games to had strafing years before this came along when a mod exists to port over the controls from its sequel that kinda says a lot you can't strafe and you can't cast spells in the air which doesn't make sense textually but when you play it it'll stand out how much better being able to cast and jump feels in chamber of secrets you can't do stuff like this in the first game oh also these controls arrow keys right control to jump and no mouse inversion maybe the crazies had a point about this franchise being satanic we can cast spells which are contextual rather than selected and the games do a fairly good job being consistent with what targets are affected by what spells we're also drip-fed the spells like a metroidvania someone is really mad that i just said that each game has a roster of spells to use which gradually open up the environment especially the main hogwarts area some spells carry over between games like the unlocked spell others are forgotten between titles flopindo carries most of the first two games but gets replaced with defendo and depulso and rectum sempra in the third game when guardium leviosa disappears after the first game which is honestly kinda weird it seems like such a video game staple to be able to move objects around magically they were honestly probably just early and couldn't figure out a good physics system to improve it the possibilities for interesting puzzles are endless when you add boxes you can climb on incendio was also forgotten but then we're taught defindo which does exactly the same thing mechanically and then we learned the perfect spell for banishing ghosts only to forget it in the third game when we need to exercise peeves from the franchise the third game's new spells are kind of lame also fine ideas but not implemented as creatively as the way the prior games would do it in chamber of secrets the player learned scourge and now we can take all those green goo piles we've been seeing to task and access some new areas but there isn't anything the player can really do with carpe retractum or glacius only story mission stuff the player learns spongify and then suddenly a bunch of vertical areas are opened up but there's not a single area in the castle opened up by carpe rectum look i'm not the one that is rectum excess i didn't create the turtle that shoots fire out of its ass what was the inspiration for this the games are at their strongest when you're learning new spells and opening new avenues of exploration while that makes the mission elements more interesting those always paled in comparison to realizing that obstacle you saw a dozen times is now an opportunity learning new spells is interesting and given how there are basically no rules in harry potter for how magic works there's no limit on creativity for spell ideas but there was a real world limit the series was a movie adaptation under a strict deadline aiming to launch the same day as the film's north american release wizard stone feels like early access for chamber of secrets which feels like early access for prisoner of azkaban when the film's changed to having 18 month production cycles these game devs probably breathed a sigh of relief but probably not again it's a shovelware studio so when they weren't working on harry potter they were putting out hits like magic school bus explores the world of animals rugrats munching land and finding nemo most people probably skip credits i never do unless they're these games which broke and endlessly looped that glitch even made it into the second game but here's an exercise pick a single name off this list and just wonder about them where did they go to school and why did they have a dream project they wanted to make did they get to do it or did life get in the way an unexpected pregnancy or an older relative suddenly getting sick so they took whatever job they could even if that meant pumping out shovelware what's often meant as a temporary job tends to end up being a career but not for these people no wonder didn't make it to a decade before being acquired into a larger blob a conglomerate of shovelware studios which grew and grew until one day it stopped growing and started selling and eventually dissolved do you even recognize the name foundation 9 did you know they died in 2015 the thing is i can't help but feel a small bit of passion here harry potter was new for them nearest i can tell it was no wonder's first foray into 3d games they might have been following a blueprint but building a lego set by instructions can be fun too especially if it's enough experience to springboard yourself into a more fulfilling studio i picked a random name jordan thomas he got to move on from the first game to working on thief deadly shadows and then bioshock even got a senior writing gig on bioshock infinite say what you will about that game's writing but i would rather have written bioshock infinite than been stuck making other people's license titles most of which got abandoned an interesting aspect of these games is the flying while the general controls got better with time each game had a different philosophy for its flight controls wizard stone gave the player the most control over their character but throwing full flight controls in a game for babies is a tall order i had difficulty with this stuff as a kid because i'd never played any kind of 3d flying game before this point besides like descent then chamber of secrets had this system with more emphasis on beating your opponent than actual flying skill and prisoner of azkaban made the flying basically just flappy bird that's gonna be the most dated reference in this video aesthetic design is where these games really shine especially the first two you know you have some talented artists when you can take a square room and make it feel alive with just texture work lighting and a sloped roof look at this room this could just be a generic stone room but instead it uses lighting to easily communicate to the player what is safe and what is dangerous this game would be entirely within its rights to make hogwarts a generic brown and grey castle and as time went on it became exactly that it seems like the better the games looked from a technical perspective the less the designers tried to use unique lighting to mask its simplicity which backfired in the long term of course because now all of this looks dated but because prisoner of azkaban's so flat looking it actually looks worse from our perspective than the first game of course this also matches what was going on with the visual aesthetics of the movies people get really touchy on the subject of color correction in harry potter like yeah the series is darker and harry's in puberty except that doesn't actually match the tone of the series chamber of secrets is a lot darker than people remember and prisoner of azkaban isn't as dark as people remember but it's like someone flipped a switch and snapped the world of its color and then there's the character models nothing will ever top the playstation hagrid sure but i wouldn't sleep on these weird low poly attempts at portraying the real actors the fact that the voices are only 90 of the way there and they don't move their lips definitely doesn't help mr potter i'm professor mcgonagall deputy headmistress of hogwarts and head of gryffindor house although i do not approve of your chasing malfoy about i'll admit you have remarkable talent on a broomstick ordinarily first-year students may not compete in quidditch in your case we might overlook that rule harry gryffindor's first quidditch match of the year is later this afternoon against the formidable slytherin team see you then jordan no favoritism in your case we might overlook that rule harry the second game actually helped a lot with this but it didn't add rotation animations so the characters still slide when turning to face each other enemies of the air beware you'll be next mudbloods i never got used to the characters in the third game if it's really they have all the pieces to make them look better but aesthetically they look inferior mostly because of their porcelain skin textures it's probably the uncanny valley the more realistic the character models get the more our brains will try to reject them the plot of these games follow the movies obviously but you know how memories tend to lose detail over time that's how the harry potter franchises worked the movies changed and lost stuff in adaptation some of it necessary and some of it less so and then the games when they adapted those movies themselves lost details in the process like for example the plot point of harry not wanting to join slytherin house loses all value if you don't introduce draco's character before the sorting hat ceremony i always like to think about annotations as someone's first introduction to the franchise you might learn enough about this series from the game to keep up but there's a lot of details that just weren't translated to the games i think the games work fine enough on their own but i'm going to assume you have a vague understanding of what this series is about going forward the first game gets a slideshow of the events of the first 50 minutes or so of the movie even then when the game gets started it doesn't really tell the same story because the harry potter narrative doesn't directly lend itself to a video game so we're just dumped into hogwarts told to go adventuring by dumbledore and then head to our first class with professor quarle look i get that it's laid back but what's the attendance policy here being late because the castle decided to change shapes is already distressing enough without making adventure an excuse for tardiness we then play a spell minigame during class before being put through a challenge course related to that spell it's a drawing mini game in the first one and is replaced with a bad timing game before getting dropped entirely in the third game honestly i like the drawing minigame the most if only because it'll give people an excuse to request arcs fatalis again the more you request it the more tempted i am to do it even if that would give arcane unfair representation on this channel these challenges aren't exactly the safest thing also harry seems to be receiving the bulk of magical education here a stark contrast to his movie incarnation that barely did anything magical for the first few flicks we start with flopindo the afer mentioned workhorse of this game it pushes blocks around and knocks stuff over including these gnomes they're bastards in the first game but serve a higher purpose in the second so i tried to take them with me where possible even into cut scenes done mr potter you have completed my defender challenge one broomstick lesson and then hermione teaches us alohomora even though she's not a sanctioned teacher she even awards us house points on faith for doing well no wonder slytherin wins the house cup if students can just tell professors they totally earned it the aloha morris spell course is very short which is funny given how prominent the spell is in all three games and even the movies there's just not that many things you can do with the spell to unlock doors then we learn wingardium leviosa yet the course requires knowledge of flopindo as well which makes sense for a game but not for a school ron didn't figure out the levitation charm after his first day of class so are kids just supposed to be trapped here if they don't do well in the earlier courses alohomora ends up being optional for full completion but is that part of my grade i didn't learn this spell as part of the official curriculum so whatever showing up in courses is kind of alarming following that is incendio useful for popping and stunning hazardous plants you'd think there'd be more uses out of a fire spell like lighting fires and puzzles i guess common sense caught up to them because all the first years forgot to spell by the chamber of secrets and had to relearn it the thing is these plants never really served as compelling threats or obstacles and it seems the devs agreed by the third game because they cut them combat's not really the focus of the games we mostly just knock over enemies prisoner of azkaban would mark an increased focus on fighting segments while enemies generally just flavored areas of the first two games barring the odd peeves boss fight our last spell for the first game is lumos and there's even a whole course dedicated to the wizarding equivalent of a flashlight of course it serves a double function of revealing hidden walls and platforms which helps enable some level creativity and that's the first game's roster complete then there's the infamous library level the thing is the final boss rush i can't believe i'm saying that about a harry potter game the final boss rush doesn't really do the game's mechanics justice which i believe was probably the purpose of this level instead harry the green spell is not the ow spell it's the equivalent of a wizard magnum the library is a stealth section relying on the idea that harry can't cast spells from inside his invisibility cloak the problem's that well it's a forced stealth section in a game with no emphasis on those ideas most of you probably wouldn't have even guessed the footsteps sounds depend on the surface of the floor in this game i get that the game is setting up stuff that might not get to be used in the finale so why not take creative liberties with the finale to expand it out instead of this to be honest it's not even that bad it's a healthy switch up to face an enemy the player can't just outright kill we then move on to the chamber of secrets we've upgraded into full cutscenes which establishes the first half hour or so of the movie and even then it just sort of brushes past the consequences of crashing the flying car the game incorporates the surviving first-year spells into its tutorial area which i think is an appropriate way to handle things these spells aren't so complicated that we need to relearn the intricacies and the game wastes no time getting into the meat of the franchise immediately teaching us rictum sempra which is used defensively to stun critters the challenges are also timed now and our house points are derived from how quickly we complete them as well as how many optional challenge stars we collect is the implication that not everyone does these but rather just representatives from each class because one would think we would be graded personally for our metrics on the test and not as a house house points get reworked into a weekly housepoint ceremony unlike the first game which made the brilliant move of making it impossible to beat slytherin and thus ensuring dumbledore would always have to rewrite history to make his preferred house win now our performance is tied to a regular reward the bonus bean room oh i didn't explain this they're beans everywhere in the first game we turn them over to our boys fred and george who are collecting them for a prank on snape and they give us collectible cards in return they didn't do anything other than signify how detailed an explorer you were and i managed to find all but one of the cards actually i think i found all of them but i was just too lazy to open that chest down there anyways the beans have been turned into a full currency that we can trade for potion ingredients and cards which are now tied to a progression system in the second game i mean the progression is just expanding our health bar but hey that's worth more than quidditch armor the economy does get busted once the wizarding fight club is introduced and we can relentlessly bully peter into dueling us for infinite beans and the potions aren't really that sophisticated as it's just a health potion in a game that's not that challenging so little wonder they disappeared in the third game prisoner would expand on this again although it took away much of the incentive now there are three different currencies to buy stuff we can collect but there aren't really any gameplay advantages anymore since potions and extra health got removed but collecting all 80 of the collector's cards is necessary to graduate the third year which was an odd choice to be sure considering how dangerous getting all 80 of these things were honestly i think it peaked with the second game tying gameplay buffs to collection is a good incentive to actually do it otherwise we're just patting our stats so if we do well in the challenges and earn lots of house points we get to go to the bean bonus room and it's always us it must suck to go to hogwarts if your name isn't harry potter at least the third game introduced switching protagonists so each of the trio got time in the spotlight instead of just harry carrying the school the bonus room got a downgrade in prisoner as well though in chamber each trip has a little bit more of the area unlocked due to us learning new spells but in prisoner's bonus room it's basically just the exact same gauntlet over and over with no new additions based on the new mechanics chamber of secrets honestly peaked with its challenges and i'm saying that knowing full well about one of the third game's challenges and don't say nostalgia i'm tired of hearing that argument these games all came out in the same three-year time period in addition to the challenge levels or story levels which are sort of an application of the mechanics we've been learning going into the supply closet for potion ingredients there's a whole level for that stealing ingredients for the polyjuice potion two levels for that sneaking into slytherin's dorm room a level for that and i'm all for it there's a good enough foundation here to make more levels without feeling repetitive although because ron doesn't come with us the level in the forbidden forest goes a bit differently than the other versions of this story games amuse me because they tend to emphasize fighting a lot more than other narratives video game harry potter has no qualms about killing a few dozen spiders just to learn that aragon isn't the monster the petrified mrs norris the chamber of secrets proper is also a really good final level compared to the last game and sure the end boss fight with the basilisk is really awkward i think the duel with voldemort worked out better this is just fine so we move on to prisoner look at that train model this one takes the most liberty with the story outright excising everything up until the train to hogwarts and it's immediately apparent there has been a focal change people like prisoner's game well enough but if you ever wondered how goblet of fire strayed so far from the proven formula i think the answer lies in this game there are three characters in most of the game now and many of the levels incorporate elements which require multiple casters at once like locked doors with multiple locks the perspective may also shift between the characters so the days of harry suffering back injuries due to carrying the team are kind of over one thing that's alarming however is how rapidly the game shifts from the end of the tutorial straight into our first class at hogwarts like i said earlier prisoner has less of a focus on expanding your exploration with its new spells and it kind of masks that by not allowing the player to explore hogwarts before their first class like you could in the first two games it also cut out the spell minigame and the housepoint system and even quidditch so more of a focus must be placed on the levels and challenges then right the carpe retractum challenge has to be taken in a vacuum because it's the first challenge we can't explore a chamber of secrets to your level as the first challenge of a game i guess but the challenge is very simple the spells just pull us towards these pylons or the pylons towards us the former is a mobility option that was already done better by spongify from the second game and the latter is a button that was already done better by flipindo while it adds flavor there's a stiffness to the mechanic that doesn't really allow you to do anything cool with the added mobility this is a 3d platformer so i would expect to be able to move and cast the spell in the same motion or to cancel out and target the next pylon instead it's cumbersome retract them to a pylon wait for the platform drop down repeat after this we're introduced to the castle into shortcuts which we don't know the passwords to yet the thing is prisoner doesn't really need the shortcuts as getting around this version of the castle is faster than in chamber due to the fixed staircases and there's just less to do in the castle overall after this we head out to our magical creatures elective before finding out that a pixie infestation needs taken care of with a reward for doing so i feel like one of the designers was really into the idea of putting a timer over the whole game so you could dynamically be late to class but someone kept shooting them down because the game isn't open-ended enough to be a full student role-playing game as for the pixies well it's just a mini game where we spam rictum sempra an annoying amount of times this wasn't a challenge even back in the day after this we go fly around on buckbeak which itself is another minigame that's actually tied to our graduation then transfiguration class where hermione learns a spell to transform statues into animals it's a neat idea and it's a shame it doesn't get used in the overworld we can control a rabbit which accesses tight spaces as well as a dragon which can fly around we finish and get dumped out into the castle before walking to the end of the hallway and get shoved into a quidditch game except it's actually just a cut scene as there's no quidditch in game three i love that to be able to actually render all of the dementors in the scene they opted to utilize sprites except it's actually just a single sprite so when you look at it from any angle beyond dead on the illusion is immediately broken this scene has to see the sprites from the top down meaning that all of the dementors are either horizontal or hey they're just cardboard cutouts no need to be scared harry most of them aren't real we learned the spell alohomora to deal with the mentors which only reprises in the final boss sequence and otherwise does nothing in these games ship we learned the spell expecto patronum to deal with dementors which only reprises in the final boss sequence and otherwise does nothing in these games we get a very short level in the library making limited use of ron and hermione's new spells before moving on to charms class where harry gets to learn glacius it's weird because rather than having all the kids learning each spell it's more like each one is specialized into a different school of magic glacius lets harry freeze things which he uses to murder endangered amazonian salamanders but he can also freeze flowing water including these massive water slides hold on are we actually playing another downhill ice sports game trapped in the body of a billion dollar intellectual property that has no ordinary relationship with sports is this seriously happening again because it feels like someone in no wonder was passionate about this ice slide idea but knew full well they weren't actually going to get to make their dream game at this studio well they should team up with gary over at activision and make their dreams a reality that's why prisoners in a weird spot it's got the goofy but fun tone of the first two games and then we get dragged into an hour of dark and dank caves complete with generic skeletons in the finale of the movie plot jesus christ i mean i get they're hard to animate but it's just no pretty much every reason why goblet of fire failed as a game has its roots in the gradual changes prisoner made from chamber of secrets you can do the dark movie plot focused adaptation style or you can do the fun movie inspired reimagining that places the strengths of video games and unfortunately prisoners just kind of stuck in the middle of those two philosophies and then it's back to goofy again with our finals which are just remixes of the original spell challenges i mean it's a school game and schools typically have final exams right only problem is that these spells don't really have time to shine in the broader game spongify could have a good final exam because it's used all over the place in the second game but ron doesn't really get to use carpe retractum a whole lot before his test he's missing from a chunk of the game actually after his kidnapping and injury and with our exams over we go to leave hogwarts only to be given a list and told by dumbledore that we got a 100 this game to get the credit roll i'll be honest i was pretty much only interested in seeing if the infinite credits bug had made it into the third game otherwise i would have just looked at the final scene and called it there it didn't and the final scene is literally just a couple lines from the narrator and harry looking wistfully out the window of the low poly train that conveniently was already made for the opening sequence and that rounds out the first three harry potter games what's funny is i didn't know a new game was being made in the setting until writing this video hogwarts legacy which has been delayed until 2022 thing is if we look at the developer avalanche software we see the exact same history that defined no wonder a studio that never developed a single unique ip in their entire history being contracted to deliver on someone else's vision of the world the name itself is a pun for there was probably no wonder to working there honestly kylotan games is looking better by comparison at least they got to try at making some original games like the cursed crusade and bet on soldier before their dreams were crushed and they were relegated to biannual rally car games while i'm curious to see where this game lands on the spectrum i have to wonder if the developers have learned from the past and plan on improving upon a good existing idea or if it'll just be the universal game blueprint of the eighth generation imprinted upon a pre-existing franchise the thing is it's probably the latter in part because of the disappearance of these games outside of their original score by musical wizard jeremy soule nobody really seems to talk about these games aside from anecdotes about nostalgia i fail to see how these games could ever have reviewed so poorly back in the day they can be beaten in a couple hours sure by adults who will find the game's challenges rather simple but this kind of game basically got me into video games as a kid i picked this up at a scholastic fair and my parents even had to buy a new graphics card for it to run it's a novelty now with some interesting ideas so i guess 7 out of 10 applies but i'm also aware that i'm no longer the target audience for this gameplay formula kids will figure out how to play any game of course as evidenced by me sneaking some doom time on my dad's computer but games for kids should be graded on a curve at least mechanically you should of course still strive to tell a good story with a good moral in it in kids media honestly the only reason i wouldn't advocate giving your kids this game today are the controls something that would probably be patched up in a modern re-release and also i don't really think kids today are into harry potter i'd like to thank the patrons on screen for patiently allowing me a month off of normal content creation to focus on working on the oblivion video about a month ago i finalized the script for that video and started recording audio and even doing editing work on the video if you want more timely information about where that project is at that's where i post status updates i use side projects like these to avoid getting stuck in creative ruts and as practice work also wow i did not anticipate that battlefront 2 video being received so well i only had 32 subscribers this time last year now i have 32 000 and it's people like you who stick to the end that i have to thank for that now that i've made it awkward i'm just i'm just going to cut this off

Channel: PatricianTV

Views: 634,409

Keywords: Patrician, Harry Potter Games, Harry Potter Sorcerors Stone Game, Harry Potter Chamber of Secrets Game, Harry Potter Prisoner of Azkaban Game, First Three Harry Potter, patrician harry potter

Id: iIt8yShmUI8

Length: 27min 27sec (1647 seconds)

Published: Wed May 19 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

All I remember is the 'dungeons' were very fun (if a bit simplistic) and the gnomes and their giggling were f**king terrifying

[u/Salmakki]

Oh man, incredibly fond memories of these games. Getting to the BEAN BONUS ROOM was always a rush. I always felt like I was too poor to buy all the stuff I wanted from Fred and Georges shop in PoA though...

Actually this brought a memory roaring back. I'm reasonably sure that I never actually beat chamber of secrets because at the age I was playing it, I got to the actual pipes leading to the chamber and then quit because I was deathly afraid of facing the spiders + basilisk. Loved the books, loved the movies, couldn't finish the game. Wow, I really ought to go back and do that some day.

[u/craxmerax]

Never played the PC versions, but the PS2 versions of the first 3 games were so good (that's how I remember them atleast :))

[u/NovoMyJogo]

The first 3 HP games on GBC were turn-based FF-like games. They were amazing. I couldn't believe how much more fun they were than the console versions.

Guys, take the time to look them up if you're even a bit curious about HP. (not my video)

[u/Sh0esy]

Was the 4th one awful or was it just awful compared to the first 3? I hated it

[u/Mr_Bell_Man]

Chamber of Secrets on the PC was one of my favorite games as a kid. As silly as it sounds, it's one of the games that got me into PC games (along with Jimmy Neutron vs Jimmy Negatron).

Also the part where you find the petrified Nearly Headless Nick scared the crap out of me as a kid. I remember trying to jump around him when I replayed the game thinking that I wouldn't have to see it again. Good times.

EDIT: The scene in question.

[u/Radulno]

I loved those games as a child (I mean I loved everything Harry Potter so of course). They were actually pretty good. It's a shame those games are lost to official sale because of licensing issues (same for the old LOTR games like BFME).

Also, I can't wait for Hogwarts Legacy to experience a modern Harry Potter game, please be good

[u/Prasiatko]

For me somehow the Game boy versions of the first three books were the best of the Harry potter games despite (or maybe because of) the limitations of the platform. They were basically open world games with turn based combat.

[u/prince_of_gypsies]

I’ve become the opposite of a Harry Potter fan over the past 10 years, but oh man the nostalgia I have for these games…

Also, not a single word on the ridiculously amazing score by Jeremy Soule?