Was it Good? - Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

[Music] there was nothing about the starry sky that night to suggest that strange and mysterious things would soon be happening as unsuspecting muggles slept a huge motorbike with a giant destroyed it tumbled down from the darkness the giant named hagrid left a blanket wrapped bundle on the doorstep of number four privet drive nestled in the bundle was a baby harry potter the boy who lived it's time to put on your robin wizard hat practice your flipendos and marvel at the quidditch pitch as we journey back to the first year of hogwarts school of witchcraft and wizardry ladies and gentlemen welcome i'm josh drive hayes and today we'll be revisiting the original harry potter and the sorcerer's stone on playstation 1. i'll be finishing the entire game critiquing every mechanic and trying every flavor of bertie bott's every flavour beans before asking harry potter 1 was it any good drop a like on the video or sub to the channel for more classic game critiques ring the bell for all the future notifications as usual a massive thank you to all the supporters on patreon and twitch who keep the channel alive more on how you can support at the end for now let's begin harry potter one of the largest and most instantly recognizable franchises in history the first book released in 1997 in america releasing as harry potter and the sorcerer's stone in the uk and europe we knew it as the philosopher's stone it became a global hit then only four years later in 2001 the film adaption released harry potter was a cultural phenomenon it invaded schools everywhere people were dressing as characters for world book day and as the series continued we'd see every type of branded merchandise you can think of from pencil cases to chocolate frogs marauders maps to replica ones but back in 2001 alongside the first film we got the dreaded video game tie-in a whole genre of games notorious for being bad the game actually released on the 15th of november one day before the film was out in cinemas and strangely it released on eight different platforms game boy color game boy advance playstation 1 and windows pc in 2001 then mac in 2002 and then playstation 2 xbox and gamecube in 2003 and every version of this game was different the game boy color and advanced versions played as top-down turn-based rpgs similar to the old final fantasy games the pc version was a third person adventure set in hogwarts loosely following the plot of the film and the gamecube was similar to the pc version both with exceptional graphics and lighting effects for the time unfortunately there was the playstation 1 version loosely based on the pc game but with smaller rooms longer load times terrible voice acting and fragmented situation specific mechanics the playstation 1 version was not well received by critics and yet it would go on to be the sixth best-selling playstation 1 game of all time selling over 8 million copies this means the first harry potter game on playstation sold better than any individual metal gear solid game any tomb raider game any crash bandicoot game so this is the version we'll be replaying today because i had this game as a kid and i remember having a fantastic time i remember it being a majestic mix of varied mechanics and beautiful character design and non-stop action so let's pour a butterbeer and settle in as we ask harry potter and the sorcerer's stone for playstation 1 was it any good the game starts with the menu and you'll notice the music isn't the famous harry potter theme this is because the film theme was written by john williams and the game design team hadn't heard it while the game was being made the music in the game is composed by jeremy sewell now himself famous for working on a vast bank of video games including morrowind oblivion skyrim warhammer dawn of war guild wars and knights of the old republic the intro movie plays and we are treated to some awful looking story book drawings detailing the events of the opening of the first book for the next 11 years harry lived with his dreadful step-parents the dursleys until that fateful day when he received the letter inviting him to attend hogwarts school of witchcraft and wizardry hagrid took harry to diagon alley to purchase a most unusual list of school supplies soon after harry caught the hogwarts express from platform nine and three quarters and left the muggle world far behind these drawings look like paint by numbers and the whole intro is so abridged we don't actually know who any of these characters are or why they matter all the context has been stripped away the whole intro is condensed to the point of it being irrelevant we then appear in hogwarts and meet dumbledore welcome to hogwarts school of witchcraft and wizardry i am albus dumbledore your headmaster now hogwarts is full of secrets harry so search behind every door but keep in mind not all secrets are rewarding oh um which reminds me uh the third floor corridor is out of bounds to everyone who does not wish to suffer a most painful death so we can go anywhere except the third floor corridor we start in the castle entrance the movement controls are fine forward backward left and right but there is no jump you cannot jump in this game well you can but it's context specific we'll see later the entrance hall is very small and very blocky with large wooden doors some of them padlocked your adventure line through this game is extremely linear with very limited exploration in the middle sections if you walk up to npcs and talk to them sometimes you'll get absolutely random stuff like this nitwitch blubber tweak four wonderful words don't you think explore around a bit more and you'll find the twins by the look of that scar you must be harry potter i'm fred weasley and this is my brother george hello there harry we have a proposal for you in hogwarts there are special portraits and behind these special portraits are prizes hidden around the castle are four flavors of beans yellow blue green and red and you'll discover all of the colors in order it's a way of tracking how far through the game you are if you pause the game you can see how many of each color you've found if you find enough of a single color you can trade them for a password to open up a hidden room behind some portraits we'll look at this more later on push on and oh there's some ghosts floating around and some candles in the air that's a nice bit of set dressing so we round the corner and meet ron hey harry remember me wrong weasley that slimy slithering draco malfoy ran through this door with an hour under his arm i think it was your al hedwig let's go after him so some kid called malfoy has stolen our owl we follow ron and then we meet malfoy well well well if it isn't the famous harry potter i'm draco malfoy and you do well to show me respect looking for that owl of yours how careless of you to leave it lying about go home to your mother potter oh sorry you don't have one do you okay let's just talk about the emotional characterization and the building of interpersonal relationships within this game because there is none i understand this as a children's game but i don't believe that's an excuse for it to be a bad game using the age and therefore lowered expectations of your primary audience to excuse a poor quality product isn't fair it's not good design it's lazy it's taking advantage of naive or non-critical players i believe even if a product is aimed at children it should still be the highest quality you can make it i'm going to be incredibly critical during this playthrough and while the game may be seen as a supplemental piece of media within a greater already established franchise it's also the first game so i'll be treating it as an onboarding point for new fans of the franchise i'll be treating it as a standalone game this experience should be quality even if you haven't read the books or seen the film my first major issue is the lack of any establishing motives or personalities for any of the supporting cast dumbledore says hi then walks off ron is suddenly your friend malfoy is a dick but why there's zero setup for why things are the way they are and because of this there can't be any payoff or character arcs later now normally in games you don't get character arcs because writing them takes time but this is a book it's already been written for you you could have just used that in the book malfoy is raised by a strict father who expects far too much from him and is emotionally distant who has pushed him to believe that all achievements are a sign of greatness so he feels natural resentment toward harry a new kid who is instantly liked by many and who has seemingly achieved more than him instantly through the virtue of just surviving a childhood assassination attempt the hatred that book malfoy has toward harry makes sense because harry is the antithesis of malfoy's taught values but game malfoy his entire character arc is hey harry your owl also your mum's dead so we set off to rescue hedwig to climb onto a ledge just walk up to it and keep walking at it to jump just run toward an edge so there's no jump button but there is a context-based jump function this will become annoying later when there's no real way to tell the game the difference between leap off this ledge as far as we can and let me fall off this ledge please and thank you in most early game levels you'll follow feathers collect them all to unlock the door at the end every room in the game is essentially a simple puzzle and in the next room we meet nearly headless nick hello harry potter my name is nearly headless nick and i am the gryffindor house ghost how look how tall this room is well i mean you must go all the way to the top to get out that was voice actor david cocker doing his best john cleese impression press triangle to enter look around mode scan the room then begin to climb the edge of this tower if you fall you'll take damage and the character model will flash for a bit your health is shown in the lightning scar icon to the top left you'll notice we haven't had the importance of that scar pointed out to us at all the game does this often it just assumes whoever is playing already knows everything so it doesn't bother to explain anything it doesn't do any world building of its own it knows that enfranchised fans have bought this this is not a standalone product i'll be expanding on the negatives of this later this corridor is full of dangerous snails so we learn our first spell flipendo the knockback jinx press x to cast the spell the spell you cast will be based entirely on the context that you are in in the game if there's a white star above the target you'll cast flipendo one hit makes a snail stop the other makes them spin and die let's just enjoy our first taste of spell slinging action this is rubbish i know many of you have great memories of this and i'm sorry and i'm not saying that you're wrong for enjoying it i have great memories of playing this but this is terrible move on a few rooms this floating tip book lets me know i can spin the camera with l2 and r2 we'll find another issue with this soon we then discover these movable blocks you can use flipendo to push them into place but they only move along preset paths and now a good bit of game design if you use triangle to manually aim you can fire your flipendo spell manually and break this spiderweb the introduction of two separate mechanics manually looking around and spell casting and then combining them to enhance and allow new gameplay is good design i hope they do this more because this is what quality games do they take two smaller aspects and combine them to make a third unique aspect some blocks are big and need a charge flippendo spell hold down extra charge and when you cast a spell you will shout [Music] i sure hope that doesn't get annoying later now we meet neville they're using characters from the books but there's no real reason to this could be any random student neville needs to get through this corridor but flying books are stopping him so we learn how to target press r1 to lock on and your flipendo spells will now go toward your target you can cycle the targets freely shoot the books down and okay what is with this voice acting just listen the lever is around here somewhere there i found it did they not have the time or the budget to re-record did they use the first take and call it a day or did the director actually listen to this and say yes that is what i want my game to sound like eventually we find hedwig she is trapped in this cage free her by shooting the cage with flupendo and then we leave hedwig now shows up and gives us a broom as thanks camera issue time you can spin the camera with l2 and r2 but the camera cannot pass through walls or objects so you can get the camera stuck there are many ways you could fix this you could have the wall fade out or become translucent you could have the camera move up to and around the edge of the wall or phase through it to the other side but no it's locked a certain distance from harry and cannot be changed so if you hit a wall while spinning the camera tough no more camera control for you remember it's a kid's game is not an excuse for poor design choices back to the main hub if you try to leave malfoy will stop you and despite just learning flipendo you can't cast it here in fact if you try to cast a spell anywhere you're not allowed to a little puff of smoke just leaves your wand this is one of the worst design choices you have a variety of skills but you can only use them when the game wants you to there is very little freedom or player agency in this game next up flying practice we hop on our broom and get told to fly through the hoops and flying needs work there is a noticeable delay on your input and the broom's turning or pitching and when you release a button there's a delay on the movement ending aerial control is not good it's simple but it's not clean there's some yellow beans on the central plinth and in the corners and i don't get them all because it's a timed mission and i'm thinking it's not a problem i can just return later and get the beans then oh how wrong i was there are three stages of flying just how there are three stages of learning spells because the game loves repetition because it's effortless padding and each flying stage gets faster and the rings get smaller passing the flying training gets us some house points these will matter later slightly after this we meet hermione ron says she's annoying no ron she's not she's not anything this game has no characterization no one has any depth literally all we know about her is this is a student called hermione i tried to go back and redo the flying practice and grab the beans i missed but oh no it's locked you cannot redo sections so if you miss something in a section it's likely missed permanently to save your game you'll find floating save books around the castle so i save and i'm 10 of the way through already this is not a long game charms class next introduced by a voice actor with a mouthful of saliva and the face of a 60 year old farmer get to the charms class before the timer runs out walk through the floating clocks to start the timer another game mechanic timed platforming sections a short linear puzzle with very rudimentary jumping puzzles between there are beans here so i focus on getting them first it's very counter-intuitive design that you can redo sections if you fail due to spending your time collecting the beans but you can't redo if you succeed and miss the beans or want to beat your previous time we now get these spinning floating tables and this is pretty much the extent of the platforming it won't get much more exciting than this now we learn our next spell wingardium leviosa learning spells is a rhythm game follow the icon and press the correct button when it hovers over it match the pattern three times in a rug leviosa is the yellow spell objects you can move have a yellow star above them and you are timed when you start moving anything the movement range for how far you can move stuff is also super limited remember learning spells needs you to repeat the pattern but casting them doesn't you just press x and it casts automatically unlock this door by moving stuff out of the way using leviosa a letter from hagrid asking us to meet him in front of his hut in the forest on the way i find another flying mission catch some fireflies this seems like a side quest so surely you can repeat this or return to the area once it's done but no when you're finished you've finished back at the front door malfoy is still blocking the way so i levitate to this hourglass onto a plinth the front door now bursts open and malfoy gets knocked around this makes him angry and we get our first mini boss battle a wizard cracker jewel malfoy throws christmas crackers at you and you have to let them land then walk over them which will pick them up and then throw them back this is the only time the return projectiles mechanic is used after hitting him enough he summons crab and goyle his minions to come and help him let's just enjoy their amazing voice acting crab take care of this upstart now potter i'll give you a taste of my super wizard crackers what i'm starting to notice is this game is full of mechanics but none of them are fleshed out or combined it's like the designer just found a big list of platforming game ideas and put them all in but didn't bother to connect them or have them be relevant after that specific bit is over there's mechanic a and b and c but never a b and c together we beat malfoy and then get this animation about the hogwarts house cup meanwhile the housepoint hourglasses are slowly filling up ravenclaw hufflepuff slytherin gryffindor gryffindor are in the lead on hospice will sliverland hold the seventh consecutive year who cheered the hall is empty when the camera flew through there's no one there in fact the entire castle seems mostly abandoned the whole world of this game feels dead there's like five students and a handful of teachers the whole experience so far has felt cold and lifeless the house cup competition by the way is completely irrelevant nothing changes based on the outcome hagrid lives in his hut in the forest the playable game world is extremely small but it is divided into very similar looking maps and there's no world map so navigation is just remember where you are there he is there's the meme we need to go to herbology before we can help hagrid some more this means using flipendo to solve a timed moving block puzzle and jump to class i make sure to get the beans first because i know that i won't be able to get them later at herbology we learn our next spell incendio which means more rhythm games and now we know how to set stuff on fire casting incendio actually means a small game on cast you get this spinning button rhythm game press the correct button when it's in the circle it's like magical dance dance revolution this is better it's active casting and not just passive context casting you've got a load of buttons on the controller plus the analog sticks to use you could have made casting spells feel a bit more magical i get the feeling they were working to a very tight deadline so once a mechanic was in the game instead of saying how can we make this the best it can be how can we refine this or how can we make what the player can now do relate to what they already knew they just said okay on to the next you could set something on fire levitate it across a gap then flip endure it onto something you could use flipendo to put out fire you could combine mechanics but no that's just too much effort next up is some quidditch training remember the whole fly through the rings for regular flying training well it's just that again except now you're chasing the golden snitch and as you pass through more hoops you'll get faster which makes the delayed floaty controls even more noticeable you've got 20 hoops and then a small mini game where the snitch slides back and forth along a bar on the bottom of the screen and you press x when it's all the way to the left in your hand this is it this is quidditch someone clearly played superman 64 and said yes that is the game design i want the twins show up again and say hey bring us blue beans this time then we meet someone whose cat fell down a well and we need to go and rescue them around you'll also find these red potions they completely refill your health and they are pointless outside of boss fights or instance puzzles because you'll never die outside of those areas and they are the only places you don't find red potions journey on to hagrid's hut while in the woods we get followed by these little puff skin things the brambles will hurt you but if you lead a puff skin into a bramble patch they'll eat it and poop out a blue bean this gameplay loop itself is self-contained but fine hazard reward interaction solution so far collecting things is our only level of player agency and even doing that doesn't make anything substantial happen the only real choice you have while playing this linear game is do you want the beans hagra tells us he has found a dragon egg and we need to collect some fire seeds from the gargoyle gate to help it hatch we do get warned however of a huge monster out of my way harry there's a huge monster down there except no there's nothing this is one of the first times you can choose to leave the correct path there is a portrait leading to a secret room these are things you need passwords for which are given through collecting enough beans i'll return here later adventure through the forest then a hooded figure animates a pig statue and the pig attacks us and we become dark souls this fight is actually quite nice you need to dodge the swooping attacks although there is no dodge mechanic you just need to keep walking in a circle then charge up a flapendo spell to damage the enemy then when it's hurt levitate it back up onto the plinth this is a nice combination of mechanics and a decent challenge and now a puzzle two air vents standing on one blows you upwards and some of those cute following things are around so you lead one to the air vent on the floor it plugs it up and the other now becomes more powerful letting you reach the upper ledge of the next section and then the same setup but the vent on the floor is now much bigger so if you guide the cute thing back it won't do anything but if you make it eat the brambles it grows enough to block it this is great you've taken the established bramble eating mechanic from earlier which we learned to do because she rewarded us for it and the air vent from just now and combined them see you can do good game design when you try the problem is the game only seems to try every now and again it's coasting on the prestige of the harry potter name imagine if this game wasn't branded it would have been forgotten instantly there are moments of competent game design of complexity of mechanics combining but they are few and far between although save point books by the way they are everywhere almost every single area has one and the areas are tiny almost at the fire seat just need to jump across these braking platforms over the lava river jumping puzzles especially ones with braking platforms are quite hard because your full speed jump overshoots the platform you're aiming for so you want to run off the edge slowly so you don't jump at full speed but if you go too slowly you'll drop off without jumping so you're leaping into the air and then pulling back midair and hoping you can land correctly the lack of total camera control is also making this much harder than it needs to be use incendio on the fireseed plant this takes a few tries because if you miss a button press you lose progress i grab the seed and then head back the game feels rushed there are many small flaws like the jump being just too long for the puzzle you want the jump to matter in the world feeling dead because of the lack of npcs the mechanics feeling so fragmented such as throwing the wizard crackers back and never needing to do that again the game was made by argonaut games the giants behind croc unfortunately this game probably marked the beginning of the end for argonaut because they would be liquidated just three years later the final game they gave the world was catwoman on the playstation 2. return to hagrid give him the firesieve the dragon hatches and he calls it norbert the dragon will now not matter for the rest of the game to thank us hagrid gives us a book about quidditch oh the items you get given you can't use them you just have them they show on the screen to the top right and you can't select them or inspect them or do anything you just now have the item go through the gate that opened up and find ron admiring the quidditch pitch neville shows up and says malfoy stole his remember all and then malfoy appears and we have a flying chaste section the plot honestly reads like bad fanfiction the chase mechanic is again only used here we need to dodge the bludgers as we try to catch up and then press square to bash malfoy if we bash him enough he'll fall off and then professor mcgonagall shows up and says oh don't do that that's bad but also that was really impressive flying you're now on the quidditch team the match is starting right away go and play quidditch that's how you get a spot on the quidditch team by attacking malfoy i thought maybe the whole bashing malfoy was training for a new mechanic we'd have access to in the quidditch matches maybe we can bash other players out the way or bash the bludgers out the way but no you just follow the snitch as you have been doing and fly through the rings quidditch matches have a commentator by the way with about four lines of dialogue enjoy how repetitive he gets the crowd is on its feet when the other team seeker shows up they get booed how bad would you feel if you're playing against the beloved harry potter and your own team boo you just for trying to do your job when the match returned to school then snape shows up and says the book hagrid gave us is a library book so belongs in the library and steals it from us what was the point in having it then was it just a plot device to give snape something to steal to establish his character as a bit of a dick then probably the most random part of the adventure so far up until now things have at least made sense they've logically flowed from one event to the next there's been no major out of left field moments but now this happens hey it's a piece of a map hold on this is fred and george's handiwork the map shows there is a forgotten area around here i wonder if it could be behind that old rusty door the map says there is a magic word to open the door well here goes ala hamora [Music] wow look i've opened that rusty door come on let's see where it leads the book that hagrid gave us contained a map to a secret area of the castle and when snape magicked the book away the map fell out then ron shows up and says oh we should go and explore this secret area and then he suggests it might be behind this super obvious rusty door so we break in this is the moment anyone with any sense gives up even looking for the plot and realizes what this game truly is it's a series of moments loosely based on the book with no world building or character development an adventure made up of disconnected gameplay elements and context locked skills held together only by the designer's will to push the player from one disappointing shallow set piece to the next in this secret area there are some thorny plants who spawn smaller plants you flipendo the small ones then incendio the big one you can't choose to do that you have to just mash the x button and you'll cast all the relevant skills then follow the minigame to make incendio happen i just noticed if you pause the game you'll see the menu shows two of four spells are known but that's wrong you know three spells flipendo wingardium leviosa and incendio are you just not counting flipendo as a spell despite the fact it's the spell you cast the most in the whole game the spells known aren't named there's no info on them it's just two stars lit up this feels like a bargain basement no name adventure game find a puffer pod patch fungi you can pick up and then throw and they explode into flowers we get told they make trolls sneeze this will be relevant later now some mushrooms use leviosa to pick them up and blue beans fall out then drop the mushrooms and you have to race them to collect the beans back up why can't we just incendio them we were burning plants five minutes ago why is it a bad thing to do now push on through the forest and find the brain that snape lost just a straight up brain it's a plot item just go with it return to the hub and find a letter from hermione she asks us to meet her in the dungeon because of reasons never fully explained we get another update on the house cup we are still winning and then we go back to the main castle hub and to the dungeon run into snape on the way he takes the brain offers and accuses us of stealing it and then there's this awkwardly long cut scene where you just have to watch him walk away so where was it potter within your own head bring it to class now another issue you can manually aim your flipendo spell but manually aiming doesn't make the game first person it just zooms in over the shoulder but this means if you aim up the camera cannot clip through the floor so it zooms in more and your character's arm and shoulder cover most of the screen including the central aiming focus this means at no point did anyone in the development cycle think hey maybe having the character shoot up might be a nice game mechanic combine this with the fact that you can't jump at will and my guess is they completely ignored the vertical design potential of an adventure game yes you can climb and sometimes move up and you can fall down but they've not bothered to develop the gameplay dimension beyond that find hermione in the dungeon and she tells us at last harry i have an idea where the stolen object from gringotts maybe but we'll have to attend poten's class first come on harry we don't want to keep snape waiting if you're thinking hang on what stolen object so was i the game never mentions this hermione just tells you something was stolen and it's mega important and it might be in the castle and we need to go and get it back what even is this pacing it's such a jarring moment to throw a whole new plot thread at the player with zero setup or reason to care and after we've been given this mega important news a stolen object what do we do do we go and look for it no we go to potion mixing class and learn how to mix potions you learn this by pressing buttons in time with the basic rhythm game the same as learning spells look this mechanic would probably matter if you actually needed to remember the order of the buttons but it's random it's a quick time event it's just not quick and you only have to actually mix a potion once in the entire game we're told to go and fetch some fireflies from the store cupboard we walk in and the hooded man appears again blasts the floor we're on and we fall down into the dungeon below apparently no one from the class heard the massive explosions so we need to escape on our own remember those puffer shroom things from the forest the sign said they make trolls sneeze well we can pick them up and throw them at these patrolling trolls wait until the troll is standing on a metal gate and they'll sneeze themselves through the grate explore the dungeon and find that student from earlier the one who lost his cat hey maybe he could go and get help let someone know that we're trapped down here tell the teachers no he'll just sit there waiting for us to find his cat break some boxes using flipendo find the cat in one of them and slowly lead it back to the well i say slowly because if you run too fast it just stops following you and then we leviosa it out to safety okay now can the other student go and fetch help no he will give you a magical witches and wizards trading card you can view them in your folio meijer and then he'll just leave the wizards trading cards are the final collection system trading cards are scattered around in secret areas or rewarded for game progression they don't do anything but they do help somewhat with world building if you find all of them nothing happens jump from platform to platform to collect all the beans pull some switches then hop across the cauldron river now this is a decent example of mechanical crossover being good you can shoot the cauldrons to briefly stop them moving combining spells and movement look i'm trying to find things to praise but how bland does a game have to be when i am praising a linear platforming jumping section simply because it managed to combine two of the game's most basic mechanics and now another nice touch to escape we need a key the key is held in this troll room but the troll is asleep so we need to silently leviosa the cage away from the key and when we cast leviosa we actually do whisper it's the small touches like that that make me think at least a base level of care was put into the individual sections but there was no greater big picture focus it's as if every individual segment of this game was made by a different team and then stitched together afterwards with no one developing the continued narrative or mechanical structure and building upon it layer by layer you know that game in school of drawing a part of a monster on a bit of paper and then folding over the paper and passing it along for someone else to continue it feels like that with every section being unaware of the others get the fireflies and make our way to the next class defense against the dark arts this means making it through two timed rooms of flying books which sometimes stabilize into platforms the timings on this sections are actually quite tight and it does take me a few tries it's a shame i couldn't stun the books like i'd stunned the other books earlier in the game or the cauldrons only a few rooms earlier this is what i mean about a lack of mechanical consistency the things you could do earlier in the game you cannot do now despite the situations being incredibly similar and no one has even noticed we got attacked and fell into a dungeon sometimes walking into walls doesn't climb because the game doesn't like you learn the next spell verdi milius which means more rhythm games this spell makes out of phase items phase in and become physical but only temporarily so we can climb this ghostly tower of platforms this spell has so much potential maybe the very first room of the game had invisible objects we can now manifest maybe there's secret rooms back in the forest now we've got a way to interact with the world maybe we can explore an adventure more no there are about three times you need to use this spell in the game and they are all on the linear story path meet hermione again she says the stolen object must be in the secret upper castle why hermione what made you come to that conclusion so we set off toward the upper castle now the game does actually open up very slightly here there's still only one correct linear path but you have got a few wings and offshoots which lead to secret wizard cards or extra beans i also find a lot of secret doors pressing square in front of most bookcases will show they're actually hidden tunnels and most of them lead to top down block pushing puzzles use flipendo to move the cauldron onto the grates complete the puzzle get a wizard card there are three push puzzles like this and the main issue here is all of the corridors look very similar and there's no maps you don't know where you've been you can't spin the camera while you're on these puzzles as well this is another example of another mechanic being added in in a very limited way and then never used again eventually we reach a cursed door four coloured eyeballs representing four curses float around it it's actually quite brutal the eyeballs still have the nerve endings hanging from them so off we pop to find the origins of the curses and break them to get through the door here we run into creepy peeves and god look at that smile this is the stuff of nightmares potter and you better watch out for me you're ugly but what can we do [Music] everyone says you belong if you look in [Applause] the individual dungeon sections are still small but the overall levels are longer lack of navigation really begins to hurt you down here and you'll mistakenly end up doubling back on yourself a few times here we find the animated knight statues a charge flipendo knocks them back and a second one kills them there's no combat music either no sense of danger no change in game pace they're just hazards added because the designers realized hey we've not had any enemies for a while find the red curse i flip into it one down journeying through the dungeon it makes me sad i kill more nights jump on more floating tables and take the blue eye out this doesn't feel magical this is just filler you're giving us mechanics we've already grown bored of in a longer even blander even more forgettable section you've had the entirety of the magical world to work with you've got your imagination as a limit and you've settled on fighting knights in silent corridors find the green eye only one left this puzzle needs me to jump from block to block to a ledge you're meant to move the block closer but you can actually make the jump fine without moving it but if you do move the block you get house points for putting it where it was supposed to be how why house points are granted by the teachers and no teachers know we are down here this breaks the game's internal logic you can't just use house points as a reward for completing mechanics in the expected way if anything you're actually discouraging creative thinking by doing that you're a puzzle game at your core solving the puzzle in a creative and fun way is one of the most rewarding experiences a player can have but you're only rewarding them with points for doing it the way you intend it it's like the devs knew video games had high score systems in them and they knew harry potter had a house point system so they just made the points system into the housepoint system but they didn't understand why harry potter had a house point system or what those points represented in the fictional world because they don't see this game as a world this isn't a fantastical fictional place to them there's no story or history or future they are looking at this game purely as a mechanical framework for standalone gameplay moments by now i've got 80 green beans and yet there are more i see you don't need to collect every bean to have enough to buy the password you just need to collect enough some fire breathing turtles crawling on the wall not a problem i'll just flip endo them oh no that doesn't work okay i'll leviosa them nope no can't do that either the floor is covered in slippy slime so maybe i could incendio it away and oh no can't do that here this is the slippy bit where you need to avoid fire-breathing turtles the designers wanted a slippy bit where you avoided fire-breathing turtles but of course the skills that you've gained might trivialize the challenge so instead of designing a challenge to use the skills you've got to the best of their ability they just make those spells useless for a bit enjoy harry potter tokyo drift yellow curse found and broken back to the main door after escaping the cursed tower we realized oh we're late for our transfiguration class wait hang on what did we even just achieve hermione mentioned a stolen object we haven't found anything all we've done is go on a random tangent and now we're heading back to class before making my way back to the lesson i decided to go and explore all of the other doors that weren't open earlier oh look it's the great hall from the film look at all the children all the teachers all the people okay is everyone dead or something why is the whole game so devoid of life there is no passion here this released in 2001. you know what else released in 2001 halo devil may cry final fantasy 10 grand theft auto 3 soul reaver 2 golden sun and if you're thinking ah they weren't on the playstation one spider-man enter electro came out this game feels years behind its contemporaries here's the common room there's a save book and the twins and for some reason this room has a fixed camera why why can't i explore this room the same as the rest of the castle did you run out of time and not want to model the fourth wall you know i've still not found every yellow bean and i'm getting a bit worried because the places i know yellow beans are i can't get back to i push on through the final zone the gryffindor tower and now we're collecting red beans the path to transfiguration means more timed running and jumping and a new spell meaning more rhythm games this one is quite a bit longer actually knowing this allows us to transfigure stone statues into birds and now we can remove all the statues around the castle does this open up any new routes in old places not really it means we can move the one bird on the table directly outside this is another spell with a mini game but this is insultingly simple press x when the x button is in the right place it's always x it never changes another house point update oh no we've lost the lead to slithering i don't even know who's slytherin are nothing in this game has told me who anyone is i don't even know that malfoy the only established dick character is in slytherin hedwig flies in and drops off another gift then that creepy peeves shows up and steals it challenging us to erase through the castle if we win he'll give the gift back and so starts one of the strangest sections a fixed camera side-scrolling foot race over slippy beams there are some jumps but jumping is automatic so it's hard to fall apart from when you need to jump into the distance away from the camera because it's almost impossible to judge depth in this game and the platforms are closer than your standard jump distance and you can't run off at full speed you'll need to rearrange in the air win the race and grab the gift it's an invisibility cloak but it needs tokens to work so they sent the cloak but not the batteries round the corner and we bump into mr crazy caretaker well now students aren't allowed in here are they there are things in the forbidden corridor that are not for the eyes of mere boys like you no no indeed dumbledore has ordered that no students are to enter this corridor and don't go trying a secret passage mrs notice and i know them all and now the stealth section because stealth section was a bullet point on the big list of mechanics this is the only stealth section in the game they've added in nothing which really lets you be stealthy there's nothing new no cones of vision no noises or visual signals no distraction techniques there is nothing just follow the npc and stay behind them find the cloak token and you become completely invisible i just want to point out metal gear solid came out three years before this game eventually snape and filch the caretaker meet they discuss some shady stuff and then snape goes into a hidden passage we follow and i get spotted by a cat which meows and this means you have to start the whole stealth section all over again you can flipendo a snail you can incendio a plant you can leviosa a cage but you can't use any of those to help you get the keys from the doors or the tokens to activate the cloak this game feels like a dinner made up entirely of side dishes from different dinners there's no main focus no single driving gameplay feeling it's just finger food the game with a harry potter veneer what did they want the player to remember to feel to focus on the stealth section actually covers five individual rooms meaning so far this is the most committed to mechanic so purely going off total length of unique mechanical section it seems harry potter and the sorcerer's stone is a stealth game eventually we find the storeroom and the mirror of eriseth which is desire spelled backwards looking into the mirror shows you your heart's desire harry sees his parents but then dumbledore turns up and says nope be careful what you wish for can't have you seeing your family and then takes it away there's another book based cutscene with more awful artwork and then ron says a troll has cornered hermione in the girls toilets and we need to go and rescue her and where is literally anyone else dumbledore was just here could we not tell him that a student was in danger no okay we'll go and save her then another mechanic the run toward the camera section like the boulder and crash bandicoot or more accurately the spider bit in devil may cry 1 which remember released three months before this game i am convinced someone on development played devil may cry and thought oh a forward-based enemy chase that's a mechanic we've not got better add that in i spend a bit too much time trying to get all the red beans and die when you die there's a static image of harry in the hospital with a nurse tending to him and you can just begin again from the last room you entered at the end of the incredibly long corridor is the girl's bathroom and this is the only entrance to it so imagine being in class and having to ask to go to the bathroom 20 minutes early because you know you're going to have to walk down the deadly zigzag trap corridor to get there in the bathroom what else but another new mechanic we'll never use again ron charms the troll club to hit it on the head and while this is happening the troll throws random plumbing base objects at yourself and ron like toilets and pipes and we need to use flipendo to shoot the projectiles out of the air do this save hermione then instantly get told well done for saving your friend but there's a quidditch match on right now and you're the best seeker we've ever had go and play quidditch right now on the way to the quidditch match hagrid tells us fluffy guards the third floor and we should never go there thank you for the advice hagrid and now for more quidditch guess what the difference is between this quidditch match and the first nothing it's the same match just fly through the rings grab the snitch match over nothing new happens back with hagrid nor but the dragon is sick so we need to go to diagon alley and help hagrid buy some medical supplies why can't he go on his own why do we have to be there well money we have lots and hagrid has none diagon alley itself is a tiny cramped map with some of the best face graphics the playstation 1 can provide so we head inside gringotts bank to withdraw a small part of our vast fortune inside gringotts we need to find one bronze canute one silver sickle and one gold galleon to do this we speak to a banker and he tells us to go and gather bits of paperwork to unlock the vault now all of gringotts is slippy and getting the paperwork is time so now you have to run at full speed around a bank slipping wildly and grabbing contracts and once you've got all of them you unlock the next mechanic the minecart bit your money is held in the vault so you ride the cart through the vault the cart is free swinging on a track and you need to use the left and right buttons to swing it around if you hold x it will lock the cart to that level the issue here is there are physics so the cart swings around corners and doesn't lift up instantly you need to get it swinging to move it quickly and some of the coins are in spirals but if you wait until the spiral warning and then try and spin you'll miss all of them because the spin doesn't move fast enough the cart is moving along the track faster than you can start the spin and if you hit any obstacles you'll lose the coins you've collected and the cart speeds up so even though you do get an obstacle warning you don't actually have enough time to swing the cart out of the way and if you fail you don't get to keep the coins you've collected and try again until you've got what you need you need to collect enough on a single run to keep that money finally managed to gather all the coins and get the bronze connect how do we get the other two coins the silver sickle and the gold galleon simple you do the whole process of talk to dude collect paperwork on a slippy path then go for a minecart ride two more times eventually you realize it's not even worth trying to get the spiral coins your time is better spent just avoiding the traps if you do manage to get all the coins in a short section precious gems will start to appear and if you manage to get all the precious gems you'll get a witches and wizards collectible card if you don't get the cards before leaving the bank you cannot return to get them later with all three coins you can now go shopping there are only three shops open in diagon alley and they happen to sell exactly what you need first off get three frog warts the only issue is the frog is hiding in a box somewhere and we have to go and find it then stun it then take the warts but you can't just break all the boxes randomly that's bad and if you do that you have to restart the challenge you can only break the boxes the toad is in why can't i climb over this overlook and jump to the floor below have you given up making movement inconsistent now get all three warts from the frog and now on to one of the most annoying sections in the whole game getting the peacock feathers we pay our silver coin but the peacock is in the storeroom and we need to go and catch it and so begins a chase the peacock through the maze mechanic now in one of the boxes around the edge you can find a stealth cloak token does this help you no it doesn't because the peacock runs away anyway i did think maybe this was a return to stealth but it seems to just be a keep chasing bit when you are physically touching the peacock the feather meter fills up when it's full it drops a feather and you need three but if you lose the peacock which you will because it moves faster than you do the meter drains and you can't use your magic to shoot the peacock because you'll get shouted out and need to restart and my god this section took longer than it needed to then finally the third ingredient an owl feather i have an owl why am i doing this so i pay my gold and oh it seems the owl is in the back room and we need to use leviosa to float owl treats over to it so it eats them and then falls asleep but there are other owls flying in a circle around this owl who will eat the treats out of thin air why am i paying to do this this is work but the strangest thing when you feed the owl and get the feather you hear the door unlock did you lock a child in the back room of your shop and force him to feed your owls meet hagrid in the alley with all three ingredients we go back to hogwarts and help save norbert but he's growing up so hagrid sends him away to romania that's not a joke that's the plot unfortunately malfoy that famously well-behaved and authority-respecting student has alerted the teaching staff that we are helping hagrid raise a dragon so now harry ron and hermione are sent into the forbidden forest and told to find a wounded unicorn as punishment hagrid tells us to be careful and then he says be careful the forest can be a dangerous place i better go harry the spoiled brat draco is waiting with fang if i'm not back soon fang might just have him for his dinner who's fang this is the first time you've ever mentioned fang so we go into the spooky forest first puzzle there's a large tree over a ravine okay so shoot the tree and use it as a bridge so i shoot the tree and nothing i try to push it nothing can't cross the ravine because it's full of thorns i shoot the tree some more and again nothing what do i do so it turns out you do need to shoot the tree but you must first target the base with r1 and then shoot it another example of the game saying yes you're doing the right thing but you're not doing the way we wanted you to take out the patrolling trolls and send you the brambles across the bridge and then battle with this turtle which farts fireballs at you you win by flippandering it so it shoots a fireball out of its arse onto a nearby tree and you can burn your way through harry you know incendio you can set anything you want on fire you don't need the turtle push through the forest and then we bump into malfoy ah potter that oath hagwood sent me to tell you that we haven't found the unicorn yet i doubt how you can find the boots on his feet without a map game malfoy is a caricature a one-dimensional villain this game is nothing without the book and the film to support it and provide all the framework that all your actions relate to find hagrid he says there's something in the woods and then harry touches his scar for the first time and wait hang on now that i think about it the game hasn't mentioned the scar at all the life gauge in the top left is a lightning bolt but the scar never mentioned we push further into the woods and discover the mysterious hooded figure drinking the blood of a freshly killed unicorn before we can fight we are overcome with pain and another book cutscene we learn about he who must not be named then hagrid says hey good job finding that unicorn here's a magical flute which i used to play and use to put fluffy to sleep with why not try it out on this bird to play the flute just push the combination of buttons shown on the screen press them quickly there's no fail state here just press the buttons this mechanic makes me physically angry because it's a perfect example of the lack of care the game has been made with there's also the intense irony that there's no rhythm needed here unlike learning spells yet this is the perfect time to include a rhythm or pacing mechanic because you're meant to be playing an instrument in fact you're meant to be playing a flute you could map the notes on the instrument to the buttons on the controller and have a specific song or melody be played but you didn't do that you did this ocarina of time had notes mapped to the keys and that came out three years before this game so it's not like you didn't have anything to inspire you harry ron and hermione decide the sorcerer's stone must be hidden behind fluffy so they all set off with a third floor corridor what even is the sorcerer's stone why do we want it who took it why is it hidden why don't we just tell the teachers none of these questions are answered in the game on my way out of the forest back to the castle i hand in some beans and get the password to a portrait opening up a portrait gets you a secret area and gives you a witches and wizards cart and then you leave the secret area automatically you can't even explore it manually i try and explore some of the other rooms in the castle and my god the hitboxes on some of these models are awful they swing axes to knock you off ledges but they hit you from really far away oh hey if you hand in the yellow beans you can unlock this portrait and get a new broomstick sort of a shame you really only need this for story-based quidditch matches and now i've done all of the story-based quidditch matches and there's no place to just fly around for fun you have a flying mechanic and you have a world just let me fly around the world eventually after exploring the identical looking parts of the third floor corridor harry ron and hermione go to explore the forbidden area and we get another update on the house cup slytherin are still winning at this point i just don't care so fluffy is actually a giant cerberus and we get attacked but remember hagrid used to put fluffy to sleep with the flute so you need to run forward toward one of the three dog heads and press x to get the flute out then mash the buttons as fast as you can to aggressively play the flute because the faster and more angry the song the calmer anyone listening to it will become and you have to do this to all three heads just take a step back and think about the emotional experience you want the player to have right now you want the player to be scared but you want them to remain calm under pressure and follow a slow soothing calming plan that's the lesson of the book that's what hagrid would have done a calm and collected approach will win so you'd think while playing the flute you could maybe program fluffy to attack but miss as long as you play correctly and follow the correct rhythm but no you do a bit of sleep damage every time you play one flute stanza correctly so you're just playing super fast when fluffy finally falls asleep we fall down a trapdoor and land on a giant devil's snare plant thankfully ron is here to be sarcastic i know what this is it's a devil's snare oh i'm so glad we know what it's called that's a great help now the most complex boss yet we have to shoot the vines in the correct order the order is the vines that light up if you don't shoot them in that order they all come back once they're all dead the main central vine appears and you need to lure it to attack you then cast a charged flipendo and their hitboxes here are just awful the only thing worse than the hitboxes though is how grating the flipendo shout becomes because it never changes [Music] incendio with the vine down we now need to catch a magical flying key to unlock the next room and this is basically quidditch but against a key no casting spells while flying though no bashing things out the way no help from ron or hermione despite the fact they are here just fly through the rings as usual and get to the key don't get me wrong i actually quite like the fact you're using your quidditch skills to advance a puzzle outside of quidditch but i'm still disappointed it's not really its own thing it's basically just a reskin of the quidditch mechanic and with the door unlocked we move on to the hardest part of the game the chess board puzzle another mechanic used only once i think the designers need to look into setup and payoff you need the player to experience a mechanic with low stakes at the start and then bring back a similar challenging mechanic with higher stakes at the end it bookends the game nicely and lets the player feel a sense of progression so in the chess puzzle you can only move one square at a time and after you have moved all the pieces will move toward you in the most direct manner possible each piece moves one square at a time meaning there's no real reason to have different pieces and if a piece moves onto an occupied square it will kill the other piece and then die itself so it's not really chess at all the animations are nice however and the little giggle the queen does when she kills something is kinda creepy this section does however feel very strange remember the game released one day before the film so there will be some people who likely played the game before reading either the book or seeing the film and imagine how confused they would be at this bit there are three chess puzzles to solve if you fail you take some damage and have to try again the third is actually quite time consuming because you have to counter intuitively head into the enemy attack and have them all bump into each other last minute with the chest puzzle bit done you can head through a secret door and save the game before the final action-packed section remember the troll from earlier the one who attacked hermione well it's back but it's still very sleepy and we need to run away quietly so we run down this corridor and use wingardium leviosa to gently move objects out of the way so the troll doesn't trip into them objects like a chair or a mop and a bucket and it's a chair just pick it up and move it out the way you don't need spells for this this is the only instance of use leviosa against the clock and once the path is cleared the troll falls down a hole and probably dies in the next room we see a knight statue put under a large bell then it's just a big version of the three cups switcheroo routine we need to find the one with the knight under and then fight it the knight has a shield and will block your flipendo so you need to lure it into attacking you and then shoot back in the brief window its shield is down once it dies it drops a potion which protects us against fire hermione says there's only enough for one person so we should drink it and go further into the castle to find the sorcerer's stone and i really think we should go and fetch a teacher by now but okay onwards we go through the fire into the next room the masked man appears over by the far side and they cast a spell animating two sets of aggressive armor near us we fight both bits of armor at the same time so they animate two more and we defeat them as well and finally they summon a large boss knight and this fight actually has mechanics whoever designed this fight i can see you actually put some effort in a charged flipendo will hurt the night but then it will phase and become red and when this happens it's invincible you need to lure it into attacking you and when it does it slams its sword on the floor and this causes a red shockwave and you need to keep moving to avoid the shock wave and then fire a flipendo back and as you weaken it it will cause multiple shock waves every hit so the fight actually changes and has a difficulty curve based on how far you are through it good this is good design right here take the night down the masked man stumbles the hood falls and big reveal it's professor quirrell the teacher you had one lesson with and no emotional connection to the mask was hiding the back of his head which is voldemort's face oh yeah it's voldemort he's a bad guy the game didn't do a very good job of establishing that but trust us he's a bad guy we chase him find the mirror of erised again and in the mirror's reflection we find the sorcerer's stone because it's what harry wants more than anything in the world so voldemort decides to kill us in the real world and take the stone from our reflection this fight is repetitive and honestly it's actually a lot worse than the large night boss we just killed there are three phases to start with you need to shoot the pillars around the room and make them fall on voldemort he'll walk in a slow circle toward us stopping only to cast spells or trap you with some green vines just mash buttons to escape the vines once the pillar phase is over you'll now need to cast a charged flipendo at the mirror which will fill the mirror with energy then wait for voldemort to be standing behind the mirror cast another flipendo and you'll send a powerful magic blast out of the mirror and do some damage once you've done this enough he will run at you knock you down and now you need to mash square to keep recovering life then press x when it tells you to to do some damage i'm not sure how or what this is meant to signify but this is how the fight ends this is the final boss you apparently defeat voldemort by just kicking him in the balls while he climbs on top of you with voldemort defeated we get the final cut scene it shows slithering about to win the house cup but then dumbledore grants a load of points to gryffindor and we win instead and then finally the game almost ends but there's still stuff to do because first of all you are forced to watch the seven and a half minute long unskippable credit sequence then after the credits there's another cut scene showing the house cup points why we know gryffindor won the ending cutscene made a big deal about how we won god all this design is so low effort but we're not done there's a final few irritating choices left once you finish the game you can save what do you think loading a finished game does maybe it lets you explore the complete map maybe fly around hand in all the beans you missed go back to diagon alley fight the knight again no loading up a complete game lets you read the witches and wizards collectible card compendium of the cards you've collected and that's it you cannot go back into hogwarts on a finished game you can only look at collected cards and once you leave the book you hear ominous laughter maybe there'll be a sequel but you do unlock quidditch mode what's that well it's six games of quidditch each match lasts about 90 seconds if you don't miss any rings and each match is exactly the same so it's a whole nine minutes of additional gameplay some of the matches even have different sky boxes like mountains and some of them take place in the rain and if you finish every match which i did because i've come this far may as well be thorough you earn the quidditch cup what can you do with the quidditch cup nothing but here's the final annoyance the cherry on top to really infuriate all you completionists out there i collected every color beam but i missed a few witches and wizards cards see how my completed game says 95 complete you cannot change that because you cannot go back and collect old cards if you miss a card on your playthrough you lose the chance to ever gain a hundred percent so after replaying harry potter and the sorcerer's stone for the playstation one was it any good honestly no it's a linear adventure game with way too many mechanics crammed in to cover up for the fact there's no guiding design document no central narrative the game doesn't know what it is beyond a vehicle for varied disconnected mechanics there's zero characterization very little world building and abysmal ambience hogwarts is meant to be a magical school and it feels like a dead abandoned mansion the spells and abilities you learn can only be used in very restricted context-driven scenarios leaving the player feeling very little agency when faced with a problem and the few times they do combine like stunning the floating cauldrons or defeating the stone bore then levitating it back onto the plinth give you only the flashest of flashes of what the game could have actually been if they cared to tie the level design together it feels like playing a design document of aspects a game might contain with the harry potter branding hiding how shallow it actually is it's just a collection of staggered game mechanics all slapped together to tie in with the film it relies on the player already knowing and caring about the story and the characters because it does virtually nothing to establish who they are or why you should care or why they're doing anything they're doing the plot stumbles from point to point and when the player knows what they're doing mostly you never truly understand why you had an entire book worth of backstory and adventure and relationships to work with and this is what you made there's no magic here the biggest saving grace is thankfully it's an extremely short game so to end the review i will award harry potter and the sorcerer's stone very well i promise you'll die begging for mercy as your parents did cheers for watching another massive thank you to the supporters on patreon and twitch who keep the channel alive you can support from only one pound a month check the video description for links to the patreon twitch twitter and discord and as always remember hello harry it's me hagrid good to see you these are the hogwarts castle groans and i'm the gamekeeper of course you'll need to attend your herbology class professor sprouts in the greenhouse waiting for you come row me hot later for tea i have something to ask you my hut's in the grounds [Music]

Channel: Josh Strife Plays

Views: 732,286

Keywords: classic gaming, retro games, older games, retro review, gaming reviews, nostalgic gaming, nostalgia games, playstation 1, playstation 2, n64, dreamcast, classic rpg

Id: 1wu4qIma308

Length: 66min 57sec (4017 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 07 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/bofe112]

I know this game has nothing to do with the the new game, and it is very old. I also loved this game so much back in the day when I was a kid, but Josh's comments really funny.

[u/sephrinx]

I remember playing the Gamecube games and they were dope.