Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Reviewed by Shae Dougall (spigel) on Jan 6, 2017
Reviewed on Nintendo Gamecube (also on Playstation 2, Xbox, PC, MAC, Game Boy Advance, Playstation, Game Boy Color)
While nostalgia has always been a powerful, destructive force in the lives of Americans, no generation has been preyed upon as viciously as the poor American Millennial. Take, for example, the Millennial’s reverence for anything related to the 1990’s. Any opportunity the Millennial has to memeify an episode of Spongebob Squarepants into a relevant insight on what college/adult life is REALLY like is snapped up immediately. Playing the nostalgia card is huge with Millennials. You can “mobilize” thousands of them to pay attention to you simply by referencing anything that existed between 1991-2004. Enter me, and enter Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Admit it, the only reason you’re reading this review is because you used to be absolutely obsessed with the boy wizard. Maybe you still are. I am. PAY ATTENTION TO ME!
Upon beginning Chamber of Secrets, the senses are immediately overwhelmed by the sheer amount of glorious fanservice. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets accomplishes everything you would expect (or wouldn’t expect) out of a licensed video game product. The visuals perfectly capture both the spirit and the scope of the series’ second installment. Each and every set piece from The Burrow to Diagon Alley to Hogwarts are modeled with the utmost care and really look and feel authentic. The load times can be bothersome when moving from area to area, but are mostly forgiven due to the ambitious undertaking of building such a massive world to run around in. There is a ton of great stuff this game has to offer on the surface: great music, great models, great visuals (although the lack of progressive scan support and frame rate chugging sometimes made me literally feel ill, ESPECIALLY playing on an HD TV in 2017), and flying around on your own, personal Nimbus 2000 is AWESOME, particularly in Quidditch matches where there are actual stakes.
A good chunk of the gameplay feels directly borrowed from The Legend of Zelda. The Zelda inspiration results in some incredibly strong ideas: dungeon crawling for new spells (items), equipping said spells to action buttons, locking onto enemies and centering the camera, with the L button, and using the big round A button to talk to classmates and open doors and treasure chests. Big deal, right? This stuff should be rudimentary. The thing is, this game came out in 2002, just a few years removed from the 3D adventure masterpiece that was Ocarina of Time. Video games have obviously come an extraordinarily long way since then. As a result, it makes the gameplay aspects that Chamber of Secrets gets wrong even more grating. (Keep all the positive stuff I just said in mind while I proceed to tear into this game.)
The gameplay in CoS largely consists of running around the hub world of Hogwarts (which I frequently affectionately refer to as “Hubwarts”). It’s a straightforward setup, and one that makes a lot of sense in the context of what going to Hogwarts should be. As Harry’s day progresses, his Remembrall tasks him with going to class, helping Neville Longbottom out of a tight spot, flying in Quidditch matches, amongst other things, and the story evolves as you progress through these tasks. Despite the basic premise, there are a lot of immediate issues to the gamer of 2017. For starters, there is a ton of obvious gating. There is no free rein over where you’re allowed to go in Hogwarts. Everything is locked behind doors you can’t open because of ectoplasmic goop or tapestries that you can’t cut down without the proper spells to do so. That’s generally accepted to a certain degree in games like this, but there’s basically not even an illusion of exploration. Everything interesting is completely closed off until you have the proper spells to traverse it, or an NPC tells you to go do something in a certain area, thus unlocking the area. A world that the player inherently wants to explore is locked up tighter than a Gringotts vault.
The spells that you need are also gated behind story events. First, you have to go downstairs and talk to Ron or Hermione. Then, you have to go to class. Then, you have to explore a dungeon in order to get the spell that you need. This is serious “art imitates life” stuff. A spelunk into a hidden dungeon to unlock an item in Zelda feels more like dragging yourself out of bed to go to your first period math class in CoS. The dungeons in CoS are mostly lifeless, making them feel completely menial. The puzzles are rudimentary. The mini-bosses never change in difficulty or strategy required. Ultimately, it all just feels like an exercise in banality, something that the “action” sequences of an action-adventure game should never attempt to mimic.
Once you’ve got the spells, it’s a miracle if they do anything useful or interesting outside of the dungeons. Sure, you’ll cut down a tapestry here and there in the overworld, but it’s not like there are any actual puzzles that utilize the spells. The spells are mostly just there to maintain that THIS IS THE HARRY POTTER UNIVERSE. Otherwise it’s just a bunch of locked doors. It’s not even a MetroidVania style of backtracking to areas that you’ve already been to in order to access new areas or powerups. There are no new areas or powerups. Everything important is revealed to you in a linear fashion through the progression of the story. Worse, every possible puzzle solution is laid out for you, eliminating any semblance of challenge and amounting to nothing more than busy work. Push this block here, press this switch! Eurocom’s puzzle designer must have thought that the player is either incredibly dumb, or that this is the first adventure game the player has ever purchased. Maybe both. The puzzle difficulty is, in a word, pathetic.
Difficulty, in fact, is delegated more to generic combat, dueling, and simply trying to stay alive in a world that is decidedly “camera-angle challenged”. Combat is simple, and mostly consists of trying to dodge enemy’s attacks long enough to line up a Flipendo spell. It’s fine, but nothing special, and can be exasperating when outnumbered by enemies. Dueling is something that was played up in the marketing for this game way back in 2002 (yeah, I remember), and it’s pretty fun the few times you get to do it throughout the course of the adventure and during sidequests. It’s frustrating when Harry doesn’t even get hit with a spell during a duel and falls down anyway, but glitches like this are supremely common in “early” 3D adventures, so I’ll give CoS a pass on some of those. Despite the positives provided by the solid combat system, the biggest negative contributor to the difficulty is this: The camera sucks and the hitbox detection sucks.
There are a lot of camera angles the game simply doesn’t allow, and it is infuriating to try to escape prefect-infested corridors without getting caught, simply because you can’t see them. The camera also becomes a significant problem during the dungeon crawling portions of the game, too. It’s infuriating trying to line up jumps to precise platforms with the camera constantly swinging back around behind Harry every time he moves. These jumps are made even more difficult considering the hitbox for the ledges is minutely tiny. The player will miss a ton of jumps over the game, most of them completely attributed to the awful hit detection. It’s tempting to blame the camera in these situations, but it boils down to this: If I touch the ledge, I should grab the ledge. CoS does not play out that way, unfortunately. (Incidentally, the hitbox problem also affects combat and picking up collectables, but nothing is as gruesomely offensive as the aforementioned platforming issue.)
These irksome camera problems diminished my enjoyment of the game so greatly that I found myself not even bothering to explore for Chocolate Frog cards, fly around on my broomstick, or participate in the fun sidequests and mini-games. The dungeons, camera, and hitbox almost literally extinguished Harry’s will to live in the world that he occupies. What a horrible school.
In a Hogwarts that is still bursting with life, character, and entertaining diversions, it is emotionally devastating to discover that a lot of that beauty is only skin-deep. It’s not a good game in 2017, and now I’m not even sure it was a good game in 2002. The magic of nostalgia is gone now. CoS commits a number of cardinal gaming-sins over the course of its ten hour adventure, but for me, the Millennial, nothing is worse than the nostalgia-crushing reality that it simply hasn’t aged very well.
3/5
Meh
