This GBA rendition feels a bit like a discount puppet show. The 'levels' are large circles using an extremely limited pallet of enemies and backdrops. The in-engine cutscenes lean heavily or your previous understanding of the work, ultimately book-ended by fitting slideshows. The exploration is present, though if you wish to avoid recombing through the castle you will wait until the very last moment to begin.

The game actually benefits from being front heavy. The majority of the game's levels use either 'normal' or 'dungeon' Hogwarts room tiles, but the opening level has an exclusive, impressive volcanic theme for Gringotts. That and the bean challenges immediately after are also the only diverse or exciting gameplay experiences.

You can feel the limits of the preexisting story and time, which I assume was majorly consumed by the 3D flying segments. There are several themes that are only seen for a single room. The first boss is half-way through the game, but also the most interesting one. Standard enemies are also limited in use and design, all being beaten by three or less basic ranged attacks. The most visually interesting ones, giant spiders and the Gythrash ghost wolves, only appear in single, otherwise empty room, the latter of which you will only ever see with the Link-Cable functionality.

100% Completion is also locked behind the Link-Cable, though bittersweet there is functionally no gameplay exclusive to it.

What can be said for this handheld game is that it is paced for consumption. Missing from this are any complaints about controls, music, miss-able collectables, stuck-spots or bugs. If you can appreciate short games with simple, square-peg-in-square-hole stealth, combat, and metroidvania elements you will find yourself completing it.

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

Disclaimer : This is one of those titles that I think should have separate entries on here per system as there are 4 entirely separate versions of the game. Keep this in mind when looking at review scores.

Game Summary : Have you read or watched Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets? Then you know the plot. Outside of a few small changes to lend the game a more video game friendly structure, the plot is very faithful to the book. The gameplay is a pretty simplistic turn based RPG system, which ends up being a mixed bag.

Review Portion : While a delight for those who are fans of the series, anyone who isn't or fans looking for a solid game in its own right will likely be disappointed. The dedication to keeping RPG elements themed to Harry Potter including the names of items and spells is appreciated. Even the enemies, a necessity for a game like this, stay feeling of the world despite not really being an element of the original story given it's lack of combat in general. The minigames I played were fun and also well rooted in the world of Harry Potter without ever forcing you to play them long enough for them to overstay their welcome.

The combat system while simple, which makes sense as I understand this was likely created with children as the target audience, is simple in that sort of frustrating way that comes from a lack of explanation. There are various spells with multiple levels of strength that become unlocked as you level up. This would lend itself to some sort of elemental system, but none seems to exist. You can analyze enemies to see their resistances and weaknesses, but they seems to be random and not set to some sort of elemental system pattern. It also doesn't work on bosses and ineffective spells used on bosses do all of 1 damage, causing these fights to be a process of elimination and nearly guarantee the need to redo these battles at least once after finding the "right" spell to use.

There is a wizard card system and attacks tied to them, but this can also be frustrating as some cards seem to only be able to be found by finding them at random by clicking the "A" button EVERWHERE. And I do mean everywhere. A single desk may be "clicked" 4 times before a hidden item is found, once for each side. A single bookshelf can be clicked multiple times and only have an item on the final click at the very end despite looking very much like a single object. The same goes for some of the card attacks which must be found or earned independently of just having the cards needed to use them. This frustration is not just a completionist gripe, but also something that can lock you out of important attacks and equipment unlocked by finding complete sets of related cards. Cards can be bought, but they are random and certain cards seem not to show up in the random packs no matter how many cards are purchased. Multiple times I saved my game, emptied my wallet to buy hundreds of cards, and still found that no matter how many times I reloaded and repeated certain cards just did not appear.

While I don't personally mind a certain amount of required grinding in my RPGs this game does seem to require quite a bit of it not only for levels, but for money to get equipment which offer much higher stat boosts than levelling does even at higher levels. Some of this equipment would require A LOT of grinding as well. A lot as in single pieces of equipment costing about 4x the amount of money I had before the final boss fight and probably more than I had earned cumulatively over my entire playthrough. Not exactly a kid friendly element, especially with the Aragog fight requiring multiple tries and a bit of luck even with a fairly high level and good equipment.

Summary : If you have a love for Harry Potter and are just looking for a charming little nostalgic experience best played in bursts then this game may scratch that itch as it did for me. Otherwise look elsewhere for a good RPG on the Game Boy Color.

Personal Score : 8

"Objective" Score : 6