Brace yourself folks. A video game aimed at children and based on a movie/book, and it doesn’t suck. Electronic Arts continues to improve its Harry Potter line of games with Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban. With somewhat Zelda-esque play mechanics, the game is actually engaging and the Potter-heads are going to really enjoy it.
If you’re not familiar with the Harry Potter book series and the resulting movies based on it … crawl out from under that rock where you’ve been living. I’m not about to go into the whole story, but let’s just say that Harry Potter and his friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger are students at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Prisoner of Azkaban finds our heroes in their third year of studies, and all is not well. A wizard with a dark past has escaped from the prison of Azkaban and rumor has it he is looking for our boy Harry. The fearsome prison guards of Azkaban, the Dementors, have been dispatched to recapture the prisoner and have stationed themselves around Hogwarts in case he comes there.
Unlike previous Harry Potter games, Prisoner Of Azkaban lets the player play as all three of the story’s main characters. Each has unique strengths and will obtain different spells as the game progresses. Strengths include Harry’s ability to jump farther, Hermione’s knack for getting into small places, and Ron’s uncanny ability to see secret passages. Using all the characters properly is important to moving forward in the game. At times one character may need to go off on his own to complete a portion of the quest or two or three characters may have to work together to move an object or trigger a switch.
Gameplay takes place in day intervals at the school. On any given day the player may attend a couple of classes and play through a few events in the overarching story. Classes are where most new spells are learned. Of course I’m not sure most of the students’ parents would approve of how the lessons are taught. It often consists of going into some dark dungeon to pick up a book or object, etc. That would be okay except those places are filled with things trying to do-in the kids. Hogwarts’ attorney might want to educate the faculty on legal issues like child endangerment and wrongful death.
Lots of the play is puzzle-based. Since this game is geared for the kids, the puzzles are not going to tax an adult, and the game is even good about giving hints so the younger players can figure out what they should be doing next. Fighting enemies is bloodless. Basic spells knock them down and make them disappear or deflect the enemy’s attack. The larger boss enemies usually have a weakness to exploit and using the right, more advanced spell to exploit that weakness is the path to victory. At any one time a character may have two spells equipped to the X and Y buttons. The player can change any character’s equipped spells on the fly by pulling up the inventory screen and mapping the desired spells to the buttons. This means as our three friends go into each encounter they can be armed differently and then the player may use the character that is best equipped to handle any given situation. There is a lock-on function that makes targeting the spells easier. It works pretty well overall.
The frustration level of the game is kept low by some nice play touches. When jumping, the player only needs to run toward the correct spot and the game will execute the jump for him. The game also doesn’t allow players to just run off ledges into bottomless crevasses. When killed, the player is put back almost exactly where he died: no replaying through a big chunk of the level to get back where you were. The player may also save at any time during play, and when reloaded, the game will pick up right where it was left at. I know this is great for kids because moms have no patience for that I’m-not-at-a-save-point-yet excuse when she wants you to do something.
In addition to the main game, Prisoner Of Azkaban offers three mini-games: Dueling Club, Owl Racing and Hippogriff Flight Challenge. If the player owns a Game Boy Advance and a link cable, a couple of games can be downloaded from the GameCube to the GBA for play: Buckbeak’s Hippogriff Glide and Wizard Cracker Pop-It. Owning the aforementioned GBA stuff and the GBA version of Prisoner Of Azkaban opens up the ability to download an “Owl Care Kit” from the GameCube to the GBA. The player may then use the kit to further train his owl on the GBA and then upload the improved owl onto the GameCube to use in the Owl Racing game. Really a nice set of bonus features.
Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban is probably never going to win any awards for gameplay, graphics, audio or even adapted source material, but it is a solidly playable game that is going to greatly entertain its target audience of Potter fans and younger gamers. Electronic Arts is to be commended for making such a solid game against a license that some publishers would figure they’d make their sales numbers with an inferior product and the name alone. (Thanks goodness Hasbro Interactive didn’t win the Harry Potter rights way back when they were competing for them. Those rights would have gone to Infogrames/Atari in the 2001 company sale and I shudder to think what the game I just played would have been like with their track record for movie-based games.) It never ceases to amaze me that EA has not imploded like so many other publishers that have grown too big and let the quality get sloppy. EA continues to put out a superior product and constantly does more than it has to for gamers.
If you have young video game players in your house who are also fans of the Harry Potter books or movies, Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban for the GameCube should definitely be given a look. If the kids aren’t Harry fans, it is still a pretty good bet they’ll get some fun hours out of this game too. But for an adult, experienced gamer – probably not. Let the kids have their fun. Just play it a little once the kids have gone to bed.
