Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban for Game Boy Adv Reviews & Ratings by IGN

Ever since Electronic Arts smartly snagged the Harry Potter videogame rights, the company has fueled the gaming market with literally a game a year. Even when 2003 lacked a film to coincide a game release, the company made sure the Potter-freaks had something to scoop up in the form of Quidditch. For the recently released Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, EA once again swoops in with a Game Boy Advance rendition of the movie, and once again it's a significantly different experience than previous Potter GBA games. The change in game genre is certainly refreshing, and the experience is a solid, lengthy, and faithful Potter adventure. Its development, however, is spotty and just a little unbalanced, lacking a final polish in the end product.

Features

• Three playable characters
• Four mini-games
• Link cable support for trading cards
• GameCube connectivity (Owl Care Kit)
• Cartridge save (three slots)

It's Harry Potter's third year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. And as if the classes weren't enough for Harry, Hermione and Ron, now Harry's got another problem: Sirius Black, the man sent to Azkaban Prison for the crimes of murdering Harry's parents, has escaped...and is now coming after the young wizard. This boy's got some serious problems on his hands for a thirteen year old.

Previous Harry Potter Game Boy Advance games have been of the adventure style where players had to guide Harry and crew through Hogwarts performing specific tasks or solving puzzles that would open up the next part of the game. Prisoner of Azkaban definitely has its fair share of these adventure elements, but for the latest Harry Potter experience, Game Boy Advance development house Griptonite Games produced a full-fledged role-playing game. Borrowing from familiar RPG designs such as Final Fantasy and Golden Sun, Griptonite's giving the game a much different feel from previous Harry Potter titles with turn-based battles. Players will have to manage up to three members in their party by equipping special items that will enhance each characters' abilities in the battle sequences. And just like nearly every RPG ever made, the more battles players win, the more experience the characters will earn...and every level the characters earn mean stronger abilities and better spells.

Prisoner of Azkaban is definitely aimed at the younger crowd, so don't expect a deep and engrossing experience just because it's a role-playing game. The designers simplified elements and kid-ified others; enemies never "die" in battle, for example...they simply skitter away when they run out of hit points. If all characters fall in battle, the game will simply bump players back to the beginning of the level with full health, experience, and all the items still in their inventory. And in any battle that players win with fallen characters, those characters earn the same amount of experience points as the other members of the party. It's a lengthy adventure, but the simplification of standard RPG elements means that players won't end up stuck in the storyline.

And as much as the developers borrowed from successful RPG titles, Golden Sun this is not. The graphic style varies wildly in places; the scrolling engine is constructed solidly but features very stiff character animation. Swapping between the three characters just looks flat-out quirky because all the programmers do is switch the heads on the sprite bodies. The battle engine features a dynamic camera that zooms in, out, and around the action much like Golden Sun, but the technology used to pull this off is incredibly sloppy with scaling and rotation effects that more look awkward than impressive. The game's pacing definitely needed to be tweaked; it's a real drag having to cycle to the character screen to see the experience points tallied up after every freakin' battle. It artificially drags out the length of the game and can't be skipped.

But where there are bad elements, there are also some very good ideas in Prisoner of Azkaban. The adventure, while linear in nature, branches outwards every so often. Players will be faced with choosing one quest over another several times in the game. There's no backtracking to the quests the player doesn't choose, which means the only way to see the entire game is to play through it a second or third time to choose the quests that were missed the first time around. Also, while the battle engine isn't impressive on technical and visual merits, the designers add a cool feature where players can keep track of attack order between characters and monsters via an icon list in the upper right of the screen. It's a neat addition for a first-time RPG.

©2004, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved