Game #1320: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets(Playstation 2)

 This chamber can keep a secret.

 Now this one I actually owned when I was younger, but I'm sure I never got to finish it. I remember when Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets released on PS2 it received a ton of good reviews and it was being compared to Zelda, so I took the plunge and bought the game, and I'm pretty sure I liked it quite a bit, so I'm not too sure as too why I never got to finish it.

 Anyways, this game actually came out before the Philosopher's Stone on PS2... and it shows. The camera is a bit janky and the game as a whole feels a bit rough. Flying is super annoying, because every time you move him, the game jerks him towards the center of the screen, which makes it feel as if Quirrel is casting something to make Harry fall from his broom... except that this is the sequel and professor Quirrel is long gone.

 And I thought ghosts were annoying in the Philosopher's Stone? You can't defeat ghosts in the game, which is very annoying, and if they touch you, you lose all-flavored beans(currency)! Midway through you get Expeliarmus, which is actually a deflect spell, and afterwards the game starts throwing Gargoyles your way, which must be fought by reflecting their fireballs.... over and over again. They take forever!  And that's a thing I felt with this game... many times, it felt quite tedious. The puzzles are alright, but going through them feels like a slog at times.

 Compounding to that... is the stealth. Every time you go out at night you need to be stealthy, and it's SO annoying. Prefects can hear you from far away if you do anything other than slowly crawl, which is so boring. And they always have the SAME boring patterns that force you to wait. You do know that Harry has an invisibility cape, don't you? And if they catch you, you lose house points, which hurts you right in you ego. The game is easily at its best when you are exploring Hogwarts with your spells to obtain Trading cards, and every ten of them you get a small permanent health boost. And exploring Hogwarts works, it really does. The puzzles are very simple, but just using your spells and finding chests feels quite magical, for lack of a better word. Exploration is top notch, everything else, from combat to stealth just feels rough and half-baked.

 One big point of criticism that this version(PS2) of the game received are loading times. And I'm not gonna lie, when it came to my memories of the game... the loading times weren't something I remembered. Well.... they are not hideous, but, they are quite frequent. Sometimes after going into the menu to swap spells may trigger a half-second long loading screen, but once again, very brief. Loading times when exploring Hogwarts? Not too long, but frequent. Totally manageable.

 The game looks exactly like Philosopher's Stone, which means it's a bit of Sims and a bit of the movie take on the franchise, and it's quite fitting for this part of the Harry Potter saga. That said... they completely removed Dobby from the plot! Harsh! Harry and Ron don't even get Gilderoy Lockhart to help them reach the chamber.... It's quite surprising, but among all the versions of CoS I've played... this one does the worst when it comes to adapting the plot of either book or movie, much unlike HP 1, in which the home console version had the best adaptation of the plot.

 Chamber of Secrets is alright, but it hasn't aged very well, honestly, you're better off playing Philosopher's Stone, which is this game but polished, and, if you want to follow the plot in videogame form, play the PS1 take of Chamber of Secrets.

 5.0