STASOCRITIC REVIEW | Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (GBA)

Several years ago I came across a forum where people were talking about the Harry Potter RPGs, and a person by the name of 'Dreamwriter' was actually involved in the development of the games, saying making 1 & 2 on GBC was one of the best times making games, which was then quickly followed by 3 on GBA, one of the worst. When asked why 3 on GBA was the worst, the response was this.

"We were micromanaged to death by the publisher on that one. They specifically asked for the GBC Potter team to make that game, and we designed our dream game, taking everything we learned from Chamber of Secrets and amping it way up, taking full advantage of the powerful new hardware. To be honest, we over-designed it, to be sure, but still, without interference we could have made a really kick-ass game. But the publisher didn't trust us to make quality GBA art, seeing as we had come from GBC development. To make a long story short, halfway through production they made us throwaway all the existing background art, replacing it with a new style they came up with, and because the background art changed, we had to change our sprite art to match, and now all the scripting had to be redone, since backgrounds and characters were different sizes/shapes from before. With only half the time to now make a full game, we had to cut many, many features, and to release it as a decent game we had to work crunch mode for the rest of the project, including weekends and holidays, while the publisher had reps in our office micromanaging it all. Not fun."

On the whole, it's disappointing the game's quality got cut in half due to publisher interference. Had that not happened, Prisoner on GBA could have been that one Harry Potter game to get a score of 80+, but it is what it is, and admittedly what is there is still a competently made RPG given the time crunch and all. Kudos to the developers for what they could pull off, I can feel their pain.

Great video as usual.

The way paralysis works in PoA is you can only paralyze once. I think the reason why you got the message "The opponent is immune to paralysis!" is because you used Ron's Stink Pellet on the enemies before casting Petrificus Totalus on them. Also, in a way Ron's Stink Pellets are obsolete once you get Petrificus Totalus because Stink Pellets only works for one turn, and Petrificus Totalus can last for multiple turns sometimes. It's pretty sad that the game doesn't really tell you about this, and also the fact that you can only paralyze enemies exactly once.