![]() Collecting your team - really just informing about 30 of them of a secret place to meet - is sometimes as straightforward as merely locating them and talking them into it. As mentioned, charging up your powers involves doing a lot of things that are fun for 15 minutes. In gameplay, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is divided sharply down the middle in the first half of the story, you collect your team of like-minded junior wizards, learn spells, increase the power of your spell oeuvre and teach those spells to your compatriots. That would save a load of wear-and-tear on the oxfords. This is a millennia-old order of wizards if they can't work out a reliable teleportation spell, you'd think at least they'd get the flying thing down. That's another thing: the walking, running, prodigious foot travel. ![]() After a few days of all that walking, I'd have taken to my dormitory bed for the rest of the term. Had I been born magical and attended Hogwarts, I surely would have flunked out, as it's too much walking - believe me, you'll soon mash the run button and keep it depressed - getting from the Owlery to the library to the Defense Against The Dark Arts classroom. My eldest child is a fan of Rowling's Potter novels, and I've seen and even enjoyed, despite often excruciating detail-flogging, a couple of the films: I already know Hogwarts is huge. Hogwarts, the wizard's school's campus, is huge. There's the single worst element of Order of the Phoenix: the trivial portions of assigned tasks consume far too much time for no good reason, save fidelity to the source material. ![]() For these things you are awarded with points that unlock bonus material in the rewards room and, more importantly, ramp up that spell-casting skill it's even fun for the first hour into the game, zapping this and that, yet you'll soon feel you're performing rote chores with no logical connection to increasing Harry's talents as a young wizard, taking up too much time off your main agenda in the bargain. These duties include not only raising curtains to reveal mysterious armor-suited statutory, but also casting spells here and there to repair broken urns, light torches or, get this, even make up beds or flatten rumpled hallway carpets. While the game has a plot - the book's and movie's plot, of course - to propel it forward, there are numerous digressions with which to keep up in order to unlock "secrets," or bonus material, and do necessary things, like increasing the power of Harry's spell-casting abilities. The same goes for Order of the Phoenix as a game. The same people claim that every doorstop of a Harry Potter novel would make a decent average-length novella if you boiled it down to its necessary elements. And they're full of too many dead-end digressions that may masquerade as red herrings but ultimately just run their course to no purpose. To their credit, the developer has done fairly well with the hand dealt them, but they've failed to, or been unable to, rein in certain parts of the Harry Potter experience for the sake of making a good video game.Ī chief gripe from some critics is that Rowling's novels are repetitive, recycling the same plot themes not only across serial novels but also within the same novel. In making Order of the Phoenix, EA was surely saddled with too many obligations: to the book and film, and to the core fans who will by default read the book, see the film and buy the game. The best way to approach Order of the Phoenix is head-on, as a video game, but the newly minted Harry Potter legend towers so far over anything dare speak his name, it's difficult to do that. The same complaint can be made about EA's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix for the PS3, a faithful reinvention of a film which is a strict version of a book. ![]() Some detail or subplot excised for expediency's sake will play well to general audiences but turn off the hardcore crowd, killing the film's word-of-mouth advertising. But the Harry Potter movies are a unique quandary, much like Peter Jackson's films based on Tolkien's work: In order to ensure box office and DVD success, the movies must pander in great measure to the source material's fanatics. The key here is that notion of adaptation, the idea that not every nut and bolt of a lengthy novel need make it into a feature-length film. The book has been copied into a movie rather than the book being adapted to film. ![]() The usual critical complaint doled out for films based on Harry Potter novels is that despite quality casting, excellent direction, good scripts and top-notch special effects, they are too faithful to the books to make perfect movies. ![]()
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