“More Beans!” – Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

[As with previous Harry Potter games, I have donated the total I’ve paid for Goblet of Fire media including this game to a British charity supporting trans people, as some kind of offset to this post prolonging the reach, by however little, of a series by a leading campaigner against trans people’s human rights.]

The game version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone revelled in exploring the setting of the book; by Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban the setting was mostly reduced to background colour. The trend continues in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which loses any sense of a continuous place in favour of having you select levels from the pensieve memory storing/viewing device. That is not its only move towards incoherence.

The first level of Goblet of Fire takes place after a death-heavy prologue, and follows the Quidditch World Cup final, when the baddies strike and our familiar trio of heroes have to get away to their magical transport home. They have to fight some creatures and lift a bunch of rocks and logs to do so. It introduces the main mode of Goblet of Fire, which is much more combat-focused without adding enough complexity to make it worth focusing on. Hit x a lot, and occasionally square, and jinx everything that moves. There are a couple of twists, like a meter which fills up and allows you to activate a more powerful mode with a cry of “magicus extremus!” (thanks to the low bar of uses of faux-Latin in the books, this new one doesn’t even seem particularly egregious). But it remains dull and repetitive.

And throughout the game, including amidst desperate escape from evil and death in the dark, successful jinxes are commemorated by a spray of bright, multicoloured beans. Which handily undermines the atmosphere to little benefit, a perfect metaphor. The game wants to move into more serious territory, but its attempts to do so are ineptly built upon a foundation of escapist silliness that tonally won’t go along with it. Extend the metaphor to the books themselves if you like. Goblet of Fire’s intro of a sporting contest which suddenly veers into darkness is after all a miniature of the whole plot. 

Beans aside, in reaching new heights of greyness, the game is actually spared some of the worst parts of the book. The playable version of Goblet of Fire contains neither the duplicitous female journalist with “mannish hands”, who disguises herself to get access to places she shouldn’t, nor the subplot about happy slaves which goes out of its way to mock suggestions that we should improve society somewhat. The game is rarely impinged on by plot in general, using the dragon-evading and underwater-rescuing trials of the book as brief action interludes amidst a slog of samey combat and having to go to the same levels again to do rudimentary puzzles to get enough collectibles to be allowed to progress.

One thing it does offer that stands out from its predecessors is being built for co-operative multiplayer. Where the previous game had you switch between Harry, Ron and Hermione at will, this one has you as Harry at plot-critical points and otherwise has you choose one of the three and stick with them, while the other two offer support. A second and third player are free to step in at any time and do a better job than the rubbish AI which requires frequent workarounds for its reluctance to help you out. It doesn’t add much, but it improves things a little.

The co-op aspect also offers a way into understanding how Goblet of Fire may have ended up as it is. The simplified action, the co-op, the swapping in and out of characters, the UI with character portraits in the corners of the screen with their health and bean counters, the abundant beans themselves… it all adds up to a very strong flavour of Lego Star Wars: The Video Game. EA appear to have picked up on imitating the leading recent example of how to make a popular game based on family-friendly movies. The difference being not just several levels of quality of invention, but the fact that Lego Star Wars leaned into its contradictions for humour in a way which Goblet of Fire completely fails to. Overall, it’s a vision of how Lego Star Wars would have come across if it lacked the charm that was its biggest asset. Still, maybe the Lego games and Harry Potter might have a better match in future…

The sense of chasing after the latest big thing also reflects a wider truth about the Harry Potter games. They were all-but-guaranteed to be popular as a result of popularity of the source films and books. But even as they were successful, none of them were particularly catching on critically or as part of the wider conversation about games, never having a breakthrough on their own merits. As a result, there was more incentive than not to rip things up and start again each time in the hope that this time there might be something more to build on. Except, of course, that the lack of identity made the underlying problem get even worse each time. The centrality of beans was about the only lasting legacy to carry on.

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Top of the charts for week ending 19 November 2005:

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