Harry Potter (video game)/YMMV

• Non Sequitur Scene: The side missions in Deathly Hallows Part 1. For example, Harry is searching Grimmauld Place... Suddenly, he finds himself in a dragon's cave!
• Ear Worm: The first few games were scored by Jeremy Soule, so it's a given.
• Excuse Plot: Gameplay takes precedence over Rowling's complicated plots, so the storyline of each book/film is more-or-less reduced to this for the game. But let's face it—practically everyone who plays these games knows the plot already anyway.
• Hell Is That Noise: Chamber of Secrets has multiple examples, but the most notorious are the ghost enemies, who always make an eerie wailing sound right before they attack Harry. It's a creepy enough noise to listen to if the ghost is in front of you and you can at least see it preparing to attack. If the ghost happens to be behind you or on the other side of a wall, and you don't know until that horrible sound suddenly comes out of nowhere....
• It's Short, So It Sucks: The games based on the 7th/8th movie(s). Angry Joe even pointed out he finished Part 2 in 2:52, which is just 20 minutes longer than the film's running time.
• Narm: Lots of it: Hermione's voice acting in the fifth game. Her voice actress who had played her for the past few games had been great, but for this game, she was quite wooden, and constantly stated the obvious.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: The first 4 games kinda averted it. The others, not so much.
• They Just Didn't Care:
  • Half-Blood Prince doesn't bother introducing Romilda Vane, Harry's fangirl. However, Harry still gets her love potion spiked cauldrons, which Ron eats. Then you have to brew the goddamn cure.
  • Worse than that, you find Polyjuice Potion instructions (and naturally have to brew the potion to find out what it is) even though the Polyjuice subplot is eliminated from the game as it was from the movie. So the game makes it a huge plot point that Draco Malfoy is brewing Polyjuice Potion for some mysterious purpose, but then never explains what it's for.
  • The first game never explains who Voldemort is, apparently figuring that simply saying "Harry Potter... The Boy Who Lived" magically covers the whole Backstory. Made all the more egregious by the fact that the intro movie then spends an inexplicably long time detailing the scene in which Harry asks the Sorting Hat not to put him in Slytherin.
  • The PC version of Chamber has Dobby warn Harry not to go to Hogwarts, and then he disappears. He doesn't cause the Dursleys to lock Harry up and he never appears again. In short, his appearance is never explained and has no impact on the plot. He's just there because the book/movie says he's supposed to be.
  • In the first game, the teachers award you house points for how well you learn spells. One spell, however, is taught to you by Hermione... so she randomly awards you house points! And she insists while doing so that Professor Flitwick would surely award you these points anyway. Oookay then.
  • One could say this of the entirety of The Deathly Hallows Part 1, due to being an Obvious Beta.