ZeroMachine said:
Harry Potter isn't something to look to for an epic fantasy world. It's something to look to for good characters/development and an interesting coming of age/good vs evil story.
I'm going to disagree with ZeroMachine while I try to explain why I liked Harry Potter
so hard back in the day. You see, I'm er... 24 now. I was 15 or so when I first learned about Harry Potter (from my literature teacher. Go figure). I didn't use the internet that much back in the day, so for me it was just something that a teacher told us about. Now this is important, because it adds up to the impression I got from it: I liked it because it told the story about a magic, mundane world that totally coexisted with the mugglesphere so to speak. Suddenly a fictional universe opened up in front of me, being in the sweet spot between accessible and deep. There were brands, shops, schools, pubs designed specifically for mage use but regular at the core, there was magic but just the right amount of magic to make things more convenient or functional, but magic-people still had to live in cities and use methods of transportation as mundane as boats, but on top of that a new array of magic-only tricks opened up, which I admit can make a really cheap plot device, but just so you get an idea: it was the whole
parallel fantastic world living right under our noses that functions similarly yet in a complete different way thing that dragged me in. Plus, they were long books, REALLY long books that guaranteed hours and hours of history. So, I guess the lore is rich enough, just... not radically different to our everyday world, so it can seem simple sometimes.
Anyway, it's actually a little ironic that the length and lore of the Harry Potter were the precise things that made me stop liking it. You see, books kept getting bigger. And bigger. By the time I finished the about 700 pages of the fourth book (in which there is one of the cheapest magic plot devices I've ever seen) I just stopped reading them. Also, the second film was about to come out by that time, and I've never been too much of a hipster, but the commercial success of Harry Potter kinda made me think the books were becoming a way to try and milk the franchise even further.
TL;DR: Lore was complete, although kinda mundane.