Sword and sorcery! This would be Conan the Barbarian, Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, and so on. Corrupt empires, barbarian swordsmen, evil wizards being evil, and Andre Norton's Witch World.
"Heroic fantasy" is another term for the same general subgenre. I like it a bit better because it has a fewer presuppositions in the name re: the amount of swords and sorcery.
Err... it absolutely is? Harry is literally the prophesized chosen one, marked (near) birth and destined to go on an epic quest to defeat the literal Dark Lord. That they make handwaves at the prophecy being self-fulfilling is mostly irrelevant to that. I mean, you could argue Voldie is likely to get a Tomahawk to the face the moment he annoys the rest of the world, but the characters certainly seem to believe the stakes are apocalyptic, and the story treats them as such. You could make an argument it's low magic compared to like... Dungeons and Dragons, or Eragon, or things similar to that. Harry Potter Wizards all have magic powers, but they're fairly minor, and they're also a tiny minority that generally doesn't matter to the world as a whole.
Admittedly, I haven’t read the last two Eragon books, but “potions to regrow bones”, “costless shapeshifting”, and “pretty much all of the transfiguration spells” tend to be greater than or equal to what the Eragon magic was in my recollection? If anything, it was harder to learn magic in Eragon ‘verse—but it wasn’t set on Earth, so, high magic. This might be my urban fantasy background speaking too. When “the greatest feat of magic is summoning one (1) small flame at a key moment with little ability to do more” is a common theme in the genre, kids at age twelve being able to defy death and rewrite reality without much effort or consequence seems pretty far in the other direction of magic.
I mean, sure, it takes a lot more effort to learn magic in Eragon... but Late Eragon has stuff like 'instantly regenerate from fatal wounds, automatically', 'mindkill a thousand soldiers at once', and 'accidentally make a girl a reality-warping problem antenna'. These are just examples of the kinds of things that are common, not the extraordinary feats. I don't blame you for not reading it, though, as it also has the 'be an insufferable prick' spell active on the entire cast, permanently. D&D, meanwhile... well, the HP wizards have pretty much the One Good Spell, and I guess transfiguration at a 'lower' level? They're kind of comparable in that they have different advantages up to about level 7, at which point D&D land gets Polymorph and Death Ward, thus negating any advantage HP might have, and then things just keep getting crazier. And that's just wizards, not even talking about clerics, druids, warlocks...
I know that, but it's not what the majority of the story focuses on, in the way it does in, say, Lord of the Rings. For a lot of Harry Potter, Voldy is background noise; he's the overarching megaplot, but the bulk of the pagetime is not devoted to the characters Fighting Voldemort. He takes up more of it as the series goes on, but the gang still spend much more of their time even in books 5 and 6 worried about stuff going on at their school which involves Voldemort by proxy than they do trying to directly confront him. Like, if you open up something like The Wheel of Time to a random page, most of the characters will probably be focused on fighting the Dark Lord or his minions or gaining power to do so, but if you open up Harry Potter to a random page (and don't get Book 7), most of the characters will probably be focused on this year's class and school drama. It's a story that includes a prophecy of a Chosen One destined to defeat a Dark Lord, but that's not the draw or where most of the narrative focus is.
