Growing up, I was what one would consider a mild-to-moderate Harry Potter fan. I was around eight years old when the first movie came out, but I didn't read the books or see any movies in theaters aside from the first, second, and last until I was an adult. Despite the controversy around J.K. Rowling and the volatile nature of virtually everyone who feels the need to vehemently simp for a self-conceited billionaire, I purchased Hogwarts Legacy anyway since carving your own path as a wizard/witch seemed enticing. I'll throw this disclaimer out there: I am pro-trans and left-leaning.

Simply put, Hogwarts Legacy is window dressing. The game lacks any natural substance and comes off as a storefront for later DLC releases, similar to other WB games. Once you take off the sepia-toned glasses of nostalgia, the game feels dated. The story is mediocre, laden with Obama-era liberal idealism befitting those between the ages of 18 to 22 during the early twenty-teens (coincidentally, the group of people most likely to have Potter-related tattoos). The gameplay is briefly fanciful yet repetitive (similar to Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, although with less reason to pursue varying combat styles absent of unrelenting spell-slinging). None of the choices you make matter in any meaningful way. The player character feels less like an actual student at Hogwarts and more like an observant exchange student.

The game is utterly lacking in dynamism. NPCs are wholly non-reactive, both in dialogue options and in general interactivity, the actions you commit and the choices you make have virtually no impact on the procession of the story, and despite a blatant misdirection of presenting this game as open-world with dynamic paths, the only thing open about the game is the map (although not too open since you can't travel to certain places before you've checked the arbitrary boxes the game has placed before you).

That said, the writing is the worst part of the game. None of the characters are particularly memorable or engaging, aside from that blind fellow with a laughable name (honestly, who names a child Ominis?). The cast of characters is somehow more diverse than the Hogwarts faculty and student body from the books, which take place 100 years after the events of Hogwarts Legacy. There's no questioning why the goblins are rebelling, just that they are, and they must be stopped. Some of the characters feel like they're written based on politics, like the Merlin researcher who informs you that she is married to another woman for no reason other than standard liberal brownie points or the inexplicable and poorly named trans character, Sirona.

Again, Obama-era liberal idealism is laden in every corner of this game, likely for a good reason, since Harry Potter stans tend to fall directly into that category. Combine that with J.K. Rowling's dance with the TERF community, and you appeal to both sides of the political spectrum. Like all who embody respectability politics, you're not alienating anyone. That's not to say those video game developers shouldn't walk on eggshells if they want to. Still, it certainly makes for a dull experience when they do.

For all intents and purposes, the game is below average. That's not to say I haven't enjoyed parts of it. The flying mechanics are great, and the game is visually appealing in a Norman Rockwell-Set-In-The-Wizarding-World way. Your eye is drawn to what you're familiar with, like the moon-backed silhouette of Hogwarts or the use of popular character surnames.

While I'll take the time to finish the game (mama didn't raise no quitter), I cannot recommend anyone buy it at full price. There's only a little value to be found beyond nostalgia. If you like that, fine. Go ahead and play it.

If you're looking for something beyond the surface in Hogwarts Legacy, you'll be disappointed because there is very little.

I haven't had my coffee yet this morning. So, disjointed brain dump ahead...

• The game feels really, really expensive. The world you roam around in is insanely, ridiculously well-crafted. Potter-heads will find a familiar new faithfully-recreated landmark about every 0.01 seconds.

• You won't see any familiar characters, aside from the ghosts in Hogwarts and a "Professor Weasley" who's a distant ancestor to the book/movie Weasleys.

• The story is mostly forgettable. Bad guy wants to do bad stuff; beat the bad guy.

• Spoken dialog, while well-performed, is mostly just characters blandly complimenting each other about how "brilliant" they are. The game does the whole Paragon/Renegade line-choices during dialog, but it never feels like your choices ever actually change anything.

• Combat is consistently fun, if perhaps a bit too easy on the default difficulty (especially once you start collecting the strangely-forgivable Unforgivable Curses). I finished the game at Level 36, and rarely ever needed to use any of the 20+ healing potions that were always in my inventory.

• There are 3 branching side quest storylines that were pretty interesting. Most other side quests are boring one-off fetch quests. These quests reminded me a lot of Final Fantasy 16's side quests; even to the point where I started skipping dialog for them just like in that game.

• In the front half of the game, the structure of many main quest tasks is a bit tedious. "Use these two potions at the same time, and then we'll let you progress or learn this new spell." Thankfully, this pattern goes away in the back half of the game.

• Loot is everywhere. You're practically wading in it through the whole game.

• The game has a certain degree of Ubisoft map barf. There are dozens & dozens of copy-pasted tasks like Merlin Trials & Astronomy Stations. There are seemingly hundreds of scrolls to find and locks to unlock for even more loot. You'll probably eventually wish for a Skyrim-style perk that lets you skip doing that lock-unlocking minigame over & over & over.

• And for all the controversy around it, this game was easily the most diverse and inclusive game I've ever played. It's not even a contest.

• I don't think you have to be a Potter-head to enjoy this game. it has a decent gameplay loop that's 75% really-fun and 25% kinda-tedious.

I could not for the life of me finish this game. I really really wanted to like it and I enjoyed the first few hours of gameplay. Especially the whole taming beasts aspect was something I was looking forward to because, if I would ever imagine myself at Hogwarts, I would be completely into magical beasts and learning everything about them.

But the story (so far) felt super bland to me. None of the characters seemed special or interesting to me, they all just sounded like copy pasted Harry Potters, Hermione Grangers or whatever other character that exists in the movies. I'm sure the story picks up halfway through but I just couldn't be bothered after 15 hours. All the little collectibles seemed cool at first (I'm a huge completionist so I was looking forward to grabbing them all) but traversing the castle was really annoying, I was often just walking in circles trying to find a specific spot because of a demiguise moon for example. Grabbing the field pages was quick and fun enough though. For the rest the open world felt pretty empty overall.

The combat was fun to me, but pretty hard if more than 3 enemies are locked on onto you, though maybe that was due to me using a keyboard instead of a controller. Though again, it wasn't enough for me to keep playing the game ultimately. I found myself skipping through the dialogue because all the lines were just bland filler honestly. I think what also doesn't help is that I'm not the biggest Harry Potter fan. I think if you know the world and the lore perfectly, the game is much more interesting than it is to me. I personally give this a 3/10 but if people feel like it should get a 7 I can understand why, it is just my opinion after all (don't come for me HP fans plz).

This is an awful game Now bear with me

This game would have been great if it came out in 2013 with a multiplayer option as a semi mmo and I would have loved it, but it came out in 2023.

The story is boring, the conversations with characters are bland and the world is unrefined (but that's the original creators fault). This is a 70-75 € game. If the game had every npc interactible and made every choice matter that would justify the pricetag.

Baldur's gate 3 costs 70 €.

I was planning to give it 2 stars bc it's at least playable, but in my playtrough the game crashed 3 times and I had 6 soft locking bugs where I was unable to pick up or interact with items needed for the story.

Also I really didn't like the fact that you can just walk away from an enemy after attacking them and they would just return to their starting position.

IDK, the game really just got on my nerves, and while I am fully angry at the fact that the worldbuilding sucks in the HP universe, I tried to look at it as of I liked it and critique the game on it's own.

The announcement of this game sparked excitement, yet skepticism lingered due to past Harry Potter-related games falling short of expectations. However, this open-world game managed to exceed expectations.

Graphic/Design ★★★★★
Exploring Hogwarts and its grounds in previous games pales in comparison to the immersive experience of a fully connected world in this game. The attention to detail and faithfulness to the books is commendable. Hogwarts Castle is breathtaking, teeming with life and surprises. While Hogsmeade and the surrounding highlands may seem less vibrant, they are still beautifully crafted. Character customization options could be expanded, and NPC character design could use improvement in potential sequels.

Story ★★★★✭
The main storyline, though somewhat predictable, remains engaging and seamlessly fits into the Harry Potter universe. Side quests delve into darker themes, providing unexpected twists and turns that captivated me. I was not anticipating quests such as "The Haunted Hogsmeade Shop" and the Hufflepuff quest centered around a murder mystery.

Gameplay ★★★★✭
The game's standout feature is its vast array of activities, from side quests to puzzles, magical creature encounters, and battles. The battle system surpasses previous Harry Potter games, offering a satisfying challenge once mastered. The open world strikes a harmonious balance, allowing players to immerse themselves fully. Even petting cats is possible.

Sound & Music ★★★✭☆
While the soundtrack complements the overall experience, it may not stand out as exceptional.

Overall Fun ★★★★★
For fans of the Harry Potter series, this game fulfills long-held desires for an immersive experience. However, even those less familiar with the franchise can appreciate the game as a well-crafted open-world adventure.

Final Score 4.5/5

A note: Everyone should be able to live and exist as the person they feel they are, and anyone who doesn't want people to be able to live that way are really wrong.

Also, if you've heard or repeated things about the game like, "The central plot of the game is that a bunch of hook nosed bankers - goblins - steal wizard children to use in their blood rituals", just know that that makes you sound, literally, like the people who said, "Harry Potter books teach children about Satanism." These two things happen, in their respective works, exactly as much as each other, which is to say, not at all. Literally. That is not the plot, even a little bit. The actual plot is that a specific Goblin learns about hidden magical artifacts that hold a destructive power, and that specific Goblin attempts to get that destructive power to use for himself to become the ruler of the world. Your character is bound up with this destructive power, for plot reasons, so in an attempt to get it, he's partially after you, and you must stop him from getting the world-ending power.

If you repeat this stuff in some attempt to discredit the game, it just makes you look stupid and ignorant, just like Christians looked when they talked about Harry Potter being Satanic. If anything, Hogwarts Legacy takes the Bridgerton approach to diversity, where it just doesn't care that it isn't "accurate" to have people of all walks of life, because it's more important to have positive, good portrayals of diverse people in works as large as this. I liked that a lot, personally.

With that out of the way -- the review:

Hogwarts Legacy has gotten a lot of calls as being “Mid”. Along certain axes, I think this makes a lot of sense. I write mostly about video games, and I think extraordinarily highly of them as a form of art, but my true love and favorite art form are theme parks. So allow me to draw a metaphor to my favorite form:

Hogwarts Legacy is a “mid” video game in the same way that Space Mountain at Disneyland is a “mid” roller coaster.

Looking at the stats and riding it with the lights on, Space Mountain is absolutely a “mid” roller coaster. Actually, more accurately, it’s a bad roller coaster, more akin to a carnival mouse style coaster than anything else, going slow, mostly straight, and with a majority of the turns in one direction. In the same way, Hogwarts Legacy follows the rote open-world design, which on the scatter plot of gameplay characteristics lands somewhere around the Batman Arkham Series, The Witcher, and Shadow of Mordor, with a little splash of Breath of the Wild tossed in for flavor. The story is linear with only minor choice regarding how much Dark Magic you decide to learn. It has a gear system that really drags it down.

But when you turn off the lights and turn on all the theming, when you walk through the queue filled with the Mission Control audio and trippy music, when all of this is layered on top of the frenetic sounds of the loading station and you feel the bass of the audio as your rocket is “charged” going up toward the lift hill, Space Mountain becomes something so much more than its mediocre layout. You’re speeding through space with the lights of stars swirling around you. The blinding flash of reentry disorients you right before you disembark, and you are left with the feeling of not a roller coaster so much as a wild and transportive experience.

So it is with Hogwarts Legacy. The pieces of Hogwarts Legacy that contribute to the feel of the thing work overtime in absolutely every capacity. The structure of the ride might be simple or even lackluster, but the artistic work is ultimately more than this single slice of the whole. Hogwarts Legacy must contain literally millions of individual pieces of art. In the first 8 hours of the game, I saw enough unique castle wall tapestries alone to be worth the price of admission. Absolutely every surface, every material, every object, every single thing you can look at with your eyeballs in this game looks like thousands of dollars was spent imagining it and executing it, with a better production design than any of the dozen-odd Harry Potter films. Were this any other game of any other intellectual property, or if we existed in any universe other than the one in which JK Rowling acts like this, the internet would not be able to shut up about the mount and dismount animations in this game, so unique and interesting they are. The raw feeling of inspired magic, the exact feeling that drew in and captured so many of us when all Harry Potter was was some books, suffuses this game. Even as I methodically checked off things to do on the open-world map, over the 64 hours it took me to reach 100% challenge completion, I was continually being surprised by new bits of magic and creativity in the world.

The story of Hogwarts Legacy follows a straightforward path and is somewhat underdone, but it is in the moment-to-moment beats that the story shows its potential. It feels like you are cozily living inside the magical world that was once only available to readers of the Harry Potter books. As you go on adventures, solve puzzles, and make friends with fellow Hogwarts students, you are transported into a world full of magic, wonder, and discovery, and it feels uncannily similar to the parts of the books where Harry, Ron, and Hermione would have their little side-adventures during the school year.

Creating and playing as your Hogwarts student is a joy, too. Rather than creating a character and spending the whole time staring through their eyes, never seeing them again outside your equipment screen (cough Bethesda), your character is constantly shown throughout the game during exploration and in dialog. This creates a stronger sense of connection with your character and the world around them, and makes the myriad cosmetics you find in the gear matter. I found myself constantly role-playing with my outfit, wearing my Ravenclaw uniform at school and making traveling and adventuring outfits for when I was exploring the Scottish Highlands.

(As an aside about Gear -- except for the cosmetics, I'd say the gear system is one of the major weak points of this game. Why do we still have gear systems that boil down to, "Equip the thing you picked up if the arrow is green, otherwise sell it"? Just up my stats immediately and have cosmetics be the only thing that matters about the gear. That is a more honest expression of what actually occurs in Destiny-style gear systems like this)

While the story is not the game's strongest aspect, it still manages to capture the feeling of the Harry Potter books in the moment-to-moment experiences, and I think that's what really matters. When I go and visit the Harry Potter theme parks at Universal Studios, any narrative element is limited to improv between myself and any of the cast working there, and I don't think any less of that experience for not providing me some kind film quality story. It would, however, be interesting to see a Hogwarts Legacy sequel that delves more into the choices and dialogue options, similar to Mass Effect or Dragon Age, which could further enhance the player's connection with the world and the characters.

The combat system in Hogwarts Legacy feels like a developed version of the Batman system, which is not a bad thing. There is more to the combat than meets the eye, as reading enemy descriptions can give you insight into their weaknesses and how to defeat them in cool ways. For example, by paying attention, you can turn enemy's spells back around on them, bury spiders' heads in the ground, or even use a troll's club against them.

Visually, the combat is stunning, with numerous particle effects that make each spell and attack feel impactful. However, the limited equippable spell sets can be somewhat frustrating until you figure out a good strategy for your personal style. Overall, the combat is enjoyable and adds to the immersive experience of the game. One thing that I found particularly lovable was how the spells work in meaningfully logical ways. It feels somewhat like Breath of the Wild, where there are systems that can be played with like fire, ice, attraction and repelling, and levitation, and these systems can be mixed and matched with each other to make interesting effects and solve puzzles.

One of the most creative aspects of Hogwarts Legacy is the Room of Requirement, which feels like a lighter version of Disney's Dreamlight Valley. It's genuinely impressive that you are allowed this level of creativity in a game suffused with such intense, almost excruciating detail. I feel like I can barely design a room that lives up to the design of the elements they give me to fill it with! It is clear that a lot of effort and care was put into every aspect of the game, from the character models to the environments to the music to the beasts that you can capture, breed, and play with.

However, with so many different aspects of the game to explore, it does feel like the developers may have spread themselves a little thin. In a potential sequel, it would be interesting to see the developers focus more on the things that really resonate with players and further refine the game's mechanics and design.

Like Space Mountain, whether or not all of this works in concert for you is going to depend on a lot of different factors. For someone like me, who finds the Wizarding World to be as compelling an aesthetic as space travel, who thinks that the most important thing a piece of art can be is “transportive”, Hogwarts Legacy satisfied me exquisitely. It makes me dream constantly about what the inevitable sequel will look like. And like Space Mountain, whether or not all of the individual parts of Hogwarts Legacy work perfectly is ultimately irrelevant when the overall experience is so enjoyable. Fans of the Harry Potter universe will appreciate the attention to detail and immersion into the magical world they love. And for those who are not familiar with the series, the game still can provide a fun and engaging experience, so long as they appreciate the aesthetic of wonder and mystical academia that defines Harry Potter.

Overall, Hogwarts Legacy manages to capture the spirit of the Harry Potter universe and offers a great adventure game for fans and newcomers alike. With its immersive world, enjoyable combat, and creative aspects, it is a wonderful achievement and hopefully a sign of even greater games in the future. Just as much as I hated Red Dead Redemption II because it's aesthetics and themes clashed so jarringly with my own taste, Hogwarts Legacy pleased me more than any other open-world game I've ever played.