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.
