I grew up during the right time to be a part of the Harry Potter craze of the early 2000s. I read through the books, watched the movies, and played the games all throughout grade school. While I kinda fell off the wagon after the final movie came out, I was interested in Hogwarts Legacy when it was announced. I just waited till I had a PS5 to try it out.
Starting this game up, I was curious how much of the Harry Potter movie material would make it into this game. Mainly if they would try to mimic the iconic music of the films or if they’d have to make it legally distinct. Luckily, since WB published this game, the music score does take cues from the movie soundtrack and the Hogwarts castle in-game mimics the one from the films with a few changes. Hogwarts Legacy, however, is set in the 1880s. That is one benefit of the Harry Potter universe. The wizarding world has always had this established look of being a bit out of time and archaic, so there’s not a huge shift in aesthetics from the 1880s to the 1990s. The only noticeable change is some of the civilian clothes being a little extra dated looking. Setting it 100 years prior to the Harry Potter saga lets the developers tell their own Wizarding World story that still closely resembles the Hogwarts we all know without having to deal with all of the lore around Harry & Voldemort. And I give the developers props for avoiding including a bunch of references to Harry Potter or shoehorning it into the plot. There are a few, understated and tasteful references to the Potter saga without being annoyingly “wink, wink, nod, nod”.
The gameplay is simple but engaging. Trying to balance all the different spells of the Wizarding World in your game is quite the task I imagine. You use R2 to ready your wand and you start off with four spells on a quick select you can cast, each mapped to a face button. As you level up, you unlock more quick select sets so you can switch between sets of four spells on the fly. In total, that gives you 16 spells you can switch between in combat. It keeps combat moving and makes you feel like a wizarding master as you switch in between different spells that have different effects depending on the enemy you’re fighting. You can also learn the Unforgivable Curses, which I was hoping would create a tradeoff for the player. Sure, they are very useful spells, but if you use them in front of another wizard maybe they’ll make a shocked remark or not trust you going forward, closing off certain paths. Unfortunately, this is one of those games that use spongier enemies to create ‘difficulty’. It led to a lot of the late game fights being endurance tests that quizzed you on how well you can dodge and block, especially since most of your spells had little to no effect on the tougher enemies. You have the option to avoid fights sometimes using a stealth mechanic in the game. Though it does confuse the game sometimes when I’d stealth around what is meant to be a combat encounter. Outside of combat, you can fly around on a broom, grow magical plants, brew potions, and solve puzzles in the world. The game has a dialogue choice system, but from what I could tell there’s no Mass Effect style choice/consequence system, you just get to choose the flavor of your response. There’s also a basic skill tree where you can upgrade your spells, potions, and general magic abilities.
You also get access to the Room of Requirements to use as your personal space you can customize to your heart’s content. It reminded me how much I really dig that dark academia style that Harry Potter excels at. I designed it to be a cool, moonlit, hangout spot full of dusty books and gothic architecture. Unfortunately, this game has a system for capturing and taking care of magical beasts, and this is done by having a bunch of different doors appear in the Room of Requirement for different habitats. It makes the main entrance hall look like a tacked together mess of conflicting styles that I don’t care for. I wasn’t interested in the beast caretaking content at all. It felt tacked on because they wanted to cover as many different parts of the Harry Potter world as they could. So, I had all these doors in the RoR that led to content I didn’t care about. I’d rather they found a way to work the customization aspects of the RoR into my House Common Room. Let me customize that space so I have a reason to spend more time there and give me more opportunities to engage with students from my house.
The story is where I feel the game falters. Basically, you’re a kid who starts Hogwarts as a 5th year, I imagine they made that choice because it’d be awkward playing through this story as a 10 year-old, who can use the super special ancient magic no one else can. As to what your character was doing before this, why weren’t they already attending Hogwarts, were they living a Muggle life, is all left unexplored, which to me makes the blank slate character a little too blank. I get for meta reasons you want the character to be experiencing Hogwarts for the first time just like the player is, but it still annoyed me I couldn’t at least pick from a list of backgrounds that might’ve given my character a little more flavor. Turns out the goblins are rebelling and you have to work with a Doc Brown type, Professor Fig, to stop them, while also discovering the history of your ancient magic powers. This also leads to you meeting the 4 original keepers of the ancient magic via their portraits. Because they give you the quests that progress the storyline, the developers had to come up with excuses for why you had to wait between each trial. In the writing, it makes the keepers come off as kinda pompous idiots stalling for time. In the end, you fight the goblin rebellion’s leader and save Hogwarts from the evil ancient magic. With how they tell the story, I never felt invested in any of these characters or plot points. It all felt very much like the writers just used tried and true storytelling cliches and we are just supposed to care about these characters beyond their surface level personalities. Professor Fig dies at the end of the game and there’s a wake for him in the great hall, but when the professors stand up to give speeches about how good a person he was, it rings hollow, because I never got much of a personality from him besides, a bit of a “kooky professor” vibe.
Poor characterization plagues this game. There’s a group of professors you take classes with, namely Charms, Herbology, DADA, & Potions. You get one or two interactions with them, enough to establish a general character trait, then you don’t see them at all unless you talk to them while exploring the castle. The headmaster, Headmaster Black, is the polar opposite of Dumbledore, which is nice they didn’t just make him “another Dumbledore type”. He’s remarked as being vain, uppity, & out of touch. The problem is that’s mostly all conveyed to us through “tell” not “show”. The few scenes he’s in, he’s a bit pompous, but nothing egregious. Black is also voiced by Simon Pegg, the biggest name in the cast, so I imagine they didn’t have a lot of time to record with him.
The goblin leader, Ranrok, is just “the big, scary bad guy”. I want to avoid re-opening the can of worms that was cracked opened at this game’s release as much as I can, but not giving more characterization to your main bad guy and his rebellion made me feel a bit “off” trying to stop him. Like, Ranrok claims he’s rebelling against the wizardkind that’s oppressed the goblin people and wants to reclaim goblin property. That seems like a legitimate cause, the only reason given to why we have to stop him is “because he’s evil”. I can respect a game that goes against the “plucky rebels” trope that I think is overused; history has proven rebellions are rarely led by a group of ragtag do-gooders. But we need more info on Ranrok’s rebellion besides they want goblins treated as equals, which shouldn’t be something we as players would want to stop. Maybe the rebellion is like the South during the American Civil War in that they are rebelling to keep a practice that’s outdated and inhumane, maybe we see Ranrok using tactics that are barbaric and indiscriminate, or we learn that he’s only paying lip service to wanting goblin equality, but is really just trying to set himself up as a king. That last one I think the game hints at, but again the story is so surface level. And I realize, it’s Harry Potter, the stories have always had the premise of good vs evil, but you need to add more nuance if you’re applying that to a story about stamping out a rebellion.
You also have several side quests they run parallel to the main story. These involve you helping out a fellow Hogwarts student with their mission. Again, these fall flat, mostly, due to bland characters. There was a main mission early on where you can pick a friend to take with you to Hogsmeade. I thought this meant we’d have that option with future quests, but no. I’m not saying they needed to make it a BioWare-esque system where you choose two companions to take with you, but having an option to interact with them more outside of their side quests was sorely needed. I want to go on adventures with my classmates, not a professor. One plot has you helping Poppy the Hufflepuff to save some animals from poachers, another is helping Natsai the Gryffindor take down a wizard crime boss. I think the problem is, it’s always just you and them on any mission you partake with them and they never show up in any other story missions. They never felt like they were my most trusted friends, just some quest givers I visited occasionally. The one exception to that is the Slytherin student quest line. Here you are helping Sebastian to heal his sister of a particularly nasty curse. Over the course of his missions, you are usually with Sebastian and another Slytherin, Ominis. You both watch as Sebastian becomes more desperate to heal his sister, resorting to dark magic to find a cure. Since there’s more people involved in his story to work off of, you get more characterization and I felt more invested in this story of trying to help a friend, then attempting to pull him back from the brink, than I did in the main story line helping the stuffy keepers.
I also may’ve had the wrong expectations going into this game. I was hoping for something of a Hogwarts Simulator. Sure, you can still have your main adventure plotline, but I wanted to also worry about attending classes, winning house points, making friends, etc. I was hoping for something like Bully, where I’d have a class schedule I’d have to keep while doing my extracurricular activities. Build a rapport with my friends, maybe have a romance option where instead of a fade to black, because they are children, it culminates in sharing a first kiss. There were some dialogues that felt like my character was awkwardly flirting with Natsai in the way high schoolers do. The world map includes both the school of Hogwarts, the village of Hogsmeade, and a large swath of the surrounding area, including lots of little villages. Most of the quests take you out into the surrounding area & I barely set foot in Hogwarts after the first act. I think the game was trying to have its cake and eat it. There was a moment during a quest in Hogsmeade that I thought, “Hey a game set in the Wizarding World where you play as just a wizard in the wider world, not a Hogwarts student, could work.” Either give me that or a Hogwarts adventure, don’t try to do both. I think they could’ve cut the map in half. Keep a few villages and countryside to put your goblin rebels but make most of the game focus on the castle of Hogwarts, the Forbidden Forest, & Hogsmeade.
When the game does do the standard Hogwarts stuff, it nails it. The first act was by far my favorite. You get to sit through the Sorting Ceremony, explore the castle, attend classes, study for your OWLS, fly a broom, learn “flick and swish” for Wingardem Leviosa. Playing through those moments brought back warm memories I thought long dead and gone of just the pure joy I had watching the Harry Potter films. When I got on a broom for the first time and the game played the big swelling orchestral score, I had a big dumb smile on my face and I got a little teary eyed. I forgot just how much of a Potterhead I used to be. I remembered all the House ghosts, recognized the hallway to the Potions class from the film, and remembered some of the stories of the artifacts hanging around the school. I wanted the game to capitalize on that. My favorite Harry Potter book/film is Chamber of Secrets, because I liked that it was still set in the school, doing your normal school stuff, but you also had to solve a mystery. The game also ends with the awarding of the House Cup, and that did bring back some of that childhood nostalgia and whimsy, but it would’ve meant more if I actually had to earn points throughout the game. The game also doesn’t feature Quidditch. I don’t know if they just ran out of time, couldn’t make it work with their broom control, or removed it to encourage people to buy Harry Potter Quidditch Legends instead, but I did miss its inclusion to add one more thing to that Hogwarts experience.
All in all, Hogwarts Legacy had potential that I feel got squandered. The first act brought back a lot of that nostalgia for me as I explored Hogwarts, but missions constantly pulling me away from the school, poor character development, and a by-the-books unambitious story slowly started taking their toll on me. Exploring Hogwarts was a treat as I recognized locations and people from the books and films, and the magic system is handled well. If you were someone who grew up with Harry Potter or enjoy the Wizarding World, I can recommend this game at a sale price because your mileage may vary.
