How would you like to live out your fantasy as a student at the magical school of the Harry Potter universe? How would you like to learn to fly a broom around the school grounds and into the extended area beyond? How would you like to learn the different spells that allow you to fling objects across a classroom or set them on fire? How would you like to brew magical potions and grow their ingredients in your own private lair? Hogwarts Legacy is a game that sets out to offer you many of these scenarios and many more. I would say that it mostly succeeds in giving that sense of escapism while also managing to do a few other cool things.

The Short of It

What I’ve Played

30+ hours
Completion of the main storyline and >80% completion of the various optional challenges
The version available as of March 2023
Normal difficulty

Pros

Incredible amount of detail to the environment, characters, and creature designs pull you into the universe
Simple, but satisfying combat
Simple, but fun puzzles
An array of side-quests and challenges to keep you busy
Open-world environment is massive and encourages exploration
Loot adds variety to the customization of your character
Music is great and akin to the iconic Harry Potter films

Cons

Character customization options are a little weak in comparison to other big video games
Lack of more classroom, romance, or life-simulation scenarios is a missed opportunity
Would have been nice to have a few more friends to go with you on adventures, or a little more depth to the social interactions
Some really bad voice acting
Interactions with NPCs can feel a lot like an older game; a very uncanny valley experience
Same problem with most open-world games of fatigue as the game goes on with all the busy work

The Rest of It

Story

The game begins with your invitation to Hogwarts, the magical school of witchcraft and wizardry. You’re somewhat of a special witch/wizard in that you’re not starting at Hogwarts as a first-year student like Harry Potter did. Somehow, you’ve managed to escape notice until you’re old enough for the fifth year at the magical school. It’s an odd scenario, but the school was kind enough to send Professor Fig to mentor you over the summer and get you caught up on all the lessons you might have missed before school starts. It doesn’t take long for your new life in the magical world to get shaken up, however. While on your carriage ride to the school with Professor Fig, a dragon attacks your carriage and the two of you are transported to a mysterious location with a portkey that you discovered using special magic that no one else can see. Before you’ve even gotten to school, you’re already on a mysterious adventure and your character is impressing their mentor with their unique ability to see ancient forms of magic. Soon enough, you encounter the primary antagonist, Ranrok, a powerful goblin who is leading something of a goblin revolt in the magical world. He attacks, but you and Professor Fig manage to escape to Hogwarts, where more of the mysteries surrounding the ancient magic are waiting to be unlocked.

While I’ve seen it criticized as a little cliché, I don’t really have a problem with the fact that the protagonist has an ability that others don’t. Yeah, it’s not the newest idea for a video game story. I couldn’t tell you how many games I’ve played in which the protagonist is the “chosen one.” However, Hogwarts Legacy is very up-front with what its main intention is in how everything is presented. This is a power-fantasy for Harry Potter fans, meant to let players project themselves into the Wizarding World to explore it and escape to it. Wouldn’t you want to be the best and coolest wizard or witch in the West? When you consider that no other game has been made for the Harry Potter universe to this scale with the ability to create your own character, the “chosen one” storyline is hardly a knock against it, and the writers found ways to weave that more into the story and gameplay.

The fact that you are starting school as a fifth-year is tied into your special skills, suggesting that you’re something of a late bloomer when it comes to your magical ability and that this unique power might have affected that in some way. I think making you a fifth-year who hasn’t experienced too much of the magical world is a wise decision on the part of the developers because it allows the player to learn all the spells you should know already without impeding what you are expected to do as a student. The special ability also justifies the various quests that you embark on throughout the story as something no other student would be able or willing to do. If you wanted to be a boring, average student, I’d suggest playing the Sims and downloading some mods to live out that fantasy.

All that being said, I will concede that where the main plot inevitably goes is pretty predictable. Some characters inhabit archetypal roles and meet archetypal ends. Some characters turn evil and all of the events that lead up to this are very telegraphed. And a majority of the choices you make in dialogue sequences have little or no impact on what ultimately happens. I was not expecting a story that was going to throw me for a loop or be incredibly detailed and thought-provoking—as all the marketing for Hogwarts Legacy was mostly focused on just the world itself and what you could do in it—so I just didn’t expect much from it. If I knew someone like Any Hennig (project lead and writer for The Last of Us, Uncharted, & Soul Reaver trilogy) was driving the development, I might have felt differently if the story ended up the way it did.

But there’s more than the main storyline to follow. There are lots of side-quests scattered throughout the Hogwarts Valley ranging from protecting local fauna from poachers, to broom races, to criminal investigations. The storyline that is specifically tied to learning the dark arts is particularly interesting, as there is a fair amount of morality at stake in the decisions the characters are making. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s on the same level of detail and nuance as The Witcher 3, but the missions all do their part in helping you immerse yourself in the world. Like the Witcher, the world is big enough that I expect many new storylines and quests will be implemented later.

Gameplay

There’s a lot to do in Hogwarts Legacy. In fact, there’s too much to do in some ways. It is an open-world game by Avalanche Studios (known for other huge games like Mad Max and Just Cause) and the huge map is absolutely loaded with all sorts of activities and collectibles to find. Having just played and given up on Mad Max a few months ago from the open-world fatigue, I have to admit that the same feeling was starting to creep in with my time in Hogwarts Legacy, so I started to move through the story more and only play the game in small chunks as a time.

When you first get your chance to break away from the story and wander, it’s difficult to resist the temptation to just run around and explore Hogwarts immediately. There are numerous collectibles that require different spells to complete, as well as various puzzles to solve. They’re all relatively simple, and the world is pretty bloated with them in that you could be in the process of looking for a random page for your field guide and you stumble across two or three other puzzles in the process. Getting field guide pages in particular often give a small snippet of detail about the world, while also providing some experience points. I was already well into level 20 before I had learned half the beginner spells simply because I found the exploration so satisfying. In some regards, I think the experience point reward is a little too high as you can get very overpowered very quickly as a result.

In addition to the experience points for finding various collectibles or solving different puzzles, you’ll often receive gear rewards. Completing a certain number of challenges in your field guide nets you a cosmetic item that you can equip to your character, while many of the puzzles, dungeons, and enemy camps themselves have some armor you can equip. This is one of those games that has gear with different levels of rarity, as well as crafting methods to let you further improve them. It’s not something I’m ever really excited to see in a game, but it functions as a method to keep motivating you to explore more. For the most part, the stats of the items I found to be irrelevant, as I rarely felt like what I was wearing had much of an impact on my ability to stay alive in combat. The main reason to find more and more gear is mostly just so you can dress up your character in different outfits that either make them look cool or like a complete idiot.

As I mentioned, there is indeed some crafting in this game. It really shouldn’t come as a surprise when there’s a class at Hogwarts specifically for brewing potions, but there’s not that much to it. For the most part, you’re either brewing a select number of potions or upgrading your gear. There’s no mechanic in which you’re upgrading your wand with a sniper scope or crafting your own super spells. The potions you get and the various other consumables all have their benefits, however, other than your healing potions, they’re not essential when it comes to most combat encounters.

The combat, while not the most difficult, has a decent amount of depth to it that makes it satisfying, especially as your collection of spells increases. It’s not an overly complex combat system in the world like a Magika or Monster Hunter battle format in which you need to memorize certain button combinations to do particular moves. However, the rhythm of attacking and defending while also optimizing your damage against enemies is rather satisfying. The types of spells you get mostly consist of damage-causing or status effects. You can get upgrades to some that cause them to be area-effect spells, but for the most part, the functions of the spells are pretty straightforward. The role of status-effect spells like Levioso or Accio is to put the enemy in a stunned state in which you can cast your damaging spells. In the first combat encounter of the game, your mentor, Professor Fig, shows how certain spell combinations work well with each other. There are some enemies that are particularly weak to specific spells when used in combination with each other, such as the aggressive frog creatures that are quite tough unless you lift them up by their tongue at the right moment and cast the cutting spell.

In addition to your attacking, you’ll also need to do some defending. Taking a page out of the Batman: Arkham games and every other open-world game made by WB Games, an alert animation appears above your character’s head when an enemy is about to attack, allowing you to cast the Protego spell to deflect it or dodge the attack completely. Likewise, your enemies will also be protecting themselves with shields, which you’ll have to counter with the appropriate spell to break, or just use the Stupify spell over and over. If you don’t keep up with defending and dodging attacks from multiple enemies at once, your health does drop rather quickly, regardless of the difficulty level. That being said, the fact that you can instantly heal with your potions, use the other consumables in your inventory to level the playing field, or use the overly powerful ancient magic spells to instantly kill most enemies, it’s unlikely that you will find the Normal setting extremely challenging if you have played action games like this before.

All in all, the combat is very similar to other open-world experiences from WB Games. I would say that the Batman games are the best at being the most rewarding by giving you different tools and button combinations to make each encounter challenging and interesting in their own way. However, Hogwarts Legacy manages to be more accessible to a wider audience, while also being more complex than something like Mad Max with the ability to combine certain spells in the right situations. It’s not so engaging to make me want to jump into a fight at every opportunity, but the game also has some functional stealth mechanics that allow players to bypass most random encounters altogether.

Lastly, there’s the Room of Requirement. You get access to it a few hours into the game and acts as your personal Hogwarts dollhouse in which you can customize the interior with various items you can buy in shops or find out in the world. Most of the items are purely for decoration, but you can get potion stations, as well as planter boxes for the various ingredients you might need. The process of customizing the room and the objects within it is relatively easy and straightforward to use. As you progress further into the game, you’ll also get access to sections of the room that are specifically for housing the animals you find in the wild. Breeding and raising animals gets you more ingredients that you can then use to upgrade your gear in the Room of Requirement. I’m not one who cares much about customizing these sorts of rooms in a video game, but I can see why someone who does, or someone who just loves the Harry Potter universe, would get lost in the interior design opportunities.

Presentation

There are some real highs and lows when it comes to the overall presentation of Hogwarts Legacy. The peaks certainly overshadow the valleys, but when you encounter the low points, they stick out quite a bit. It’s like enjoying a fresh and delicious salad with the occasional speck of dirt attached to a spinach leaf that manages to ruin a bite or two. The overall meal is tasty and satisfying, but those bits of dirt definitely stand out when you encounter them.

First, the good. The world of Harry Potter is brought to life in excessive and impressive detail in Hogwarts Legacy. The open world is absolutely massive with tons of locales to explore, brimming with detail and personality that help make it feel like a fully realized version of J.K. Rowling’s vision for the Wizarding World. The Hogwarts Castle is huge with many different pathways and staircases that interconnect with each other, often crowded with other students of the school. The neighboring town of Hogsmeade is likewise filled with charm and detail in a way that makes you feel like you’re at a Harry Potter amusement park. Even the small hamlets that scatter the expansive map have their own level of polish to make the world more real and alive.

Regardless of where you are, it’s the small things that do the heavy lifting when it comes to animating the Wizarding World. The paintings within the castle and elsewhere all move. There are knight armor sets that come to life and duel with one another in a hallway—out of boredom of being a decoration for a hallway, I’m assuming. There are tea sets that float and shift on their own on small tables. The occasional ghost meandering by or the ghost couple that is having a row chasing each other through halls and other encounters all do a lot to add character to the world. Much more detail would likely be too much for my computer to handle.

There are some things about the detail I could nitpick, though. I think it would have been good to have more students of different ages and sizes in the school. A vast majority of them are around the same size as your character, so it feels like the school only has fifth-year students. The school also gets very empty at nighttime, which is accurate in that people wouldn’t be out and about, but all the beds in the dorms are empty. Obviously, these are small nitpicky flaws, but when you consider all the detail put into the world to make it feel more alive and consistent with the Harry Potter universe—down to small details like staircases that kick boys out of the girls’ dorm, which was from the books and not the movies—it’s curious that something like routines for the students and teachers would be overlooked. I’m assuming there was a decision made around technical limitations, but I don’t know.

Speaking of technical limitations, I imagine that is part of the reason why the characters themselves are a little hit-and-miss, including your own character. The character customization is quite limited for a game that is meant to be something of a means for you to project yourself into the Wizarding World. In creating your character, you select from a set of pre-designed faces, hairstyles, and voices. There’s a decent selection of hairstyles, but for some reason, only a few of them work with the various types of hats you can find. Considering how much gear you find with the unlimited number of hats, it’s perplexing that only a few of the hairstyles work.

Likewise, the faces and voices you choose have their own caveats. The faces are detailed enough to be very expressive during close-up conversations. However, I feel like there just aren’t quite enough methods to tweak the face more to make it truly customizable for the person who wants to escape to their magical fantasy. Likewise, there are only two voices to choose from: a feminine voice and a masculine one. The game has a slider to change the pitch to make it deeper or higher, but the modulation of the voice is very apparent and annoyed me whenever my character spoke for the first few hours. Your character talks a lot throughout the game with countless others, so I get why someone at Avalanche Studios decided to have only two voice actors for the protagonist, but the lack of choice was definitely disappointing.

Despite the faces being detailed, there were plenty of moments during interactions with NPCs where the uncanny valley took center stage and made everything feel dated in some respects. When I told one that their brother died to complete a quest and she started to cry, the face she made was not compelling. It was made worse by the fact that she cried for a moment and then snapped back upright with a neutral expression because the dialogue interaction sequence demanded that I still be able to ask her some extraneous questions or buy goods from her. There were plenty of other instances like this one where the movements of characters would be very odd and the interactions would feel like something out of Mass Effect: still fine at doing their job, but distractingly stiff.

However, there is nothing more distracting than the occasional bad voice actor. There are plenty of characters that you meet in passing who have annoying or odd voices that don’t really match the face. The winner of the Worst Voice Award goes to Mr. Moon, though. I do not know what sort of direction the actor was given when reading their lines, but the lack of animation from the characters in this game does not really allow for his somewhat flamboyant, over-the-top way of speaking.

As for things like the spells, creature designs, and animations, they’re all quite good. I didn’t play on the highest possible settings in my own playthrough, but I was able to admire the game’s lighting and shadows in others who had more powerful graphics cards. The way the spells look is cool, but there’s probably room for improvement in their appearance with more effects and dynamic colors. The Witcher 3 is a decade old, but just adding a few mods to it managed to make his small set of spells look amazing, so I expect similar possibilities when it comes to Hogwarts Legacy. A healthy modding community will be able to assist with my various nitpicks and gripes about the game’s overall presentation.

If there’s one thing I can’t fault in the game’s presentation, it’s the music. I think the music is superbly done with some great tunes that suit the situation. The battle music is perfectly good, but I especially like the songs that play when you’re just out exploring the world. It’s very much akin to the soundtrack of The Witcher 3 in that it never gets too overbearing, but it is able to evoke a little emotion as you explore. Even the theme for Hogsmeade is catchy enough that I never got tired of listening to it while I was in the town.

TL;DR

Hogwarts Legacy sets out to give players the chance to escape to the magical world of Harry Potter and mostly succeeds. The combat has enough complexity to stay engaging throughout the whole experience. The attention to detail makes the world rich and alive. Just exploring the massive world is entertaining on its own. There’s still plenty of room to grow with expansions and mods that will really let any Harry Potter fan fall deep into the fantasy, but it’s already a strong start. Even if you’re not a fan of the source material, Hogwarts Legacy has plenty to keep you entertained and is an easy recommendation.

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