Hogwarts Legacy Review
In the 40-plus hours, I spent charming, flying, and cursing my way through Hogwarts Legacy, I encountered bland enemy design, repetitive combat, and a lack of RPG elements. However, at its core Hogwarts Legacy is a worthwhile and fun open-world action-adventure game worthy of your time, especially if you are already a fan of the Wizarding world.
Before I get into any more of the specifics of the game itself, I feel the need to address the elephant in the room surrounding this game and its world creator J.K. Rowling. Much like Cthulhu creator H.P. Lovecraft was an author with reprehensible views, J.K. Rowling has been embroiled in a culture war regarding her statements about the trans community. I disagree with Ms. Rowling’s stance on trans women or the trans community. I also think it’s wrong to villainize an entire game, its development team, and its fans for the beliefs of one person involved in the creation of the game. Trans lives matter. Trans rights matter and trans women are women. Moving on, let’s discuss the parts of Hogwarts Legacy that impressed me as both a longtime HP fan and a video game fan.
From the outset of my journey, I was grinning from ear to ear. I have been itching to play a game like Hogwarts Legacy since the days of GameCube. I grew up reading Harry Potter and watching the movies, so seeing Hogwarts so faithfully recreated in such grand detail had me stopping my adventure mid-quest to take in the scenery. Unfortunately, most of what you see in the game, however beautifully rendered, is not interactable. The paintings on the walls move, but you can’t speak to them. House Elves aparate out of a room whenever you enter one, and there isn’t a set school schedule like in the Persona Series games. I felt like a Hogwarts student in name and name alone. The school part of the game takes a backseat to the action part and as someone who loves a good life sim game, I was disappointed that I didn’t have to worry about being late to potions class or actually having to take an exam or two. With games like Yakuza: Like a Dragon having literal college quiz minigames you’d think a game that takes place in a school would care more about letting players emulate the Hogwarts student experience. You can speak to other students, but only specific ones who give you quests, which becomes the only reason to talk to your classmates outside of classes. I wish there was a larger emphasis placed on the relationships between students because that was such an integral part of the Hogwarts experience in the books and films.
After creating your witch or wizard (non-gender specific) you meet Professor Fig who serves as your guide and mentor throughout your adventure. Once you get through a brief tutorial and an introduction to basic spell casting, you arrive at your sorting hat ceremony at Hogwarts. The game allows you to choose the house you wish to join, but there is a way to let the hat choose for you if you are unsure or just want to be sorted based on your personality. Each house has a unique common room and dorms for students to explore, but aside from a single chest to open later in your adventure, there isn’t a reason to venture into your common rooms. There are no vendors there, and you can’t sleep in your bed or study for exams in the dorms. Again, the castle looks more alive than it is in terms of interaction. The same cannot be said for nearby Hogsmeade Village and the room of requirement which are two locations I spent a considerable amount of time during my playthrough.
Hogsmeade is a short walk or eventually broom flight away from Hogwarts and students travel there freely to get school supplies and other consumables to help them on their journey. In the early hours of the game, I found myself traveling to Hogsmeade quite often. I couldn’t yet craft, grow, or breed the various materials I needed so I had to buy them using gold I accumulated on my adventure. The loop of going on a mission, obtaining rewards, then heading to Hogsmeade to buy more supplies was a natural rhythm I fell into early on. As I progressed, however, I found myself frequenting Hogsmeade less as my room of requirement grew to better suit my needs.
Once unlocked the room of requirement serves as a home base for your Hogwarts hero. While initially confined to one room with limited crafting recipes, with some upgrades you can have up to three full rooms filled with potions, plants, and enough furniture and wall art to make even the most hardcore Animal Crossing fan envious. The coolest aspect of your room of requirement is the areas that allow players to breed and interact with various magical beasts. Beasts provide your hero with different materials which can be used to improve the stats of your equipped gear as well as to create new enchantments for your clothing items. I liked the ability to change the perks on each clothing item individually, but the cost of each perk and their respective bonuses seemed mostly irrelevant due to the lack of difficulty throughout most of the game. There is a lot more depth to the magical beasts than what I’m willing to say in this review and in fact, one of my favorite parts of the game came from interacting with different beasts and I don’t want to spoil too much for those who haven’t played yet.
Beyond Hogsmeade and the Room of Requirement, most of your time will be spent in classes, working on assignments for your professors, and taking on story quests that advance the main plot. I finished every optional assignment and most of the side quests before completing the main story and this made most of the story missions very easy. The game supplies you with a plethora of tools to dispatch your enemies, but my dedication to my studies meant that even as a new 5th year, I was casting charms at baddies with the best of them before too long. Slinging spells at enemies is what you’ll be doing when you’re not in classes and although it can be overwhelming at first, after a few hours of practice I felt comfortable with combat in Hogwarts Legacy.
Each of your spells takes up a section of your spell-casting grid which is permanently situated in the bottom right corner of your screen. A press of the right trigger will cast a basic spell that has no cooldown and does little damage, conversely holding down the left trigger will prep a spell and a press of the corresponding face button will execute it. Basic spells are used to string together attack chains punctuated with harder-hitting spells and charms with individual cooldowns that you’ll need to juggle. The freedom to change the position of spells at any time was a genius idea as I quickly found myself tailoring my spell loadout to suit the needs of the task at hand. Once I unlocked all the charms and spells in the game (unforgivable curses excluded) I was able to customize a spell-casting grid that made sense for me and allowed me to pull off combos and dispatch my enemies in visually impressive and creative ways. The combat is a bit bland, but the spell interactions with enemies are excellent. Most enemies can be defeated by repeatedly hitting them with spells, but exploiting an enemy’s weakness is the fastest path to victory. For example, early on in your adventure, you learn the levioso charm which can be used to levitate objects in the world. In combat, this allows you to lift your opponent skyward and follow up with a combo to defeat them. I appreciate how combat became a dance of precise spellcasting and timing instead of a button-mashing mess. Casting spells feels good in Hogwarts Legacy, I just wish that the enemies on the receiving ends of those spells were more interesting.
Players will spend most of their time fighting spiders, goblins, dark wizards, and a small number of magical beasts. Apart from a few boss fights the enemy variety is underwhelming. In a game with such rich lore to pull from I wanted there to be more interesting enemy types. I found myself crutching a few spells that did reliable damage to most enemies and would switch to situationally applicable spells to dispatch foes quickly or break an opponent’s shield. Once you learn the spells needed to defeat enemies more quickly, combat becomes a chore. It was also unsettling to see a 16-year-old student take the life of a goblin or dark wizard. I hoped that the story would help to contextualize some of this violence and make me feel that it was necessary, but the story was one of the least impressive parts of Hogwarts Legacy.
As a new 5th-year student who can see and manipulate ancient traces of magic not seen for centuries, your experience at Hogwarts is more unconventional than that of your fellow students. Strangely, we don’t learn anything about the player characters’ family, or life before Hogwarts. The first scene with your character in it, sees them standing in an alley with Professor Fig. At least in the Pokémon games you have a mother who wishes you well before sending you off with a strange old man on a life-threatening quest. In a game so fixated on letting each person live out their own Hogwarts adventure, the game did not seem to take my actions or dialogue choices into account.
Since I chose Slytherin as my house I was quickly introduced to fellow student Sebastian. I did not like Sebastian at the beginning of the game and my opinion of him did not change by the end. He’s a poorly-written character with a singular, naive motive, which would be fine were it the only issue. Alas, it seemed nothing my character did to intervene with Sebastian’s story made any bit of difference. There are a few moments where your actions allow you to learn a new spell or two, but Sebastian’s fate and the player’s involvement are both almost entirely preordained. I wanted to be able to shape my time in Hogwarts Legacy around my character and see the effect they had on the world, but unfortunately, most of what I experienced is likely to be what most other players experienced. Each house has a unique questline for students to complete, but aside from that and the colors of your robes, there isn’t much narrative difference in playing a mean-spirited Slytherin or a loyal Hufflepuff.
On its surface, Hogwarts Legacy looks like a much more impressive game than it is. Don’t get me wrong, I still think it is a fine game, but I can’t recommend it to those who want to play a deep RPG or a game with a compelling and interesting story. However, if you are a fan of the source material or just want to play out your every fantasy as a Hogwarts student there is absolutely no better way to experience the wizarding world than by playing Hogwarts Legacy.