Hogwarts Legacy

I have thoughts about this game. 6,000 words of them.

World

To succeed, Legacy needs to make you feel that you’re at Hogwarts. Clearly the development team knew their lore and put some love into the project, because this is where the game shines.

Graphics

Note that I played the game on PS5 with the Balanced performance setting.

Like any modern release with a AAA development budget, the game is beautiful. You've seen the trailers. It has a consistent art style that, thankfully, doesn’t strive for hyper-realism. Landscapes are gorgeous and towns look populated and lively.

There is almost no pop-in, I noticed it exactly once during my play-through. I didn’t experience any frame drops or other performance issues.

Sound Design

The music fits the setting. Usually, I notice music only if it’s really good or really bad, and Legacy falls into the former category.

What I’m more impressed with is the sound of combat. The swishing of wands, the regular cadence of shouted spells in time with your button presses, and the effects of magic on your enemies and environment… I discuss combat later in this review, but the quality of the special effects is a large part of getting you in the flow state that works so well.

Level Design

Hogwarts is described as a large castle that’s easy to get lost in. Students who know the castle can get where they want quickly, but novices can get lost for hours. Every corner filled with oddness and delight. That philosophy is captured in Legacy in exquisite detail.

The castle has multiple sections with plenty of verticality. Each corridor is unique and there are puzzles, interesting conversations, moving paintings, and just general oddity everywhere you look.

One of the first things I did was turn off the objective marker and mini-map (all UI elements can be disabled). I tried to learn the castle and quickly found that I was getting lost in the labyrinth. Fortunately, there is an easy way to highlight your path to the next objective, and I believe the game would be almost unplayable to novices without it. Seeing the path wind its way through the complex environment gives you a sense of perspective on the scale of the castle. On the few occasions I did manage to navigate by myself, it felt like I’d done something genuinely impressive, like the feeling of solving a tricky puzzle.

Unfortunately, not all aspects of disabling the game UI work nearly as well. I attempted to play the game without the objective marker and found that not all the quests accurately communicated their objectives outside that prompt, which was rather disappointing. As an example, a professor said he was giving me an assignment. When I spoke to them again, I got a repeat of the previous conversation. I had to enable the objective prompt to find out what he wanted me to do.

Of course, Legacy also has areas outside of Hogwarts, such as Hogsmeade and the Forbidden Forrest. They’re faithfully reproduced in design but not interactivity. You can visit Zonko’s, but all you get are a few cute animations. If I didn’t know from reading the books how exciting the place was supposed to be, I never would have spared it a second thought. Similarly, you can’t even buy anything from Honeydukes. I’m more disappointed than I care to admit that I can’t buy Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans or collect chocolate frog cards. Although, I did notice that there is an (inaccessible) door to the Honeydukes basement, which gave me a nice chuckle.

Classes (think 'Charms', not 'Paladin')

The experience of attending class for the first time is captured in all its glory. Your very first Charms class is memorable, with interesting dialogue and a mini game to help you practice your new spell. It’s everything I wanted.

Learning new spells involves a short mini game practicing wand movement. It’s trivially easy after you’ve played it once, but it does the job of making learning appear like it takes a non-zero amount of effort (more on this later). More on crafting later, but I was disappointed that my first Potions class was little more than a short quick-time-event.

But it’s downhill from there. Legacy is not Persona; you will not be attending class on an even semi-regular schedule. You go to class to advance the story and that’s pretty much it. Hope you enjoyed your first classes because that’s really all you’re going to get. Most Harry Potter fans love the series mostly for Hogwarts and the student’s daily life. For a game whose selling point is Hogwarts, it tries to get you through the fun Hogwarts stuff as quickly as possible so it can focus on being a mediocre open-world RPG.

The Writing

Considering J.K. Rowling is the most successful author of our generation, I had reasonably high hopes for the story. The fact that video game stories have lower standards only heightened my hope that we would get some writing that stood out.

In a way, I was right. The story is bad, even by video game standards. When your wife, with no interest in literary analysis and barely paying attention, leans over and says "that story sounds bad", you know you have a real stinker.

Story

At what point does an homage stop being an homage and start being a rip-off? This reminds me of how The Force Awakens repeated the events of A New Hope, except worse.

Within the game's opening hours:

• Journey to Gringots on your way to Hogwarts, where you encounter the McMuffin.

Yes, I know it's "MacGuffin". I'm calling it a McMuffin because it's funny. Yes, I know you're annoyed. That's why it's funny.

• Fight (and defeat) a troll, far earlier than you should. Except it makes a lot less sense here. Harry's fight with a troll is due to desperation, in a secluded area, and succeeds by dumb luck. Your fight is due to... all the adults running away. While you're in a heavily populated area. Literally the most populated area.
• Break into the forbidden section of the library, where you're foiled by Peeves. If you're wondering if you get in trouble, that might have been interesting character development and obviously doesn't happen.

Main Character

You play a Mary Sue (or Gary Stu). You get to pick you own name, appearance, all the RPG stuff. You can even select your gender, independent of body type, for literally no reason. More on that later.

The timeline of the main character’s progression is so rapid that it beggars belief. You are admitted into Hogwarts in your fifth year, meaning that every one of your peers has at least four years of experience over you. By the end of your second day at school, you will be the best at every subject, have martial prowess openly compared aurors (Wizard special ops), and mysterious powers to top it all off. Most of those feats accomplished with a second-hand wand, established in Harry Potter lore to be a significant handicap. Of course, your power level only goes up from there.

Good characters are supposed to have flaws. The main character has none. Academically, you are the best at every class. The fact that everyone else has years more experience than you is simply not relevant. Of course, flaws don’t have to come in the form of academics. To take an example from Harry Potter lore, Hermione has few academic flaws (though she had some, such as never being as good at Harry at Defense Against the Dark Arts or outright walking out of Divination). Instead, Hermione mostly had emotional flaws: she was bossy, nosy, and pretentious. The main character has none of those pesky flaws, that would get in the way of being perfect. You are well-adjusted to the weirdness of the Wizarding World, friendly, helpful, kind, and a strong fighter. You are even polite to your elders, though there is hardly a reason to be, for you are smarter, wiser, stronger, and more capable than them.

Perhaps most telling, however, is that the main character is showered with praise at every opportunity. It’s not enough for you to be the best at everything, the game constantly reminds you of it. Teachers sing your praises. Classmates humiliated in comparison to your effortless mastery are nice to you and want to be your friend. No one ever calls you a know-it-all or says anything that could hurt your feelings.

I distinctly remember a moment in an early lesson. You have the opportunity to commit mischief. Of course, I did, because It seemed in character for my Slytherin avatar. "Why would I get in trouble? I'm a good girl." The professor actually caught me, and started giving me a lecture. Consequences for my actions? I love it!  But before he could get to the actual doling out of said consequences, he came to an abrupt halt and began praising me on the quality of my classwork. Talk about emotional whiplash. One moment I was about to actually have to answer for doing something shitty, the next the game handed me a cookie, told me I was great, and sent me on my way.

The conflict at the heart of the story is, tellingly, not triggered by anything the main character does. She is faultless in her own story. Everything that goes wrong is because bad men want to get her. The conflict isn't her problem, it's society's problem.

The rest of the story is a mystery surrounding the McMuffin. The mystery is, of course, something only Mary Sue can solve with her unique magical abilities, because she was born awesome.

Sidekicks

The Hogwarts experience requires accomplices, and Legacy gives you two recurring characters, though the game is mostly a solo experience. One is a white boy, the other a black girl.

Between them, there are many positive and negative traits, though they are not distributed evenly. If you, dear reader, were to guess who has the positive and who the negative, what would you pick? If you guessed the black girl has every positive trait and the white boy every negative, you'd be right. If you somehow didn’t guess that, welcome out from under the rock you've been living under this last decade.

The black girl is the only other character who has Mary Sue-like abilities to warp the world around her. She is also praised by everyone, at every opportunity. Also, she just happens to know how to use wandless magic. Why can she do this? Because she comes from a wizarding school (apparently the largest in the world) in Africa where everyone can do it. When this was revealed, I rolled my eyes so hard that I sprained my optic nerve.

This is a massive problem, because it completely breaks established Harry Potter lore. Why didn't Dumbledore use wandless magic to save himself? It must have been because he was a white man who never bothered to learn about the magic taught at the largest magical school in the world. Why didn't Voldemort use wandless magic when he couldn't hold a wand? Well, while on his travels learning all the magic the world had to offer, he forgot that Africa was on the map, and didn't think that African wandless magic was worth learning, because he was an ignorant white man. Why didn't book-worm Hermione learn wandless magic when she had to share her wand with Ron? Because she... listen, we all know why. It's because you were never supposed to be able to cast (or at the very least, control) magic without a wand. Rowling retconned it into canon to win social media points, not because it made any sense within the context of her existing story.

Side Quests

If the main story disappoints, games can often still be redeemed by the quality of their side content. Again, the writing disappoints. Side quests were boring, a substantial feat, considering that the setting is Hogwarts.

The only quest I actually remember was one set in the open world outside the castle. You talk to a woman who begs you to look into her son's disappearance since everyone else is too afraid. This is standard video game stuff, a quest that could have come from any number of open-world games. Except, it doesn't make sense in this game, because you're the equivalent of a high school student. No one thinks it's odd to send a high school student to investigate a possible murder.

What makes it especially frustrating is that quest could have been fixed so easily. Have the main character stumble upon the information, or overhear the mother asking someone else. As a theme, the writers completely forget the fact that you're a child whenever it's convenient.

Game Systems

Spells

You have up to four spells available to quick cast, the possibility of adding more "pages" of four slots to toggle between, and the ability to stop time at any point to swap out your available spells. They are used for utility and / or combat. Most spells lean towards combat.

Spells are based off the Harry Potter lore and do a surprisingly good job of being accurate in their effects (though I know enough about the lore to know that the wand movement animations are wrong). There is no mana / MP bar, instead each spell has a short cooldown. You also have a filler damage spell which has no cooldown.

Casting animations are gorgeous, special effects are on point, and seeing your character whip around with the occasional incantation feels right. Legacy gets full credit for making you feel like a badass.

Perhaps the thing Legacy does best is turning these spells from lore into useful and cohesive combat abilities. I recognized most of the spells, and they wove together seamlessly. There are some truly sick combos you can pull off by weaving immobilizing summoning and levitating charms with your other attacks. The system is free-form; you don't have to use specific spells in a particular order, but used cleverly, you can keep enemies helplessly airborne for a hilariously long time.

I feel that some of the utility spells could be better woven into exploration. For example, there is little reason to use Lumos, the flashlight spell, outside of the opening sequence. Overall, I think that the designers managed to stay true to the lore while designing a comprehensive set of player abilities.

Ancient Magic

Mary Sue has an amazing power, the ability to detect and wield ancient magic! What is ancient magic? It's like regular magic, but special, because only you can use it.

Imagine, with all the background of Harry Potter lore, if you were designing a super special set of magic powers, what would you pick? What incredible powers can you dream up for our protagonist?

Did you think of the ability to levitate objects? You know, like the very first spell Harry learns in the first book? (It's also one of the first spells you learn in this game) Well if you did, that's what ancient magic does. But wait! It also lets you see hidden magical things, you know, like one of the charms Hermione uses in book two? (It's the second spell you learn in this game)

But wait! In combat, ancient magic doesn't just let you do things that a wizard one week into their magical education can do, it also lets you summon bolts of lightning from the heavens! It's a totally unique idea that absolutely no game has ever used before.

It's just so... boring. The designers were not limited by any of the existing rules; they could have done anything. And what they came up with was lame.

In the interest of fairness, there was a single moment in the game where ancient magic pleasantly surprised me. I was fighting giant spiders and I used my one-hit-KO ancient magic power. Instead of summoning a lightning bolt, my character waved her wand at the spider, and it flew towards her, shrinking, until it landed, tiny, at her feet. She immediately squished it under her heel. It was such a perfect and unexpected result that I actually squealed in delight. This interaction happened exactly once in my play-through, and it was one of the highlights of the game. They should have done more stuff like that!

Enemy Variety

Harry Potter lore is filled with odd and interesting creatures. One only has to flip to one of the Harry's Care of Magical Creatures lessons to get reams of material for unique enemies. This makes the lack of enemy variety particularly disappointing.

The most common enemy varieties you'll fight are, in no particular order: humans, statues, and spiders. Humans are expected, no fault there. Giant spiders are, in all fairness, part of established lore, so it's hard to fault their presence; they are simply over-used. Statues are so mundane that it's hard to connect them to the source material. (Yes, Dumbledore used statues to fight Voldemort, but he was also actively controlling them)

There are some interesting and unique enemies. I particularly enjoyed the large frogs whose weakness was to levitate them by their tongues, that was cool! But for every neat enemy like that, you will fight a dozen enemies that could have been pulled from any other video game.

This is a direct point of comparison with other games in the open-world genre, and Legacy falls far short. Even Horizon: Zero Dawn, often criticized for its lack of enemy variety, had more enemy types, each with their own unique design, and each with more attacks and AI behaviors. Compared against the current king of open world games, Elden Ring, Legacy feels like it has all the variety of a Unity asset flip.

Boss variety is similarly lacking. They aren't particularly interesting to fight and have small move-sets. Once you recognize both of their moves, they are arguably easier to fight than normal encounters because you only have one of them to deal with.

Speaking of bosses, they have a critical flaw, one that game designs favoring status effects are particularly prone to falling into: bosses are immune to most forms of crowd control and therefore to most of your magical abilities. Again, I feel that someone didn't understand the point of designing bosses in the first place. Boss fights are supposed to be fun, the peak of a game's combat system, and an opportunity for your character to feel totally badass. Legacy delivers on none of this.

The last boss I fought was a giant statue (why bother making a unique enemy when you can just make an existing one bigger? Strike one). It had only two moves (strike two), both of them heavily telegraphed and easy to dodge. And it was immune to all but one of my spells (strike three). Wait for the attack, dodge, use my one damaging attack, repeat. By the time I wore down the hard difficulty's extended health pool, I was thoroughly bored. I refuse to believe that a professional game designer played that encounter and thought "this is fun". There is no excuse for bosses to be boring.

Difficulty

As of time of writing, no one really knows what all the difficulty options do in detail. I strongly suspect, however, that they are simply scaling your health and enemy damage.

I played the game on the hardest difficulty and it made combat tedious. Tough enemies become spell sponges, and you have to mercilessly exploit enemy weaknesses or it takes minutes to kill them.

There is basically no point in paying attention to your armor score. You die in 2 - 3 hits no matter what you do, so your corpse might as well look snazzy.

Most of the difficulty doesn't come from the game itself, but from some frustrating design choices:

• It’s got the Dark Souls 2 problem. Enemies will start their attack animation then teleport into perfect range for their attack. Did you roll away from the spider the moment in reared back? Too bad, it teleported to the spot where you stopped rolling, then lunged.
• Enemies will attack you when they're off-screen. This is partially mitigated by the presence of the incoming attack notification, which tells you that an attack is inbound and when it will land.
• This is the big one. The incoming attack notification doesn't work with multiple incoming attacks. Say you have two off-screen enemies and they decide to attack you one second apart. From your perspective, you see an attack, block it, then are immediately hit by the second attack you had no warning about.

Difficulty is almost entirely dependent on number of enemies. You need to use combos to do damage (combos are also fun!), but you have to constantly parry / dodge incoming attacks. This is reminiscent of how the Arkham or Shadow Of games work, except they are mostly with melee enemies, so it’s possible to kite and maneuver to a place where you can (briefly) fight one solo.

In Legacy, however, many enemies, particularly enemy witches and wizards, are ranged. One of the early quests is to fight three students simultaneously in a small room (before you have access to consumables, and you can’t use your one-hit-KO). I must have retried that fight fifty times. Your only strategy is to endlessly parry every single attack, taking pot shots when you can, occasionally taking unavoidable damage because of the attack notification issue.

Overall, combat works best when it's against one or two non-boss enemies. In those cases, the limitations largely cease to matter and the fun of the weaving spells into a massive improvised combo feels amazing. The rest of the time, against large groups, or boss enemies, you feel forced to play a battle of attrition, unable to use your most fun tools.

Stealth

Surprisingly, stealth is good. It's not as deep as stealth-focused games, but it's far better than the typical stealth gameplay bolted onto non-stealth games.

The core of stealth is the disillusionment charm, which makes you partially invisible. You move slower, but not agonizingly so. Enemies will warn with prominent visual markers when they are beginning to see through your stealth, and there's plenty of time to back off and try from a different angle.

Sneaking up behind enemies grants a massive advantage. I haven't unlocked the spell designed for this use case, but I'm a simple man: lighting them on fire while their back is turned is really all I need. Once combat starts, stealth stops working. After all, you aren't becoming invisible, merely less visible.

The result is that stealth feels like it has a good place in the game. It's a great tool when exploring dangerous areas or when entering combat. It's useful but not overpowered.

Gear

I hate this system so fucking much. Let me fill you in: You have a half-dozen gear slots. All of the items are visible on your character model (yay!). There is no glamour system / ability to customize your appearance independent of stats (boo).

You have 20 inventory slots. No, not 20 per slot, 20 total. And it's not even remotely close to enough. The majority of chest rewards in the game (and you will be drowning in them if you are even somewhat keen on exploring), give gear. You cannot pick up gear once you've maxed your personal inventory. Your choices are to either fast travel to Hogsmeade to sell (hope you were close to a fast travel point!) or discard one of your existing items, losing the amount of money you could have sold it for, and hope you pick up something better.

What if you like collecting outfits and want to save some of your favorites? Too fucking bad, from now until eternity, every time you pick up a chest, you get to spend a few minutes in your inventory menu, deciding which cosmetic is least pretty. There is apparently a way to increase your max inventory size, but after ten hours, I haven't encountered it yet.

There is no good reason for a limited-size inventory to exist. Having a limited inventory size doesn't force you to make interesting decisions (see Resident Evil), satisfy technical networking requirements (like in MMOs), or provide any gameplay whatsoever. Compare to how current open-world games handle cosmetic inventories: they don’t! God of War: Ragnarök , Horizon: Forbidden West, and Elden Ring all give you infinite (or effectively infinite) inventory space. This is a single-player game that, at least theoretically, wants you to be immersed in the world and having fun, not digging through  inventory menus. If the limit were removed entirely, the game would instantly be better.

Crafting / Potions

I remember well my first potions class. The professor walked through the recipe, and I was given a short series of quick time events. Simple stuff, impossible to fail. My character produced a brilliant potion on her first attempt, while those with years of potions experience floundered. Obviously. Then I got access to the crafting table.

Crafting is such a boring part of most open world games, but Harry Potter lore explodes with ways to make this mechanic fun and engaging. Personally, I like crafting, and love deep crafting systems (it’s one of the reason I love FFXIV so much). So exciting - the possibilities! Perhaps crafting would be a mini game, similar to the quick time events I'd just done to measure out exotic ingredients. Perhaps a callback to some of the trials Harry and the gang would one day endure in this very classroom! I selected my first potion, hit the craft button, and… disappointment below my lowest expectations.

“Wow,” I can hear you thinking, “What a letdown. The potion just appears in your inventory!?! That’s lame”. No, dear reader, that would be an upgrade from the existing system. Instead, we have crafting timers. 30 to 60 seconds of doing absolutely nothing. Like a fucking mobile game.

Some designer somewhere saw that items could take a certain amount of real-world time to craft and thought, "what a great idea! let's do that!”, without ever considering why such a system was designed - to frustrate you into paying for time skips. No, there aren't any time skips here.

“But!”, I’m sure you’re thinking. “Craft multiple potions!” And indeed, the potions classroom has multiple crafting tables. It would be repetitive inventory-based gameplay to juggle the crafting stations, but gameplay nonetheless. Nope! Only one crafting station actually works. The timer is short enough that you can do nothing during it, yet long enough that you start to wish you were doing something else, by which I mean, not playing Hogwarts Legacy.

Spending ten minutes doing literally nothing, waiting for my potion stock to replenish, was the largest quit moment of any game in recent memory. All pacing, excitement, and fun were thoroughly drained away. If the entire crafting system were to be ripped free, the game would be better for it.

Monetization

I almost left this section out, but given the state of AAA game development, and previous cash grabs with Harry Potter IP, credit where credit is due. There are no micro transactions. No loot boxes. No gatcha mechanics. No bullshit whatsoever. You simply get what you get what you pay for. Hallelujah!

The Reeeeeevolt

Discussing Hogwarts Legacy without bringing up the alphabet people is like discussing Star Wars Battlefront 2 without bringing up the loot boxes.

I feel for the trans activists boycotting this game. They are acting in accordance with their values, and I feel that I should do the same.

While they are responding to the personal beliefs of J.K. Rowling, I am going to respond to the art directly - what the game says. Moreover, I am going to skip over the sex politics entirely.

The Nature of Greatness

Hogwarts Legacy says that characters are great because they are born great. Ancient magic is possessed only by the good guys and the bad guys are of jealous of it. The central mystery revolves around a series of clues put in place under the belief that only those who were born with the power were of sufficient moral worth.

Consider the above in the context of the original Harry Potter books. Is it hard to imagine? It shouldn't be - this is how Salazar Slytherin saw magic. In Harry Potter, Salazar was a bad guy. Ironic that his exact same philosophy shows up, in the very same world, with only the word "ancient" in front of the word "magic", and suddenly the writers portray the ideology in a positive light.

Hard Work

Legacy tells us that hard work is for suckers. The main character is the best, immediately, with no effort.

If you do not succeed immediately, the only possibility is that you are one of the faceless masses who, regardless of the amount of effort you put in, will be ground into the dirt to inflate a special person's ego.

Did you train at dueling? Did you rise, over the course of years, to the top of an elite group of secret duelists, cultivating an extraordinary record? You will be soundly defeated by someone on the second day they raised a wand, because they're special and you aren't. (BTW, the character this happens to decides that they like the main character anyway, because being resented for their effortless power is just too much characterization for our dear Mary Sue)

Sacrifice

In Sorcerer's Stone, Harry and Ron get in trouble for fighting the troll. Ron had earlier said that "no one liked" Hermione, and they accidentally locked her in the girl's bathroom with the troll. Nevertheless, they risked life and limb to save her. Hermione, the teacher's pet, threw herself on the proverbial sword, knowing that she would receive a lesser punishment.

In one my favorite Simpsons episodes, (S03E18, Separate Vocations) Bart gets promoted to hall monitor, right as Lisa decides to become a bad girl. Lisa steals the teachers' edition textbooks, and when Bart discovers the books in her locker, they have a brief heart-to-heart. Lisa is about to be expelled, and understands how much of her future is at stake. Bart takes the blame, knowing that his recent spate of good work would let him stay at school, though losing his new-found and much-loved position.

The two stories teach a wonderful lesson. Sometimes, it is appropriate to take the blame for something you didn't do in order to spare someone else a worse punishment.

In the first few hours of Legacy, your sidekick is caught committing mischief. The main character, hidden, witnesses the following interaction. The sidekick is a known troublemaker and faces a tough punishment. The authority figure, seeing something off, asks your sidekick if anyone put him up to the mischief. In fact, the main character did exactly that. You are the one who asked for help. The music rises. What's about to happen?

Let's review the situation:

• Sidekick is about to face a tough punishment.
• Sidekick volunteered to commit this mischief only to help the main character.
• Main character is a model student and likely to face reduced consequences.

Bonus: Sidekick is the same person mentioned in the previous section, the one humiliated at your hand. They have every reason to dislike and rat on you.

But the sidekick doesn't, for some reason. They show loyalty to you and take the punishment themselves.

This is the perfect moment for a good sacrifice. The main character should return the loyalty by taking the punishment themself. It's morally consistent with the lessons shown above. In fact, it's even more appropriate because while Hermione and Bart actually were innocent, the main character is very much at fault for inciting the mischief in the first place. And, the risk is even greater for the punished party. Lisa was only about to be kicked out normal school. As we see with Hagrid, getting kicked out of Hogwarts is permanently life-ruining.

Sadly, the sacrifice never happens, and the music, cinematography, and writing all lead us to believe that this was a good thing. Sacrifice in Legacy is only good if it's made to the benefit of the Mary Sue.

Political Pandering

Imagine you walked into someone's home and found it a pigsty. Dirty clothes strewn over a dusty floor, junk piled everywhere, a horrid smell from a mountain of garbage. Then you walked into the bedroom and found a perfectly clean shelf, with a neat row of expensive dildos polished and ready for service. You might get the impression that the resident cared more for the dildos than for the rest of the house, and you'd be right.

Hogwarts Legacy is the dirty home. The mess of a story is shattered across the floor, repetitive, boring enemies and annoying combat mechanics are stacked to the ceiling, and the inventory & crafting systems are in the corner, emitting a truly horrendous odor. But there are no pronouns for your character. You can pick your character's sex, independent of body type, even though there are no pronouns, romances, or anywhere else it would be relevant. There is diverse representation by race and sexuality (blatantly at odds with the story's setting). The characters from "under-represented backgrounds" have virtues stacked upon them so they shine above their peers. Legacy hits every left-wing social agenda item.

The irony that this game is being lambasted for not being progressive enough, as it bends over backwards to appeal to its progressive audience, is hilarious. I had held out some hope that Harry Potter could retain a bit of its magic, but ever since Rowling retconned Dumbledore gay, nothing of quality has emerged from the Wizarding world.

All I wanted from Legacy was some escapism, and what I got was a game that reminded me on a regular interval that I'm not the target audience. In less than a month, I will be heading to Orlando, FL for my honeymoon, and we will not be stopping by Universal's Harry Potter theme park. Rowling and the stewards of the Wizarding world have decided which audience they want, and they deserve one another.

Conclusion

Hogwarts Legacy a wonderful dose of nostalgia for Potter fans. It's not a good game. Someone who isn't sensitive to bad story or game design will find plenty to love. Legacy is the best Harry Potter game ever made, and, on that basis alone, is worth recommending to fans.

However, judged as an open-world video game, it falls well short of the competition. As a thought experiment, I imagined Legacy stripped of its intellectual property and having to stand on its own feet. The result would be comparable to Forspoken, a good looking, terribly written, instantly forgettable title.

The poor system designs (multi-enemy combat, boss fights, crafting, gear) are too numerous and immersion-breaking. The story is terrible and the main character is the most obvious example of a Mary Sue I've ever seen, in any medium. If you have no attachment to Harry Potter, I see no reason why you’d play this instead of any of the other fantastic open world games of the last few years.

As a [former] Harry Potter fan, after ten hours of nostalgia, I had my fun but can no longer ignore the game's numerous faults. I'm off to put another hundred hours into FFXIV.