This is a problematic game. The whole Harry Potter franchise is problematic these days because of its bigoted creator. I won’t pretend that I understand or am able to convey all the intricacies around JKR, so if you want to deep dive into that I refer you to ContraPoints video on The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling.
Maybe it is wrong of me to buy this game as JKR will earn royalty on its sale. Maybe it’s even more wrong of me to write about it, but I’m a firm believer that its better to speak up than trying to silence anything to death. So I’ve played this game to the end and I have some things to say about it.
This is a problematic game.
The Harry Potter universe has problems with subtle racism. Like the fact that the only asian character is called Cho Chang, and the goblins are portrayed with every racist stereotype of jews there ever has been. Kind of saying that goblins are jews without saying that goblins are jews.
In this game goblins are the evil entity that wants to control the world and destroy wizard kind. In the movies, goblins are a stern people, but still characterised. Here they have been reduced to evil villains. They are so evil that they shouldn’t be considered people. Actually it is totally okay for you to kill them. Kill them in hordes. Why not give you points and rewards for killing as many goblins as possible? This is what this game does.
One weird thing is that the developers have gotten some kind of instruction that they need to adress the bigotry of JKR so they have given the cast of Hogwarts Legacy a palette of diversity and they’ve included a weirdly trans bartender into the mix. Not weird because they’re trans but weird because it doesn’t fit. It’s like they’ve added those things without understanding them.
You get points and rewards for killing more than goblins. Kill 70 dark wizards and get a scarf. Yes, for real. I’m not sure why you get a scarf or who gives it to you. It just appears in your inventory. I can’t remember Harry Potter having much of killing. When someone got killed it was a huge deal. In this game killing is encouraged. I would prefer it if you could play the game as a pacifist and just knock out your opponents if you wanted to.
Another enemy type in this game are poachers that are out in the woods hunting magical animals for their skins and feathers. It’s incredible how many poachers there can be in such a small world. Your solution to this problem, and kind of a mini game, is to kill the poachers and capture the animals. Capture them and bring them to your own little zoo. If you capture one of each gender you can even breed them. The game portrays this as rescuing the animals, but I’m not sure that locking them in and forcing them to breed is a rescue.
Let’s talk about the gameplay. It is very noticeable that this game was developed for PC and ported to console. There is a cursor that you need to move around to press buttons. In order to support casting more than 4 spells at the time, you unlock spell slots and these you select by holding R2 pressing the D-pad, then R2 again and your spell. Try to do that while in a fight. The control scheme is so complicated I often cast a completely different spell than I intended to.
The story is okay. It is kind of what you expect from an Harry Potter game. There is no twist or turn. Everything that the story say is going to happen, will happen. The writing is really bad. The dialoge is boring and sometimes cringe, and the voice acting isn’t helping. Some of the voice actors are good, but my protagonist was really irritating to listen to. The dialog choices makes a point of having one Gryffindor choice and one Slythirin choice but all the dialogue between the choices are always of the good kind. As I was playing as Slytherin it got weird when my character was really heart warming and caring in one line and selfish and power hungry in the next. Almost like she had a split personality.
The game doesn’t have much imagination of itself. It is of course fan service and every element from Harry Potter is somewhat in this game, but there is nothing much happening that wasn’t a part of Harry Potter. Like the Star Wars game I played recently, the game doesn’t dare to expand on the universe. That is a missed opportunity to tell a really great new story in the Harry Potter universe.
The game is too long. The bosses are totally uninteresting and have too high health pool. It didn’t have a proper ending and the game spend too much time on introduction (10 hours) before it starts getting interesting.
Ranting aside, what did this game do well?
The world building and design is on point. Hogwarts is very lovingly crafted and every nook and cranny contains something interesting to look at. You could almost use the game as a guided tour of Hogwarts. It’s that good.
The clothes that you pickup for your character are also excellent. I just wish they’ve made more of them, because after a while they start repeating themselves. But the scarves, the hats, and the dresses. I just wish I had them in real life, they look so good.
The game looks very good on PS5 and it runs very smoothly. I only had one crash which wasn’t a problem as I only lost 1 minute of gameplay. Flying around on your brooms is quite exciting.
I was entertained while playing it. Some games can really bore me, but this kept my interest despite all its flaws. I’m not going to reach for the “true ending”.
I rate this game as OKAY.
Replay 