Hogwarts Legacy: The “I Beat It!” Review

We discussed the political and culture war issues swirling around the game here, my initial impressions are here, and I explained how I was looking at the game while I was playing it here and here.

The basic take I had on the game was that there were three kinds of players who were likely to buy this game first thing:

1. The guy who was never really into Harry Potter (or even completely unfamiliar) but bought the game because it’s a fairly well-reviewed AAA title that sold one bajillion copies (this article from March 13 said that Hogwarts Legacy had sold 12 million copies since its release date on February 10th).
2. The guy who was kinda into Harry Potter saw the movies (maybe read the books, maybe) but wasn’t, you know, *OBSESSED* with it.
3. The guy who *WAS* obsessed with it. Took the “Which House Would You Get Sorted Into?” quizzes. Went to the Wizarding World at Universal Studios. Went there. Did that. Bought the T-Shirt.

My take was that the guy #1 didn’t manage to slog through the game but guys #2 and #3 played it to the end. Well, *I* finally played it through to the end and have more thoughts about it.

Let me begin by saying that if you have warmth for the Harry Potter universe that takes place in Magical Britain, you will enjoy this game. Maybe don’t pay full price if you’re not really into the whole video game thing because some parts of the game are downright difficult… but if you love Hogwarts, you’re going to love the game. With that behind us, I’m going to give some minor rants about the bad stuff and that’s going to involve talking about spoilery stuff.

The game has a *TON* of filler. Holy crap. There is a *TON*.

I mentioned that when I first saw how much stuff there was to collect that I giggled in anticipation? Welp, that didn’t last long. Here’s where I started:

And here’s where I said “Well, that’s enough of *THAT*”:

When it comes to the various numbers and percentages, here’s what I got:

Seriously, they put so much *FILLER* in there that I just pooped out. Eh, the wizarding world can take care of itself. I mean, do I *REALLY* need to find *EVERY SINGLE* page for my book at Hogwarts? Do I *REALLY* need to find every single pair of glasses that’s out there? We went well beyond stuff like “round vs. hexagonal frames” into the “goofy eyes glasses” territory. Do I need to find every single hat out there? Even the goofy medieval ones?

And that gets us into the ludonarrative dissonance the game throws you into.

You want to find all of the hats out there? Well, you get quite a few of your articles of clothing by breaking into the houses of good, honest denizens of Magical Britain and taking their stuff. Need a nightcap? Just steal it! Pick up the gold that they’re leaving on the counter as well. There are also nice little classy wand handles for your magical wand. Don’t just hold your wand like some kind of jerk! Put it into a wand holder and enjoy how the wand will work just as well even though you’re not even pretending to touch it anymore. The best ones are in the sleeping quarters of your various professors so you’ll want to break into their bedrooms and take the stuff that they’ve just got lying around in there too. Read their mail while you’re in there! How else might you get backstory?

On top of that, you not only fight Dark Wizards, you kill Dark Wizards. Like, dozens and dozens of them. I have killed more than 100 dark wizards. Some of them were poachers, some of them were henchmen but all of them were people who you could kill without remorse.

And now we’re going to get into spoiler territory.

Heck, as you play the game and do the side-quests, you’re going to find that one of your classmates comes from a family of unsavory dark wizards. Unrepentant, no less. While you are out and about fighting the dark wizards, the possibility that you kill this classmate’s parents is *NON-ZERO*. But does that slow you down? Does that make you think “maybe I shouldn’t be so enthusiastic about making this guy die screaming”? Nope. Set him on fire! Heck, cast Crucio on him. Cast the Killing Curse! There’s no downside. When people are bad, you can kill them.

Here’s the official numbers as of March 10th:

Merlin's beard! An enormous THANK YOU to everyone who has shared in the magic of Hogwarts Legacy. pic.twitter.com/492oQNBt9X

— Hogwarts Legacy (@HogwartsLegacy) March 10, 2023

2.25 *BILLION* with a *B* dark wizards have been killed. The tweet says “defeated” but, seriously, you’re killing them. You know what the population of the planet was in 1900? 1.6 Billion people. There have been more dark wizards killed than people existed on the planet at the time this game is set.

Seriously, that right there tells me “this is not a game for pre-teens and maybe a couple of years of teenagers now that I think about it.”

I mean, if they had the bad guys you were fighting yell something like “oh no! I’m off to Saint Mungo’s!”, that’d be one thing. There are some *VERY* nasty named bad guys that you go up against and, maybe, I could see how they establish that there’s only one way to take these guys down and that involves killing them. But you’re running around just killing dark wizards willy-nilly.

And that’s messed up.

I thought it was a game about going to Hogwarts and, instead, you’re playing someone as cold as Mad-Eye Moody. Heck, I don’t know how many dark wizards Mad-Eye killed but I don’t see how he could plausibly have killed more than I have.

More than that, the people you’re fighting are, seriously, unimpressed by how many of their comrades you’ve dispatched. Even after I killed all of the named bad guys, these low-level scrubs saw me and yelled stuff like “you’re going to pay for that!” and charged. Exceptionally bold criminals. You’d think that a very good chunk of them might have said “there’s this fifth year out there that is cutting through poachers like a hot knife through butter. Maybe we should hang out in Ireland for a month?”

This would allow me to run around and do some of the 95 (!) Merlin Trials that the game has just sitting there on the map. I did, I dunno, 50 of them? Of which there are only 6 distinct kinds? Hoo, boy. That was a *CHORE* running around the map and finding a trial and doing it… then riding over to the next one 100 yards away… and then the next and then the next and then the next.

“Jeez, Jaybird”, I hear you say. “You’ve talked a lot about running around killing dark wizards and running around doing Merlin trials but you haven’t really talked about doing stuff at Hogwarts.”

YEAH I KNOW!

The game shouldn’t have been called “Hogwarts Legacy”, it should have been called “The Environs of Hogwarts and the Associated Legacy”. I spent two to three times as much time in the Forbidden Forest as I did on school grounds. And much of that time was just the grind of killing dark wizards, doing Merlin Trials, or visiting lovely little hamlets in the countryside and breaking into the houses there and stealing pajamas.

However, the game did this intermittent reward thing where you’d run off and do 10 or 12 little things like a Merlin Trial or flying around through balloons and popping them and then give you an absolutely charming interaction with a professor or a broom race against the clock or similar. I found myself regularly saying “holy cow, that was really fun”. The combat? That’s really fun! They have enemies with different color shields and you have to match your spell color to their shield color to break it. So you’re running around, changing spellbooks on the fly, dodging, casting your own shield with perfect timing, and it’s pretty close to the combat in the Batman titles for how rewarding it is.

And in the middle of the drudgery of this or that collection quest, you’d have a conversation with one of your classmates about Hippogriffs or becoming an animagus or any number of little interactions and it felt like playing a game set at Hogwarts at the cusp of the turn of the previous century again.

They give you the opportunity to go to History class and listen to a boring lecture on the Goblin Rebellion from the ghost History teacher. You go to Transfiguration class and learn how to make temporary butterflies. In one of the main missions, you’re transported into a childrens’ story and they change the texture to black and white and you get to play around with what’s possible in a childrens’ story. You find penseives and watch the memories of long-dead professors. As you fly around on your broom, they offer up lines of balloons for you to pop as you fly through them. You can save Puffskeins from poachers. You watch Mooncalves do a dance in the light of a Moonstone.

If you liked the Harry Potter books, the game is going to give you scenes that will delight you. If you loved the Harry Potter books, the game is a love letter to you. A florid, overstuffed love letter, to be sure… but your jaw will drop every once in a while and you’ll smile happily when you catch a little something here or there.

Even though I mock for how you have to steal outfits from good, honest denizens of Magical Britain, it’s fun to play dolly dress-up and the fact that there are so very many stupid things that the game throws at you to wear makes the ability to pick a smart outfit more meaningful.

They give you too much stuff to collect and the first 75% is easy and the last 25% is downright difficult and I tapped out after reaching this point here:

But I’d say that about one third of the game was positively delightful, one third was pretty good, and one third was a grindy chore.

And how good the “delightful” and “pretty good” is hinges entirely on your relationship with Magical Britain. If you had daydreams about going there? Here’s your opportunity to go there.

If it struck you as a silly place? This is yet another sandbox with yet another heap of copy/pasted collectables with descriptions that are only of interest to Potterheads. Maybe you’ll like it if you want interesting combat mechanics (but so very much of the game doesn’t involve combat at all).

So, in a nutshell, I’d say that the only people that I can wholeheartedly recommend this game to are the ones who had it pre-ordered and have already picked it up back on day one. Or, I suppose, to people who have never played a videogame before who have multiple Harry Potter submissions on fanfiction.net and are currently working on their next one (along with someone to hand the controller off to if a particular fight is too difficult).

And now I never need to play it again.

(Given the various controversies surrounding the game, I figure that this should be an “Extra” that allows for political, social, and culture war discussions. So if you’re inclined, have at it in comments. You may want to check the comments for the other political Hogwarts post to make sure you’re not reinventing the wheel.)