Hogwarts Legacy Review
A magically driven adventure held back only by trying to accomplish too many things.
Very rarely does a game come along from an established IP that nails the source material, is wonderfully crafted, and respects the fantasy. Hogwarts Legacy achieves this magic (pun intended) and makes me wish I could have similar worlds designed for franchises I adore. Besides some technical hiccups and at times things feeling bloated, Hogwarts Legacy is a wonderful magic-based RPG experience for fans of the franchise or just the casual gamer pulled towards fantasy driven western RPGs. Hogwarts Legacy does an excellent job cementing itself as one of my favorite experiences of 2023.
Hogwarts Legacy drops you into the legendary school as a 5th-year student, which is an uncommon thing to happen. But conveniently slaps your student right into the middle of the main plot, which often times seems lacking and shallow compared to other stories going on around you. In a story that excels at creating plot armor and relevancy, the stories from your fellow students really bring you back down into the world. You'll spend your days attending short and sweet classes that act as a way of introducing you to the diverse but somewhat dull cast of characters from which your many side quests and tasks will come. Potion crafting, spell learning, and the Room of Requirement, which acts as a sort of home base for crafting, decorating, and resource gathering minigames, will all be given to you over time as you fill in downtime.
The world of Hogwarts Legacy, as the name implies, predominantly features Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, The Forbidden Forest, the nearby village of Hogsmeade, and the far and wide country side. Dotted with other small hamlets and ancient architecture holding onto itself within the wooded areas. While no previous knowledge of the series is necessary, there are clever nods to places from the books, sometimes word for word, and characters that are directly related to Harry's cast of characters. The map itself is a mixture of being overwhelming and empty at the same time; there are varying types of collectibles all around, but that at times feels like the sole reason for the map being as big as it is. Once you collect these, or if you don't care about them at all, you find yourself fast traveling between locations because even broom travel can take a few minutes to get you where you need to go. The map could honestly have been cut in half and still have the same effect of capturing the immersion and locals from the books and movies.
Gameplay and combat revolve around a four-button layout for abilities and spells; you can later upgrade this to have four different preset pages. Everything from combat spells to things needed for puzzles or beast care requires its own space among your presets. With that many options, I found myself frantically opening my spell page and swapping things out mid-fight over and over again. Managing your base combat abilities and making sure you have counters to different types of shields and spells for puzzle solving just becomes more cumbersome as you progress. Elite mobs scattered around, along with a few arena challenges, are there for those of you who want to excel as duelists and really test your merit and knowledge.
Legacy loosely follows the guidelines of a western RPG, has very baseline skill trees that I found myself running out of options I'd actually want to put points in, and a gear system that gets bogged down by a very limited inventory. I didn't necessarily feel a growth in power as I got better gear and enemies scaled with you in most instances. The upside to the limited inventory is that the transmog system is in place from the get-go; some outfits and armor pieces are purely cosmetic and let you customize your student to your liking. There's nothing better than what's supposed to be an intense story cutscene and your student runs in wearing a pumpkin head or the equivalent of a platypus beak.
Hogwarts Legacy has a roughly 30-hour main story but is packed full of side quests, whose amounts differ depending on which house you're sorted into near the start of the game. As mentioned, a majority of the side quests involve your fellow classmates and do a better job at bringing you into the world and really capturing the spirit of Hogwarts than the main story itself. I feel as if when the team at Avalanche approaches a sequel, they take a more confined story focused more on being apart of the school instead of padding things out with extra fluff. If you're a longtime fan of the series or just need an itch for your western rpg with a fantasy focus, I highly recommend giving Hogwarts Legacy a chance to see if you also get caught up in the magic.