Set 100 years before Tom Riddle entered Hogwarts’s hallowed halls as just another student, Hogwarts Legacy is an action role-playing game set in which players take on the role of a new fifth-year student at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, one who possesses the unique ability to wield Ancient Magic. As they navigate their studies and explore iconic locations like Hogwarts, Hogsmeade, and the Forbidden Forest, they uncover a dark plot involving a goblin rebellion led by the antagonist Ranrok. With the help of professors and fellow students, players must unravel the mysteries of Ancient Magic and thwart the uprising to protect the wizarding world.

The Good

• The game designers did a masterful job of capturing the movie’s aesthetic.
  • Fans will be delightfully overwhelmed and can spend hours whistful exploring the castle and interacting with the students.
• The sandbox is sufficiently open, giving the game world an impressive sense of size and scope.
• With one very minor exception, the voice acting is top-notch.
• For the most part, the controls are intuitive and easy to learn, though there is a learning curve to smoothly integrating all of your spells into an effective and varied combat.
• There is a plethora of optional and fun sidequests to keep you busy.
• One particular secondary quest series does an excellent job of making you feel a part of the story.
• The music is perfect
• Flying

The Bad

• If you spend much of your early adventuring time on sidequests, consequently raising your character level, you may find that by the time you’re ready to buckle down and complete the main quests, much of the challenge has been wiped away by your advancement. Unfortunately, the difficulty level of each quest is static and does not rise or fall, commensurate with your level.
• Magic removes much of the mystery from the various challenges and neutralizes most surprises.
• The game’s economics are fairly mundane and arguably overly simple.
• The leveling system could be more sophisticated.
• The Flying controls are needlessly complex, and your ability to modify them is too simple.

The Ugly

• The targeting system needs a complete overhaul.
• You’ll want to read the Inappropriate and WOKE REPORT section.

Hogwarts Legacy Review

COMING SOON (I’ve currently completed 62% of the game)

PARENTAL NOTES

Just Play the Damned Game

• It might be rated T for teens, but there is no way that the publishers didn’t know that younger people would end up playing it. Quite frankly, just because it’s rated for teens is no excuse. “Damn” makes a regular appearance in numerous conversations and adds nothing.

WOKE REPORT

Transfiguration Class

• There was much talk about this when the game initially launched, so here is the definitive answer. No, there are no trans characters in Hogwarts Legacy, but there is a mentally ill man who mistakenly believes himself to be a woman, and he voices a female character in it. It’s a minor character with one sidequest and one brief interaction that is a part of the main story.
  • In addition to the character’s voice being lower than any male character in the game, there is one line about her old classmates not always knowing if she was a witch or a wizard. I tested it on some of my kids, and it seems pretty clear that this virtue-signaling nonsequitur will likely be missed by those not looking for it. And make no mistake that it is cocktail party virtue-signaling that exists only to give the publishers something to pat themselves over the back about when mixing with others of their ilk. There is absolutely nothing else in the game to indicate that she is anything other than what she appears to be.

Diversium Totalus

• The publishers wanted to set Hogwarts Legacy during the Great Goblin Uprising, which is canonically circa 1890, which is fine. The problem is that the amount of diversity, in general, and number of women in positions of authority make no sense whatsoever. Even if the 1800s wizarding world was 2024, San Francisco-levels of progressive, the game’s diversity would be off the charts. However, at the time in which the game is set, British colonialism was in full swing, and it was far from pretty. India had been an occupied territory for a hundred years. Indian nationalists had just founded the Indian National Congress, an advocacy group pushing for significant reforms and, ultimately, independence from Britain. At the same time, the Crown had absorbed nearly 30% of Africa in a ten-year period. Oh, and English women wouldn’t be given the right to vote for almost half a century later. Yet, despite all of the conflict and second-class status, in the game, women comprise about half of the business owners, as do Indians and Africans. These groups and even Koreans (with British accents… of course) are represented (never mind that Korea was in utter turmoil and only 4 years away from the Sino-Japanese War), making up a significant number of teachers and students.
  • If they wanted to include this kind of diversity in the game, why not set it in a more modern era or write some dialogue to explain it? There’s nothing in the game to differentiate it from one time period or another.