Hogwarts Legacy is better than it has any right to be

I didn’t expect Hogwarts Legacy to be this fun.

As you’ve no doubt figured out by now, I’m a fan of the Harry Potter franchise. I’ve read all the books, seen all the movies, and am probably still going to watch the upcoming HBO series even though I know it’s going to be a woke mess. I even wrote a Harry Potter fanfic, which you can read here.

When Fantastic Beasts came out, I was happy to see that the franchise was being expanded beyond just Harry and his friends. There’s an entire wizarding world to explore, with a massive history behind it that gets mentioned sporadically throughout the series. Hogwarts is said to have been founded in the 10th century, and the series establishes that there were wizards and witches even before that. The potential for lore-building is almost bottomless, there’s so much you can do with the framework that J.K. Rowling has laid out.

There were a plethora of Harry Potter games over the years, and I really wasn’t impressed with any of them. Most games based on blockbuster movies generally aren’t very good, and knowing how the story’s going to play out doesn’t help. I always felt that the potential was there for a really good game involving the world of Harry Potter, but maybe not necessarily one about Harry.

So when Hogwarts Legacy came out in 2023, I was intrigued. An open-world game about the Wizarding World (the official name for the extended Harry Potter universe)? Hell yes. The game looked kind of fun, but I’ll be honest, it didn’t look fun enough to justify the $70 price tag (no game is imo). It didn’t help that I read all kinds of horror stories about shoehorned diversity bullshit, including a trans character who even other trans people were calling forced. Fearing that the game would just ruin my love for the franchise, I stayed away.

Fast forward two years, and I found Hogwarts Legacy on sale for $14. At this point I was looking for something new to play, and I was willing to gamble the $14 on the game. It couldn’t be that bad, right?

It really wasn’t.

The gameplay was as fun as it looked. It wasn’t perfect by any stretch, but for the most part I liked it. The combat was smooth and fluent, and it was pretty easy to dodge an enemy Reducto then counter with Accio followed by Incendio. The spells also had cool downs, which was fine because otherwise you could probably just cheese your way through the whole game by spamming Bombarda. Being able to learn the Unforgivable Curses was also pretty neat. There’s something devilishly fun about sneaking up on a group of goblins or poachers, hitting one with the Imperio curse, then watching him turn on his comrades. It was also a cool little detail that I wasn’t able to use Unforgivables during a duel with a dark witch where an Auror was also present.

A lot of people complained that the game becomes too easy once you’re able to place curses on multiple enemies and kill them all at once with a single Avada Kedavra, and they’re right, but for me that’s part of the fun. If I worked my ass off to get through the game, I’d damn well be OP by the end of it. By the end of Hogwarts Legacy, you’re not Skyrim levels of OP or anything, but combat is definitely easy. Come endgame, your character is powerful enough that he (or she, we don’t discriminate here at AJnet) could singlehandedly take on Dumbledore, Voldemort, and Grindelwald together. Seriously, that “ancient magic” is absurd. You can literally turn people into chickens in this game. Imagine Lord Voldemort having to spend eternity living as a fucking chicken. This shit is nuts.

I also enjoyed other elements of the gameplay, like capturing beasts and flying around on the broom. The broom controls can take a moment to get used to, but once you do they’re pretty smooth, and it makes exploring the massive map so much easier. People were upset that Quidditch wasn’t included (the game explains this as the headmaster cancelling it because a student died the previous year), but I can’t envision how they could implement it with the current broom controls, so I give them a pass on this one.

And yes, the map is fucking massive. Hogwarts Castle itself is huge, but in the outside world there’s a lot to explore, between hamlets, caves, the Forbidden Forest, mountains, and coastlines. Flying around the Scottish Highlands doesn’t feel empty or meaningless, since there’s always something going on, be it sacking a poacher camp, roasting some inferi, or raiding a goblin mine.

The game also allows you to set up shop in the Room of Requirement and use it as a base of operations. You can set up ingredient plants and potion stations, as well as store your massive collection of beasts (which you can breed).

All that said, there were a few things I didn’t really like or thought could have been done better.

Let’s get it out of the way now. Yes, the wizard population is very diverse, and being that the game takes place in late 1800s Scotland/England, it raises a few eyebrows and questions. For a group of people that are hung up on magical blood purity, they sure are highly progressive, especially when you consider that the game takes place in the 1890’s. There’s black shopkeepers, professors from India, Africa, and Japan, gay couples, and, yes, a trans barkeeper. While tolerance plays a part to some extent (which makes sense, because the game takes place during a goblin rebellion, something that’s always been an established part of the franchise’s lore), it’s not really crammed down your throat. Nobody cares about the black shopkeeper or the lesbian magical archaeologist, they’re just there as regular people, which is how inclusion should be done. While I think it’s kind of weird that wizards discriminate against goblins and Muggle-borns while being completely okay with ethnic minorities and homosexuals, it doesn’t affect the gameplay.

Sirona Ryan, on the other hand, is very much forced in. We’re forced to hear their tragic backstory of how they were a witch in a wizard’s body and how their classmates persecuted them for it, forcibly worked into a conversation about a goblin contact of theirs. I get it, they wanted to take a stab at J.K. Rowling’s stance on trans people by including a trans person in the game, and they wanted to make sure that there was no ambiguity about it. If you want to have a trans character then whatever, but Sirona was forced as fuck and felt like some developer’s self-insert.

Another improvement I think Hogwarts Legacy could have made was allowing you to be a dark wizard. Yes, you can make conversational choices to be kind of a jerk to the NPCs, you can learn the Unforgivables, you can help your friend in Slytherin cover up murdering his uncle. But aside from some snarky dialogue here and there, you can’t really be “bad”. Your character is polite as punch to pretty much everyone. I just covered up a damn murder, at least let me be a bully to my classmates or something.

It’s worth mentioning that the PC version has a mod (yes, the game has a modding community) that allows you to attack the professors and students, your rampage ending with you going to Azkaban and the game essentially being soft-locked. I’ve never played this mod, and from what I’ve read it also breaks the game in a way where you have to reinstall, so use it at your own peril. This is the closest you’ll get to becoming a dark wizard though.

I was also unsure of what to think about your character starting Hogwarts as a fifth year. I get why they didn’t have you playing as a first year (imagine an 11 year old running around blowing shit up with Bombarda or spamming the Killing Curse), but it felt weird to hear that your character is a “late bloomer” and being sorted into a house at 15 years old. I feel like they could have executed this a little better.

This game is pretty fun though, way more fun than I expected it to be. If you’re a Harry Potter fan, or you just want a game to lose yourself in for a few hours a day, then you’ll like Hogwarts Legacy. I hear there’s a sequel in the works, and I’m actually kind of looking forward to it now.

Angry_Jerk

Adam “The Angry Jerk” Baker is the CEO of The AJnet Organization and Editor-in-Chief of AJnet Magazine. A grizzled internet veteran of over 20 years, he writes about politics, culture, and whatever else manages to annoy him that day.

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