OK so I don't like JK Rowling or Harry Potter, I decided to try this game out because it was free, and ironically despite all the weird warriors for this game I'm one of the few that actually did.

This game was good but the longer you played the more the cracks would show. Like there were cool things like being able to decorate your own room and Hogwarts being so alive but then...well.

So the story is written very oddly and I think it wanted to be too many things and couldn't really be any of them. If you want the most basic example of this that really embodies the entire experience: So at one point you meet a character that passively talks about how, at another wizarding school, they don't use wands. They use their hands. When she came to Hogwarts, she had to change to using a wand. Now, probably completely irrelevant, here's a fun fact: most witches and wizards (even Voldemort) cannot use magic without their wands. One of the most basic spells both in the game and in the movies is expelliarmus, which expels wands from opposing magic users' hands (it does more than that but this is the purpose it's often used for).

Think about that. Just think about it for a second.

The game has tons of weird mental "huhs" that are frankly indicative of what the original series was (badly written), but also it generally just doesn't feel good. You're framed as this hero fighting against the evil goblins when the game, immediately, as the game starts, explains what happened to the goblins and why they're doing what they are. They are also the first enemy that you're capable of mercilessly murdering with regular spells just because. And you're supposed to be the good guy.

Now if the game actually acknowledged any of this it might have been fine but it simply paints the antagonist as bad despite the fact that almost nothing he does over the course of the story is unjustified, so by the end if you think about it for more than a few seconds you feel really weird about what you just experienced.

Also this game does not know how to do death.

Furthermore, that decorating rooms thing I mentioned? It is cool and that it's introduced later in the game is something that I like, but what it is is...well, kinda boring? And they tie some idle mechanics too it which are completely unnecessary. When the reward for something is a decoration for a feature you don't use then the task ends up feeling a lot less worth doing. The animals are cute but I wish you could do more with them.

There's a slave den in this game. This is presented without any negative connotations, and at times I think this game is worse than Rowling's original work in terms of how it presents certain things.

If it seems like I'm mostly complaining it's because yes, this is a game that is kind of fun initially but the fact that I and like, the rest of the world forgot it existed almost right after it came out says a lot despite its scale. The boss fights are bad and weirdly disjointed (do NOT get me started on the final boss), there are some puzzle sequences that just make me wanna end it, the warnings for what you can deflect and what you can't can be really difficult to tell apart sometimes, especially when a lot's going on at once, the killing spell is treated like something there's a big choice behind learning but it's actually just kinda useful and there's no drawback and no one judges you for it despite it being like, the worst thing canonically. Also it's buggy. There are a lot of bugs and me mentioning this at the end is largely because it's not super buggy but like.

To wrap this up I guess, there's this boss fight near the end of the game where you fight this big creature. It's not a good boss fight. Anyway, once its health was almost all the way down, it charged and. Disappeared.

Poof. Gone. And I was soft-locked, had to load my save and do the whole fight over again. Waited a while too, no idea why it happened.

Hogwarts Legacy, ladies and others.