Fantastic game when it isn't trying to waste your time with pointless side missions that have you running back and forth between areas to collect x number of random objects. Combat gets a little boring once you have leveled up a bit and have sufficiently upgraded your weapon. It gets exciting only on rare occasions. But enough about the boring bits. Time to talk about the good bits. The story here is one of a kind, and the characters are unforgettable. While the main character may lack a defining personality, the side characters and some of the NPCs you meet along the way more than make up for it. Sometimes, I found the anime dialogue a bit cringe-worthy on a few occasions, but I'd rather not complain about that too much. It's only a small island of annoyance in a sea of good.

"A castle! Must've been quite stately in its time"
"Does it get any more cozy than Hogsmeade?"

The 100th time time you hear these same lines repeated is when you finally realize what this game is actually about. A huge portion of Hogwarts Legacy is about playing the same shallow minigames, and going into identcal caves just to open one chest which contains some useless loot, and clearing the same poacher camps and fighting the same trolls and spiders for dozens of hours while you ignore the uneventful main story.

It's a shame because there's a good game in here somewhere. The world they created for this game is genuinely good. Hogwarts and it's surrounding areas look amazing. This is without a doubt the best representation of Hogwarts in any videogame. The castle is alive. The characters in the portraits move. Students walk around complaining about their teachers. Ghosts float in and out through walls. And the castle hides plenty of secrets just waiting to be found.

The first 10 or 15 hours of this game is excellent before it devolves into a giant open world mess. Your arrival to Hogwarts, attending classes, taming and collecting magical beasts (which is one of the few enjoyable things in the game right until the end), visiting nearby villages and getting into trouble. After that the game is made bearable only by it's combat system and broom flight, both of which feels great. But even the combat is diminished somewhat by the lack of enemy variety later on.

Two things would've improved this game exponentially. A much more interesting main story that would atleast make the player care about whats happening instead of just finishing main quest after main quest just for the sake of it.
And secondly, they should've populated the open world with meaningful side content instead of what it has now, which is hundreds of copy pasted activities placed all over the map that do nothing other than artificially lengthen the gameplay and waste the player's time. Finishing even a handful of them feels like a chore.

In conclusion, play it if you like to intereact with the best video game representation of the Wizarding World. Ignore, if you're looking for a good open world game that is worth the hours you will put into it.