As a preface, I would not have ever purchased this game, I was given a copy of it in order to do parts of my job and decided to then play it in my own time out of curiosity. If you are interested in playing this game then I implore you; I don't ever condone piracy of new, readily available games, but I believe you have a moral imperative to pirate this game. Support the quality of the product without financially supporting a game that lines the pockets of a transphobe and touts the disturbing rhetoric that this game does. I am a huge supporter of trans rights, trans rights are the social issue that I care about the most and it is awful that the creator of an integral part of the childhoods of much of the consumer base in the western world aggressively and blindly spouts hate towards transgender individuals. However, I would never tell someone not to play a game (simply not to spend money on it), but as I will get into in the review proper it will become apparent that the text of this game reflects none of JKs trans ideologies, likely as they weren't present in the original books, but it does spout some equally damaging and at times horrifying messaging.

Gameplay:
Hogwarts legacy was controversial well before it's release, and whilst the team at portkey games and avalanche software did everything they could to distance themselves from the game, JK does still get royalties, but what of the game itself? is it any good to actually play?
Avalanche have almost exclusively made tie-in games, with their biggest endeavor being Disney Infinity, a game I am personally a fan of, but could not sing its praises. Most of Avalanche's library consists of games like Cars 3 the game or Bolt the game, generic and uninteresting cash grabs made by cynics who think gaming is a novelty, so surely hogwarts legacy is just another pit-stop on the Avalanche tour of mediocrity, right?
Well, somehow, they managed to pull it out of the bag. This game at no point reinvents the wheel, every gameplay system you can see having been taken from other places, but every system the game employs is really good, from the fun and engaging combat (despite some bullet sponge enemies and lack of enemy variety), to the farming sim/home builder room of requirement, which links out to a pokemon arceus style beast catching system. Every one of the systems, mechanics and minigames is really good, never great mind you, but a game chock full of really good and varied systems and activities that are all consistently really good is not something to turn your nose up at. Sure, there's a criminal lack of enemy variety and some elements (like the owl post) feel a tad superfluous, these end up being minor qualms in the face of a grand and great beast. The closest comparison I can give to the experience of playing this game is playing the witcher 3; with it's beautiful, expansive and detailed world bursting with things to do, where you just want to sit and watch all the crazy little things play out (especially in the castle) before heading out to a minigame to beat a high score or beat some bandits in a mission. This is a good game in the gameplay, in fact I am almost relieved that I am now in the post game as I no longer have to engage with the frankly concerning writing that carries this game's narrative.

Writing:
A little bit after this game was announced, and after JK had begun her descent into her concerning obsession with stranger's genitals, it was uncovered that the lead designer of the game had, at one point, run an 'anti-sjw' channel on youtube, but hey, he's not writing the game, who cares, right? Well, this should have been our first red flag; fool me once, shame on you. A few months go by once again and the game hires Greg Ellis, who has ammassed enough controversy of his own, some of it in relation to supporting Rowling, over the years. Fool me twice...
No, we should not have ignored these warning signs. It has already been pointed out that, within the text, the Goblins of the Wizarding World are extremely antisemetic, and here that is dialed up to 11.
It's all well and good that you have a super diverse cast of characters, in fact that's great, there's every kind of person here you can imagine, there's even a prominent trans woman who is never needlessly clocked and deadnamed and demands respect around her; but what's the point of all of that if the plot of your game is that the hook nosed bankers who control the economy, based on a historically known antisemetic symbol, decide to rise up against the fact they are treated as slaves and are upset that their cultural artefacts have been stolen and locked away from them for hundreds of years, and they are treated unequivocably as the villains.
There are so many opportunities presented to this game where it could turn things around, the only 'good goblins' want nothing to do with the rebellion, no one ever questions if maybe stealing another race's cultural artefacts and putting them in places enchanted so goblins can't enter could be bad, no one ever even suggests that enslaving an entire race and treating them as lesser could be bad. Moreover, the general stance of this game is that rising up against those in power is inherently a bad thing to do, as the player if you choose dialogue options that go against doing as your teachers say you are told things like 'I wouldn't have expected that from you', all but telling you that you are behaving out of character. It even employs some familliar right wing rhetoric, of course the people rising up to try and justifiably gain what is theirs just want to 'wipe out all of wizard kind', this kind of rhetoric is sadly all too familliar from the real world politics of 2023, especially following certain protests in the last few years.
More concerning, still, is the treatment of life within this game. It's a strange thing, when you are punished for using the 'unforgivable' killing curse with a mere 'I'd rather you didn't do that', and then are allowed to use the explosion spell to kill someone, or burn someone to death slowly, and no one bats an eye. Let me be clear, there is no hyperbole in play here, this isn't Spider-Man or Arkham where in-universe you're just knocking people out. Over the course of this game you murder dozens of innocent humans, and you are congratulated for it. At first I believed this to be some kind of huge oversight on behalf of the developers, but toward the end of the game I was getting a little bored of the boss battle with rockwood and decided to use the killing curse on him. He exploded into a cloud of dust, never to be seen again. Shortly after professor fig confronted me about it, I expected a harsh telling-off for my callousness and the coldness with which I dispatched a named character. Instead I was told that he was a dangerous man, and I did what I had to, I did the right thing. And this was right next to another boss that I merely incapacitated and had arrested. I was told that my erasure of this man's life, a human life, was the right thing to do. And this was in and among the slaughter of hundreds of goblins over the course of the game.

So, to review; this game, based on a children's series and likely being played largely by children and young people, presents an oppressed group rising up against subjugation and the stealing of cultural artefacts as a threat to 'our kind', and tells you that you are free to indiscriminately murder these people, as well as humans; in fact if you think it is the right thing to do you are always justified in killing human beings. What am I to do with this plot? How can one ignore the frankly disturbing rhetoric on display here?

Conclusion:
I'm going to have to stop here, I have other things to do with my day, but I do think that, despite it all, I will come back to this game. As I mentioned earlier, now that I'm in the post game I don't have to encounter the horrifying messaging of this game anymore.
The bottom line is that this is a good game, it's really fun, has so much to do, and is really visually pleasing, I would even go as far as recommending it, but please, I beg you, do not spend money on this game, not a cent. Rowling has said that every penny from this game will go to anti-trans causes and the racist rhetoric on display in the actual game is frankly disgusting. Pirate this game, steal it digitally, There are many multitudes of places where you can acquire this game without funding the people who made it. Think about what you're consuming. You can support high quality products without supporting awful people and awful ideologies.
This game should be an 8/10, but I simply can't bring myself to do it.