Aight so I played this for few hours and I get exactly why Harry Potter adults like this game: it successfully captures the magic of the books and especially the earlier films really well. There's a lot of environmental detail in Hogwarts that is fun to look at. Lots of moving paintings and inanimate objects doing fun and whimsical things that really don't need to be there at all but greatly contribute to the atmosphere. I wish more games did that. Aside from the spectacles this game has, it ultimately doesn't really deserve much consideration as a game worth playing.

The story had small amounts of intrigue I can see being interesting down the line , but really most of the plot I saw is just a vehicle for nostalgia baiting to give the casual audience what they paid for. That's fine and all but I was never hooked on a single thing that was happening. It does not help at all that the game spends a lot of time addressing that you are a fifth year student who just joined Hogwarts because you are super cool and smart and almost everybody in school likes you from the jump. It is really hard to shake the notion that your character is anything but a self-insert in for someone's DeviantArt fan fiction power fantasy and doesn't make for a lot of room for a player to make a character they can really express themselves with.

What's really funny is you can see & feel where this game halted development as a live service and 180'd into a single player experience. A really smart move considering the collapse of the live service side of the market, but it's obvious you were meant to run dungeons with another player or two and collect loot exactly like Destiny 2. How you find items and even the equip menu UI is dead on exactly like Destiny. The spell effects are cool and take after the latter Harry Potter movies where they essentially act like wizard bullets -- and doing your special wizard move looks pretty good.

This game also involves a lot of stealth, which is the weakest aspect of this entire game. The two stealth sections I played were linear and really, really boring. All I could think about while playing them was that this game is meant for casual audiences and not meant to be challenging, but then I remembered Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets on Gamecube that came out twenty-one years ago had the same philosophy on its stealth sections but gave the player more freedom to take on it's stealth challenges.

This game started development before JK Rowling's overt fascist-adjacent views were brought under spotlight and we can go back and forth all fucking decade on the pros and cons of supporting this game as a consumer product. That all said, I'm a second generation Scottish immigrant and a person who recognizes Trans people and their inherit rights as human beings; I'm not gonna throw that aside to support some extraordinarily mid video game even if it doesn't greatly affect JK Rowling's wealth or influence. Fuck her whole ass life, her momma, and her momma's momma. So I pirated this thing and deleted the files after I realized I wasn't engaged at all and everyone was arguing over a product that really isn't special in any way other than emulating the vibes of earlier media of this franchise to get some bucks from an audience who've had a hard life and are not terminally online like all of us. This game's existence is just a touchstone of how pathetic the game industry, the consumer base and internet discourse really is. I kind of want to live in another dimension where Harry Potter doesn't exist so I never have to witness an event like this again. Hogwarts Legacy, everyone!

This game runs like shit on PC too.

Bizarre how this game is trying to present wizarding world of 1890 as this secret island of progressiveness and liberalism with a few rotten apples here and there. Everyone is welcoming and friendly, there's no tension with teachers or rivalry between houses, your student buddy is a black girl from (soon to be a British colony) Uganda, a blind kid in Slytherin dorm complains about his father being a boomer blood racist, you can enter any bathroom in the school despite your assigned dormitory etc. It's truly a wholesome chungus version of Hogwarts, created as a smokescreen so you wouldn't think too hard about fantasy slavery and institutionalized stratification of wizarding society. The way to put distance between the game and woeful worldviews of the author. A scheme that doesn't pan out at all as the story uses goblin uprising as window dressing instead of the venicle to address inherent injustices of this fictional world.

But what if, for a moment, we try to disregard the elven slavery and goblin racism, Terfling's politics and hack writing. What will you find? Nothing short of another checklist open-world game. All the artistry, gigabytes of assets and hours of voice acting went into filling the wonderful recreation of Hogwarts with icons and one-button chores to raise your gear score. At one point the world map opens up with the massive grassland expanse full of goblin camps to clear. You'll find a Harry Potter game without characters to befriend or mysteries to ponder. There's no wish fulfillment, no secret life escapism — things that made HP the inescapable cultural phenomenon with millennials like myself in the first place.

I'm amazed it came down to this when Atlus figured out a socialite RPG framework 18 years ago. Like, a Hogwarts game with calendar system would still be junk food, but at least in somewhat inspired serving. I should be attending wizarding classes and looking for ways to break school rules with my scrunklo Slytherin buddies. Instead I'm mass murdering goblin population and checking with ancient magic hotspots so I can deal 3 more damage with "basic cast". The fleeting charm of opening hours evaporates as square socket structure of the game laids bare, and so is my desire to engage with such slop.

It's a cute little game, with a great art style and decent enough puzzle mechanics, but the MTX are absolutely fucking insane:

Candy Crush style Stamina Meter

Free and Premium Battle Pass that both show on the same screen

"Deliveries" which basically amount to Loot Boxes that take 23 hours to open...you can also pay to open them faster

You can also pay 24 US Dollars to guarantee the loot box has a Pokemon in it...I have received rewards from what amounts to 28 deliveries and have not received a Pokemon...and some of the Pokemon you can get from deliveries are limited time offers

"Special" deals in the store that are limited to once per day

Premium currency that you can earn by playing the game OR purchase that allows you to increase the max level of your Pokemon, speed by the deliveries, etc. You can also use it to serve a "heaping helping", which gives you double the benefits for a puzzle, allowing you to unlock Pokemon faster.

To put the premium currency into perspective, you need 1000 acrons for a heaping helping, 3000 to speed up a delivery, and 1000 to unlock a Pokemon's ability to get to level 15. You get 80 for a 3 star puzzle. That is 13 to 38 puzzles to get these bonuses naturally.

In the last 20 hours I have spent 8 of them playing this. I cannot stop. Someone please help me, the smiling mouse knows where I live. The ice-woman has snatched my heart and I'd do anything for her. This land is purgatory and I am its victim.

Update: It's been a single day since I wrote the blurb above. 8 hours has turned into 20 hours. I am sick.

Second update: 20 hours has turned into 40 hours. I'm overwhelmed with despair, for I cannot marry the woman of my dreams. She roams the roads of my village every morning. Her enchanting smile makes me quiver. Her pristine, ethereal dress is carried by the wind itself. Her serene platinum hair is all I dream about. Yet, for all the gardening we've done together, for every moment I was by her side, and for every hurdle we tackled... I'm afraid she cannot be courted. For she is no different than Nature herself; you cannot have her heart, yet she'll never let go of your own.

I don't know if it's like this the first 10-20 days or is just like this forever, but I felt the game is really slow and boring. The gameplay loop is making potions (if there's someone sick), gathering resources in the forest and then you have pretty little to do apart from talk to villagers, so after a couple of days it feels repetitive. There are some upgrades you can do but for some reason they require absurd quantities of wood and stone. Hopefully with time they add more content and stuff to do, like the community center in Stardew Valley.