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, Rowling'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.

i'm trying to think of when exactly i heel-turned on the pokemon series... i cut my teeth on third and fourth gen, returning back in time for gamefreak's arrival onto the 3ds with x and y, and the cracks certainly showed then, but nothing could have been more damning than the release of omega ruby/alpha sapphire, its absence of the beloved frontier explained away in an interview citing "well, who the hell finishes these games anyway?" and that sort of blew my mind, hearing a game director outright handwave inattention to the delivery of their own product with "oh, who cares?"

inattention... is certainly one word that comes to mind when playing pokemon legends arceus. the entire game feels cobbled together from breath of the wild's sloppy seconds, some mmo styled fetch quests and tasks, and youtube videos of pikachu running through an unreal engine wheat field, comments repeating one another with "THIS is the game eight year old me dreamed of playing!"

well, dream bigger.

here's the gameplay: you, the player, enter a map from rust with unloaded textures. in this ugly mess of morrowind bump mapping, you run around and collect resources. of the many things you can make with them, a pokeball is one, and that is how you'll build your team. once you've lobbed enough of the things at unsuspecting wildlife (or suspecting because you ran full steam ahead and threw the damn things like mad), your new goal is to train the team and fill out the pokedex... in addition to completing story beats, of course.

but let's talk pokedex. capture a 'mon and move on, right? wrong. capture 5 of that mon. kill 7. see it use 'ember' four times, and so forth. you do this for every single pokemon, these series of menial tasks designed to give players SOMETHING to keep them in their far cry 2 usermaps long enough so that they don't run through the game too quick. and you have to do this, by the way--the pokedex acts as gym badges do in the mainlines, each badge ("rank") allowing you to use higher leveled pokemon. don't give a shit about screwing around with budews and geodudes? well you better, and you better do it often lest you lose control of your own pokemon.

how about the battles? it's funny--i feel like the initial trailers made combat seem more involved than it really is, which is... your standard turn based affair, really. there's some reworked 'speed' stuff going on, but it's genuinely whatever you're used to from the mainlines with the strange addition of being able to walk around and harass the poor beast you're fighting (or, rarely, its trainer). it's fine, too--don't mess with what works. it's actually fantastic how smooth the transition is in and out of battle, too, a player in legends being able to cut through five starly in the same amount of time a bdsp player might take with just one. this begs a question, though: why no multiplayer? huh? it's the same battle system as anything else, so what's the excuse? why can't i go fight my friends with the shiny zubat i nabbed? gamefreak can't handle seeing me run around in an arena crouching really fast in front of the opponent?

let's get back to the map, again, where all these battles take place. there's not much going on in them. the moment you exit the city hub's gates and find yourself with newfound freedom (after an hour of excruciating tutorial), you see.... virtually nothing of interest. there are some poorly rendered trees out in front, and some... rocks to the left. some grass. there's mountains in the distance, but don't be deceived--this isn't an open world game. you aren't climbing that mountain. you're certainly welcome to piddle about around them, though, the only 'reward' for exploration ever being just finding large pokemon every so often (at turkey leg dangling higher levels, too). for all the ideas nipped from botw, creating intrigue in landscape design isn't one of them. it's just your very, very painfully average set of bump maps with repeating water textures, repeating dirt textures, repeating rock textures--

it's an ugly fucking game, is what i'm trying to get at.

"graphics don't matter!" graphics matter. they aren't the end all be all, but a book in light grey print on pages sopped with coffee certainly presents a more unenjoyable reading session than you'd like. it's questionable why the game is in this state at all, barely steps past the original alpha trailers. this is the part where i must iterate and reiterate: pokemon is THE most profitable media property in the world, eclipsing genuinely anything you or i can think of. gamefreak and the pokemon company bring in over 170 million dollars annually--so where the fuck has it all gone?

well, i can make a guess: straight into exec's pockets. these games hardly matter when the pokemon company's biggest source of income stems from merchandise of all things, so here's the position pokemon legends found itself in at gamefreak: the studio wanted to make a nintendo-hire-this-man type game, they were told "sure, and you'll do it in two years!" to which someone probably complained, asking why so little time, how they'd have to dramatically cut down the scope and intent, to which they were probably told "so?" among "it'll sell regardless" and maybe even "no one finishes these damn things anyway."

and that's where gamefreak found themselves, having to create a scope actually manageable. it has its good little bits that the team knew they needed to get right, like going in and out of pokemon battles, qol changes making managing a team easier than ever (choose when they level? choose their names after? hell yeah), and even the brief interest of just hearing a faint, familiar pokemon cry quite near you... but it all takes place in these ugly, lifeless worlds sorely lacking trainers, sorely lacking cities and towns and settlements at all, sorely lacking actual level design and creativity and care.

so maybe it isn't inattention. in all honesty, gamefreak probably did the best they could given the time they had and the ideas they wanted to work with, and they knew the shit that was bad... was bad. the end result is a barely fun gameplay loop with tried and true designs smothered in mediocrity, in fetch quests and genshin tasks, in a lack of art style and cohesion, in sandboxes that fail to justify themselves, in a story that i wanted to spend a paragraph writing about but what the fuck ever, it's a pokemon story, that shit was always going to be bad.

let me wrap this review up by describing the (spoiler free) circumstances leading up to deciding i'd had enough. i did my fair bit of exploring and leveling up, and it got very old very quick, so i plowed ahead with the story and ended up at a boss fight with baby's first dark souls mechanics on display--one i ended without even using a pokemon. this granted me access to a new area, and it was there that i found the same ugly level design but with 50% more brown. i hightailed it to a ruin (which was a large, square, empty box) and met a character who hated my guts. i found three bandits after a hyped up cutscene all to just face one level 23 pokemon, and then i returned to the ruin character who now suddenly loved me as a result, her character arc completed in the span of 5 minutes, and i then realized that if i wasn't playing any longer for the exploration, and i wasn't playing for the gameplay, and now i didn't even care enough to play for the story... then there just wasn't any reason to play a minute more.

gamefreak could've done better--even if you end up playing and loving legends, you may still find yourself agreeing with that sentiment. but they won't do better, and they won't have to when these games sell the incredible gangbusters amounts that they do. the pokemon company knows this, and that's why gamefreak's never going to get the dev time they actually desperately need. so long as half baked $60 early access crap like this is peddled out and sold in the millions, nothing will ever change. in other words...

should you buy pokemon legends, you aren't supporting a brave new direction to take the series. you're supporting a grindhouse dev studio forced into mediocrity, and that's the direction they've gone for the past decade, and it'll be the same till they or this series dies. just don't forget an arceus plushie on your way out.