My wife bought the game, so I’ve donated to a local trans charity to absolve our family of shame and guilt.

There is a tendency in large open-world games to overdesign the spaces, to fill them with so many points of interest that the game inside the world will never utilize even half of these spaces. It’s even less in Hogwarts Legacy.

While the world of Hogwarts and its expansive surroundings is very ornate in detail and thoughtful construction, you can run through every area of the whole giant castle if you want to, you don’t want to. You don’t have a reason.

Generally missions in this massive world break down to funneling the character between conversations and usually entering a catacomb that looks like all the other catacombs in the game.

There is an initial sense we will just fast travel everywhere. Eventually you have a broom and a few creatures to traverse these spaces with, and the openness of the game becomes more open to you here, but the actual context of what you’re doing is never that interesting.

The world is dotted with Fantastic Beasts and places to find them (my daughter is hooked on the Chao Garden equivalent), trivial Merlin’s quests, and attempts at building spaces and places, none which feel as anchoring and thought-through with mechanical reasons as your starting House dorms.

There is a combat system which is more than just standard action/adventuring — the game actually tries to build a compelling spell system, where you can mix and match a big series of equipped spells, and it can be fun, building up a meter and unleashing Ancient Wizardry through a special attack.

Likewise, there is some good character stuff. Most characters exist to give you quests or to fill up spaces but a couple of your House friends are given real stories that develop and go some dark, interesting places.

There’s just enough here to get through the game but navigating the unending game spaces and really mechanically engaging with the systems is elusive. It is also, of course, a bad time to make a Hogwarts game with what the creator of these stories espouses in online vitriol — they have a disgusting presence and are failing their responsibility as a regarded curator of Fantasy with a big platform.

When people wished for a proper big Harry Potter video game, the monkey paw curled, and not only because JK Rowling cannot stop being a bigot on Social Media (Trans Rights are Human Rights)
Visually Hogwarts Legacy is perfect, the castle is beautifully realised and full of life, students practice magic in the hallways, parchments fly above your head. It is an absolute joy to walk through the halls and comes close to the fantasy the books put in all of our heads.

But the wonder quickly stops when you stop wandering and start playing. Any opportunity to put some magic into the mechanics of the game has been forsaken for the safest, blandest AAA bullshit one can find, without a single creative or even logical thought. Why does my teacher tell me "I have a task for you before the next class" only for the task to be "Do 10 dodge rolls in combat". How is that related to my class? Why do I even dodge roll, did I miss that part in the books?
You dodge roll, because thats what you do in video games. For the same reason the first spell you get is literally called "Basic Spell" (how fucking unmagical is that) and functions as a gun. Because how could one make a video game without a gun? It has never been done. Impossible. The players wouldnt know what to do.
Why does casting Alohomora trigger an Unlocking Minigame??? Is that how magic is supposed to work? No, it s how boring video games without ideas are supposed to work.
Why do I have only 4 spells at a time equipped? Because it is a genre convention. Only in other games of this genre you equip guns, not spells, so going into a menu to equip a different gun is a metaphor for grabbing a different weapon out of your backpack. Doesnt make any sense for magic, does it? Doesnt matter, copied without thought anyway.

Imagine a Hogwarts Legacy that actual took a back step and thought about how to translate the magic, the spellcasting, into its mechanics and controls and structure. A game where for example you map out ward movements instead of pressing a button to make magic happen. A game that looks at games like Persona for structure, not fucking GTA. What could have been

Spoiler-free review and the positives:

I'll start by saying that I do think this game is better than it is bad, but I feel myself constantly listing things that could've made the game great. I'll say some things I loved first: I loved flying, I loved combat, and I thought fast-travel being floo powder was genius. It is a very good Harry Potter sandbox. A good Harry Potter RPG...? Not so much. A lot of the good is just description and speaks for itself. So... I'll let you enjoy it if you play the game. Maybe you'll enjoy it better than I did! But... here's the main stuff I want to say... here we go...

!!! MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW !!!

Ultimately, this game took a lot of shortcuts:

1. Everyone refers to you as "they/them" pronouns so they don't have to rerecord anything. I thought this was so lazy, and completely undermines the experience as a man or woman in Hogwarts, and leaves everything feeling very bland, stale, and hollow.
2. Having only one Hogwarts House quest, which is just a side-thought for the main story while Professor Fig goes to the Ministry, is just lazy. Everything else about the houses is generic and does not reward you for choosing any of them; for example: you feel as close to Sebastian and Ominis as a Gryffindor and a Slytherin. Their house and the house you choose mean absolutely nothing aside from like one line of dialogue that developers could easily paste into an empty and meaningless box. And the same thing goes for all other students and the houses you or they belong to (Poppy, Natty, Nellie, etc.).
3. The House Cup is so astoundingly underwhelming. They don't even say your house by name, Professor Weasley literally just says the same generic thing that equates to this: the player is the only student in the school that matters, he/she/they completed the main story, and 100 points make their house the winner.
4. EVERYONE IS WAY TOO NICE. Even Sebastian, who literally kills his uncle, is hardly ever mean to you. He is always more your friend than your enemy. Everyone in the school is just super nice, maybe just a little arrogant. And no matter how mean you are, you still wind up being the relationship characters' friends anyway, so it kinda sorta means absolutely nothing.
5. I'm sorry, but Professor Fig's death was almost entirely meaningless to me. I chose the good path entirely. And As kind as I was, his presence in the game just felt like a tutorial, not really a mentor. His death was the equivalent of a tutorial narrator dying. In fact, I'd probably be sadder if Bruce Campbell died in the Spider-Man Raimi games, and you don't even see him. It's literally just a voice-over.
6. The South Shore area doesn't even change seasons. 'Nuff said.
7. The Headmaster canceling Quidditch for the year was a copout because Portkey didn't want to develop it, and nothing will convince me it was because of anything else.
8. No sitting down or sleeping? Really? What's even the point of your common room?
9. And worst of all... How hollow the NPCs and companions felt. There is no romance in a school full of teenagers, which... yeah right. Admittedly, I can excuse the romance as something that would've just been a personal preference (even though it is kind of ridiculous), but... I feel an actual negative was the lack of followers and being able to customize them. I would have loved to have Poppy, Ominis, Sebastian, Nellie, Natty, and so many others while free-roaming the world. Heck, Professor Garlick is basically still a student herself (she's only 18), having her as a follower who kind of still feels like a student along with the experience as a professor would've been a super cool type of follower. And how special would it have been to fight Ranrok with your favorite follower? Maybe they could have implemented a friend-group system where the game calculates your favorite student companions and places them in your party when you beat the game. The game even makes it a point to tell you through its themes that friendship and loyalty are some of the most important things about Hogwarts, despite your house. And the game does nothing to let you immerse yourself in it. Skyrim, Mass Effect, and even KOTOR are all older than this game, but those still let you change the appearance, level, and connect deeper with followers. You could even play most of the story with the same follower. And the funny thing is... Harry Potter and the Wizarding World are supposed to be more about friendship than any of the franchises from those of the three games I just listed.

Hogwarts Legacy is an open world adventure game packed full of secrets, exploration, puzzles, and map icons to clear. The extensive character customization options are clearly intended to offer a personalized role-playing experience, but the game's biggest strength is Hogwarts itself - a magical castle brimming with character and charm even muggles can appreciate.

The game's commitment to comprehensive representation of the Potterverse is commendable. Riding broomsticks, casting spells, exploring, and puzzle-solving all add up to a tonally unique adventure. In fact the vastness of the game is a bit overwhelming, which is why each new mechanism is doled out at a reasonable interval.

All of that being said, there is a lot of pomp and circumstance to the experience that slowly whittled away at my enjoyment. The game continued to unfold and expand even as I was hoping for the experience to contract and focus. If you want to live in the world of Harry Potter this game will devour your life, but otherwise it is just another oversized open world game with crown molding and a fireplace.

You're probably here for the movement: the main draw to a 'Spider-Man' game will always be the ability to swing from rooftop to rooftop, and this really does make the most of that with how drawn out its missions are, how much they make you use it, and how much it overshadows pretty much everything else about the game. It's well and good you can soar through Manhattan seamlessly, but it sucks that the micro movements suffer because of it - at times you'll have issues doing something as simple as jumping up a ledge as Peter Parker is so obsessed with doing flips that he physically cannot stop himself. Other times you'll be busy fighting you're 90th horde of Saber officers, or escaped prisoners and realise that the gameplay is getting stale, but you're only halfway through the story mode. This is not a bad game, but at its best its a Spider-Man open game sim which shows what could be so much more in the future