Some great ideas, gameplay wise. Improvements to combat, such as positioning, made for a huge difference over its predecessor Y:LAD. Story however is... not great. Bryce's (I played with Japanese audio) VA's English was terrible and immersion breaking as was the fact everyone in Hawaii just... spoke Japanese? Made no sense and felt very corner-cutting. Bucket List, while having its tearjerker moments, was overall a letdown. A lot of teasing things with no actual payoff especially in the Life Links. I hope that the Daidoji is just done with after this because it wore its welcome now and story-wise it makes little sense to keep them around. The basic plot of the game was also confusing and Bryce's motivations are too much of a 'I evil because I want to be evil, muahahahah' vibe. Also, flanderising Ichi to just be a dumbass (T-shirts with Saeko at the end, really RGG?) was a baffling choice and one I can't get behind.

It does still have great moments, particularly in interactions between characters, but it fels like a lot of missed potential. Gameplay is great, story is... mediocre.

Also, locking New Game + etc. behind special editions / DLC paywalls was a scumbag move. Really disappointing.

It was a thrill to be back in the HP / WW again. Spells were fun, the map/s were stunning, the castle was a joy to in, broom flight was good and felt fast especially at lower altitudes and the story was good enough with some fun characters. I do feel like there's a lot of missed potential here though as it feels like a lot more was meant to be in the game that got cut. You only really do one class per topic and then never engage with the classes properly ever again (aside from cutscenes after doing a prof's assignment). You meet a bunch of characters in the beginning then most just never really have any part to play in the game after that with only a few (Sebastian, Natty, Poppy, Ominis and a couple others) consistently being part of the game (though some do have side quests but generally, outside of the characters I named, these are fetch quests or something similar). No Quidditch, probably due to technical / dev time limitations. In fact, it feels like a lot was cut due to dev time limitations or something. Hopefully, this wasn't WB meddling, but it probably was.

I really hope that the rumoured sequel vastly expands upon this because the core of the game is so good but it just feels like it's missing that bit more to really push it over the edge into something great. It doesn't help that so much side content is stock-standard collecting stuff (90+ Merlin trials, tonnes of revelio pages, collection chests, etc.). I really enjoyed the core characters and would like to see them expanded upon, but it would also be nice to see others get much more content / screen time with more relationship quest stuff and maybe make them feel like actual friends outside of this, too, because they practically disappear from the game after their quests are done, a shame because Poppy being so staunchly pro-magical beast and revealing that she came from poachers and she's a quiet studious person who becomes much more brave and outgoing was a good character arc and she's a great character herself, so the potential is there for others as well. Make me feel like I'm actually at Hogwarts!