Where to begin with such a contested release? By saying I just found out that this is the same studio that made Dragon Ball Z Sagas. Do with that information what you will.
Exploring Hogwarts and the lands outside are probably the best thing about it. Hogwarts has a large amount of activities and simple puzzles to do with the main story trials having more difficult ones for at least someone as puzzle inept as me, conversations and flavor encounters to experience such as the humming knight, and more secrets than you could shake your wand at. Outside its a lot of nice vistas such as green hills, sparsely forested areas, the rather dreary coast and the forbidden forest with hamlets dotting your way down the roads. You'll find your fair share of enemy encounters outside of the settlements along with various simple Merlin trials and wildlife you can capture for your vivarium for resources. Unfortunately the Merlin trials have about as much variety as the korok puzzles in botw. You have about 7 or 8 versions and things are just placed more spaced out to "change it up". I don't go "wow" often but when I was riding the hippogriff over the water, it was definitely a beautiful site.
The game has a gear and loot system which I grow more tired of seeing in games by the day, but its not gear vomit levels like Nioh were you're getting 30 pieces of gear per encounter with .00000000001% parameter increases on them. Its inventory space does not condone itself to it enough. I don't know the exact number of slots you start with but it can't be much more than 25 and it maxed out at 40. I had to go to Hogsmead regularly to sell my stuff for paltry amounts of money, unless you're on playstation and do its exclusive quest at the time of writing this for an extra 10% selling bonus, like you get 60-200 a piece where things on average are a lot more than that to buy. You can upgrade your gear but it doesn't do much stats wise, the traits are really what matters when it comes to that which you have to find in chests or as rewards from challenges. You can transmog anything into any style of gear you've picked up or unlocked from challenges. I just wore the knights armor for the majority of my time. Not that I liked how my character turned out anyway. You can only choose from presets for the face with no option for actual editing from what I saw and I hated every single one. I'll also never understand not having a raw color picker for customization as its not like they were limiting themselves to "natural" hair colors here. The room of requirement, your personal resource farming center for stuff to craft potions and upgrade gear if you don't want to explore though you can't grow everything such as those damn horklumps, unfortunately doles things out in real time and does not progress while the game is off. Things can take between a few seconds to 30 minutes with the latter seemingly being exclusively for animal breeding. Placing items in the RoR also takes a specific resource called Moonstone that you can either generate yourself at a maximum of 30 a time every 10 minutes, if you place all 3 generators, or find outside while exploring which do refresh but I don't know how long that takes to happen. I spent a lot of time in the vivarium with the magical creatures, and you can find shinies of them in the wild. I haven't found many but I got a couple shiny birds which had shiny kids and a shiny giant toad. My amount of progression per session went down drastically once it unlocked but I knew this would happen and was looking forward to it. Nifflers are precious, must be petted and given all the love.
The story is easily its weakest aspect. Its was just so bland the entire time, and most of the side quests weren't much better. Honestly the only thing worth a damn writing wise was Sebastian's questline. The devs must have been slythrin sorted cuz they have so much more work put into them than the gryffindor or hufflepuff's and ravenlcaw's might as well not exist cuz you blink and miss him. I feel like the game also was intended to have companions follow you while you explore the world. Several times now have I strolled on up to a goblin or bandit camp and my character said something along the lines of "Theres a lot of them, and I'm without my friends" or "This will be tough since I'm alone". It must have been cut deep in development. Your main character is just a bland self insert with choices that lean towards the "good thing" or a little bit rude to get some extra money from quests but outside of that they're nothing. The vocal pitch you can adjust at the time of writing this is terrible as well. Move it anywhere from the middle and you're talking out of a tin can. The whole premise about ancient magic just never lived up to what it could have cuz this "ancient magic" just amounted to 5 to 6 finishers I was able to do outside of seeing what the painting people did with it when they were alive.
The combat wasn't asking much of me outside of color recognition and enemy awareness. Its kind of stiff and twitchy with not a lot of enemy variety and can be a bit hectic. Goblins have their several variants, dark wizards have theirs with just varying degrees of aggressiveness with maybe one unique spell to their name, spiders, wolves, big frogs and suits of armor of 3 sizes are what you'll run into outside of students in the dueling room. The enemy tracking is also absurd where the enemies will snap the distance between you, we're talking like 30 feet in a blink. Reminded me of Dark Souls' 2 absurd tracking. In terms of spells you have 5 damage types with one being exploration/puzzle focused (Control, Force, Damage, Utility, Curses) to choose from in the list of 27 and will need to memorize colors for shield breaking. "The game only has 27 spells! Skyrim has 100!" Yes it does and it is less than I expected I will agree but they are spells with vastly different properties and combo potential. Lift them up, slam them down, set them a blaze, freeze in place, stun after countering (with a perfect guard system), curse them for bonus damage and damage all cursed targets at one time to name some. How many of skyrim's spells are just strength progression of the 5 levels from novice to master and offer little else? I understand the mainstream is full on size queens and plenty of you want any reason to tear this game down but actually think about something other than size for once. Instead of having an arbitrary slot on incendio level 2, you just use the talent tree to give it its added ring of fire effect. Having to change spell loadouts mid combat is also kind of cumbersome as you need to hold down the cast button and then hit the corresponding dpad button to change. Better memorize all 4 loadouts of your 4 set spells once you unlock them. Odds are you're gonna find one combo that works and stick with it but you'll be hard pressed to actually be able to land it all unless you're fighting one on one.
I do wish the basic casting was more than a 4 hit where most of your damage from it comes from the final hit. You also have other items like chinese chomping cabbage (which are surprisingly strong), mandrakes, venemous tentacula and various potions to use during combat. Using the unforgivable curses was fun, and the devs almost didn't puss out on Avada Kedavra. That one shots anything and everything even with a shield including every boss enemy that I used it on with the exception of the final boss and a specific beast. There are multiple sectioned life bar enemies but I didn't run into any other than the final boss after getting the spell so I do not know how it interacts with them and if you have the "effects all cursed enemies" talent, it kills everyone afflicted. Sure it has a lengthy cooldown but there's plenty of talents and potions to reduce it. Speaking of the talent tree, you cannot get all talents from it unfortunately so plan accordingly. Leveling speed also drops hard at higher levels, requiring near 100% completion of all story, side quests, challenges and collectables to get to the max level of 40. Theres A LOT of collectables here, 1126 according to many. While its not even half of DK64, that still a lot especially since its required to get to max level, nevermind just as a completion percentage.
The flying controls seem to be a point of contention for a lot of people. Took me a bit to get used to especially since they aren't inverted out of the gate. The left stick controls your left and right turning while the right stick controls your up and down while the triggers are a speed up and a limited boost on top of the gear shift L3 click. This means you only have access to the x axis of the camera and can make things like the time trials more annoying to reorient should you miss a ring or trying to look and see what all the commotion is under you as you fly through the lands. I don't think they are awful by any means, I've gotten very used to them and can effortlessly do what I set out to but I do think either the triggers should have stayed where they are and the verticality be placed on the shoulder buttons or vice versa.
I had heard and seen video claiming the game was buggy and full of performance issues but I didn't run into much 0f anything. Other than the loading in after fast traveling, the frame rate was stable the whole time. In terms of glitches, I didn't get the quest locking or chest one. Other than clothing physics related ones that happened maybe once a session. I got stuck between a ruin wall and a cliffside and wasn't able to open the menus so I had to restart the game, but the game autosaves often so I had plenty of close saves to choose form and only lost like 30 seconds. I played unpatched on PS5 as well so nothing was fixed. So much when I played Scarlet, I either got lucky and rarely saw any issues or people are blowing it out of proportion.
TLDR: While it might not come off that way, I generally a fun time. Getting to run around a fully realized Hogwarts brought back memories of playing Chamber of Secrets on the PS2. This game right now is what I remember Chamber of Secrets being, just with a nondescript bland main character cuz self inserts and whatnot instead of loosely following a movie plot. The combat could have used more enemy variety, the story and other characters needed Sebastian levels of care, but the general act of exploring the world, uncovering secrets, petting your magical creatures and unleashing a killing curse on your foes surpasses that. Its not a 10/10 but certainly not a 1/10, probably a 6 or so maybe 7 if I'm feeling generous. Peeves is lucky he's already a poltergeist or he'd be on the receiving end of a Avada.
EDIT: I am dropping the score by half a star. This single player game would not let me even start it without downloading its newest patch at the time of writing this. There is no good reason to force an update in a purely single player title unless it fixes a gamebreaking bug. This update made the game run worse. I had literal slideshows and puzzle room not visually updating so I was just walking through blocks despite having little to no issues whatsoever on the unpatched game. I get stopping multiplayer connectivity without it but I have never seen a single player game just full on stop me without a patch before. Usually I can play while it downloads or just delete the update and play on my current version. I pray this isn't a sign of things to come. Might just never connect my stuff the internet from now on unless I'm buying a digital title and see how far I can get.
Exploring Hogwarts and the lands outside are probably the best thing about it. Hogwarts has a large amount of activities and simple puzzles to do with the main story trials having more difficult ones for at least someone as puzzle inept as me, conversations and flavor encounters to experience such as the humming knight, and more secrets than you could shake your wand at. Outside its a lot of nice vistas such as green hills, sparsely forested areas, the rather dreary coast and the forbidden forest with hamlets dotting your way down the roads. You'll find your fair share of enemy encounters outside of the settlements along with various simple Merlin trials and wildlife you can capture for your vivarium for resources. Unfortunately the Merlin trials have about as much variety as the korok puzzles in botw. You have about 7 or 8 versions and things are just placed more spaced out to "change it up". I don't go "wow" often but when I was riding the hippogriff over the water, it was definitely a beautiful site.
The game has a gear and loot system which I grow more tired of seeing in games by the day, but its not gear vomit levels like Nioh were you're getting 30 pieces of gear per encounter with .00000000001% parameter increases on them. Its inventory space does not condone itself to it enough. I don't know the exact number of slots you start with but it can't be much more than 25 and it maxed out at 40. I had to go to Hogsmead regularly to sell my stuff for paltry amounts of money, unless you're on playstation and do its exclusive quest at the time of writing this for an extra 10% selling bonus, like you get 60-200 a piece where things on average are a lot more than that to buy. You can upgrade your gear but it doesn't do much stats wise, the traits are really what matters when it comes to that which you have to find in chests or as rewards from challenges. You can transmog anything into any style of gear you've picked up or unlocked from challenges. I just wore the knights armor for the majority of my time. Not that I liked how my character turned out anyway. You can only choose from presets for the face with no option for actual editing from what I saw and I hated every single one. I'll also never understand not having a raw color picker for customization as its not like they were limiting themselves to "natural" hair colors here. The room of requirement, your personal resource farming center for stuff to craft potions and upgrade gear if you don't want to explore though you can't grow everything such as those damn horklumps, unfortunately doles things out in real time and does not progress while the game is off. Things can take between a few seconds to 30 minutes with the latter seemingly being exclusively for animal breeding. Placing items in the RoR also takes a specific resource called Moonstone that you can either generate yourself at a maximum of 30 a time every 10 minutes, if you place all 3 generators, or find outside while exploring which do refresh but I don't know how long that takes to happen. I spent a lot of time in the vivarium with the magical creatures, and you can find shinies of them in the wild. I haven't found many but I got a couple shiny birds which had shiny kids and a shiny giant toad. My amount of progression per session went down drastically once it unlocked but I knew this would happen and was looking forward to it. Nifflers are precious, must be petted and given all the love.
The story is easily its weakest aspect. Its was just so bland the entire time, and most of the side quests weren't much better. Honestly the only thing worth a damn writing wise was Sebastian's questline. The devs must have been slythrin sorted cuz they have so much more work put into them than the gryffindor or hufflepuff's and ravenlcaw's might as well not exist cuz you blink and miss him. I feel like the game also was intended to have companions follow you while you explore the world. Several times now have I strolled on up to a goblin or bandit camp and my character said something along the lines of "Theres a lot of them, and I'm without my friends" or "This will be tough since I'm alone". It must have been cut deep in development. Your main character is just a bland self insert with choices that lean towards the "good thing" or a little bit rude to get some extra money from quests but outside of that they're nothing. The vocal pitch you can adjust at the time of writing this is terrible as well. Move it anywhere from the middle and you're talking out of a tin can. The whole premise about ancient magic just never lived up to what it could have cuz this "ancient magic" just amounted to 5 to 6 finishers I was able to do outside of seeing what the painting people did with it when they were alive.
The combat wasn't asking much of me outside of color recognition and enemy awareness. Its kind of stiff and twitchy with not a lot of enemy variety and can be a bit hectic. Goblins have their several variants, dark wizards have theirs with just varying degrees of aggressiveness with maybe one unique spell to their name, spiders, wolves, big frogs and suits of armor of 3 sizes are what you'll run into outside of students in the dueling room. The enemy tracking is also absurd where the enemies will snap the distance between you, we're talking like 30 feet in a blink. Reminded me of Dark Souls' 2 absurd tracking. In terms of spells you have 5 damage types with one being exploration/puzzle focused (Control, Force, Damage, Utility, Curses) to choose from in the list of 27 and will need to memorize colors for shield breaking. "The game only has 27 spells! Skyrim has 100!" Yes it does and it is less than I expected I will agree but they are spells with vastly different properties and combo potential. Lift them up, slam them down, set them a blaze, freeze in place, stun after countering (with a perfect guard system), curse them for bonus damage and damage all cursed targets at one time to name some. How many of skyrim's spells are just strength progression of the 5 levels from novice to master and offer little else? I understand the mainstream is full on size queens and plenty of you want any reason to tear this game down but actually think about something other than size for once. Instead of having an arbitrary slot on incendio level 2, you just use the talent tree to give it its added ring of fire effect. Having to change spell loadouts mid combat is also kind of cumbersome as you need to hold down the cast button and then hit the corresponding dpad button to change. Better memorize all 4 loadouts of your 4 set spells once you unlock them. Odds are you're gonna find one combo that works and stick with it but you'll be hard pressed to actually be able to land it all unless you're fighting one on one.
I do wish the basic casting was more than a 4 hit where most of your damage from it comes from the final hit. You also have other items like chinese chomping cabbage (which are surprisingly strong), mandrakes, venemous tentacula and various potions to use during combat. Using the unforgivable curses was fun, and the devs almost didn't puss out on Avada Kedavra. That one shots anything and everything even with a shield including every boss enemy that I used it on with the exception of the final boss and a specific beast. There are multiple sectioned life bar enemies but I didn't run into any other than the final boss after getting the spell so I do not know how it interacts with them and if you have the "effects all cursed enemies" talent, it kills everyone afflicted. Sure it has a lengthy cooldown but there's plenty of talents and potions to reduce it. Speaking of the talent tree, you cannot get all talents from it unfortunately so plan accordingly. Leveling speed also drops hard at higher levels, requiring near 100% completion of all story, side quests, challenges and collectables to get to the max level of 40. Theres A LOT of collectables here, 1126 according to many. While its not even half of DK64, that still a lot especially since its required to get to max level, nevermind just as a completion percentage.
The flying controls seem to be a point of contention for a lot of people. Took me a bit to get used to especially since they aren't inverted out of the gate. The left stick controls your left and right turning while the right stick controls your up and down while the triggers are a speed up and a limited boost on top of the gear shift L3 click. This means you only have access to the x axis of the camera and can make things like the time trials more annoying to reorient should you miss a ring or trying to look and see what all the commotion is under you as you fly through the lands. I don't think they are awful by any means, I've gotten very used to them and can effortlessly do what I set out to but I do think either the triggers should have stayed where they are and the verticality be placed on the shoulder buttons or vice versa.
I had heard and seen video claiming the game was buggy and full of performance issues but I didn't run into much 0f anything. Other than the loading in after fast traveling, the frame rate was stable the whole time. In terms of glitches, I didn't get the quest locking or chest one. Other than clothing physics related ones that happened maybe once a session. I got stuck between a ruin wall and a cliffside and wasn't able to open the menus so I had to restart the game, but the game autosaves often so I had plenty of close saves to choose form and only lost like 30 seconds. I played unpatched on PS5 as well so nothing was fixed. So much when I played Scarlet, I either got lucky and rarely saw any issues or people are blowing it out of proportion.
TLDR: While it might not come off that way, I generally a fun time. Getting to run around a fully realized Hogwarts brought back memories of playing Chamber of Secrets on the PS2. This game right now is what I remember Chamber of Secrets being, just with a nondescript bland main character cuz self inserts and whatnot instead of loosely following a movie plot. The combat could have used more enemy variety, the story and other characters needed Sebastian levels of care, but the general act of exploring the world, uncovering secrets, petting your magical creatures and unleashing a killing curse on your foes surpasses that. Its not a 10/10 but certainly not a 1/10, probably a 6 or so maybe 7 if I'm feeling generous. Peeves is lucky he's already a poltergeist or he'd be on the receiving end of a Avada.
EDIT: I am dropping the score by half a star. This single player game would not let me even start it without downloading its newest patch at the time of writing this. There is no good reason to force an update in a purely single player title unless it fixes a gamebreaking bug. This update made the game run worse. I had literal slideshows and puzzle room not visually updating so I was just walking through blocks despite having little to no issues whatsoever on the unpatched game. I get stopping multiplayer connectivity without it but I have never seen a single player game just full on stop me without a patch before. Usually I can play while it downloads or just delete the update and play on my current version. I pray this isn't a sign of things to come. Might just never connect my stuff the internet from now on unless I'm buying a digital title and see how far I can get.
2 Comments
@NOWITSREYNTIME17 I really need to play Prisoner of Azkaban one day.
NOWITSREYNTIME17
2 months ago