Hogwarts Legacy
Hogwarts Legacy came out on February 7th if you preordered the Deluxe Edition, like I did. And have some thoughts about it after playing it for a few hours. Small caveat that I should mention before we continue: I haven’t gotten through a lot of the main story, and I won’t for quite some time because trying to play it on my midrange Dell G15 laptop is full of studders and lag, which I am attributing to not having a top of the line gaming laptop (I played a bit on my HP Omen tower, and the gameplay is a lot more smooth and the graphics are more beautiful). With that being said, here's my review.
Gameplay
Seeing as this is a video game, before we get to the story and some of the truly fantastical elements, we should first cover the gameplay and mechanics present in the game. The core gameplay seems solid from what I've experienced, although it would probably be better if I had hooked up my Bluetooth controller to my computer. It has standard WASD movement, Q is block, Control is dodge, R is the revealing charm, G is heal, F interacts with things, the mouse controls things, and 1-4 activate spells. The most annoying part of the mouse and keyboard setup is learning new spells: using a mouse and keyboard is a pain in the ass, and it shows that the developers focused mostly on the console experience over PC.
The menu is somewhat cleverly done: it starts off with a book motif, which I like, then as you go into the menus, you get something out of the likes of Destiny or The Division, which I don't like as much, I think the developers could have developed a better menu and inventory management system if they weren't so focused on the consoles, but that is going to be a common complaint when it comes to the gameplay and UI.
And then I noticed a couple of bugs and quest design decisions. The first was when Professor Wesley was walking me to class. She bugged out and had her back against the wall walking toward the railing of the staircase without moving. The second was when trying to get my wand. The prompt to start the cutscene with Ollivander did not show up, and I had to save and reload the game to get the prompt to show up. The one quest decision that really stuck out to me as a bad design was when trying to find a hidden treasure from a treasure map. In this case, I was able to find the location based on the clues, but I wasn't able to complete the quest because I hadn't gone to the first location. This took me quite a while to figure out due to me being more used to treasure hunts in the like of Red Dead Redemption, where you could jump straight to the solution if you knew where it was, you didn't need to do all the checkpoints.
The last thing I'll say about the gameplay is about the crafting. From what I have experienced, crafting is fairly basic. You get are able to collect some ingredients for potions, and then in select locations (potions classroom and the Room of Requirementa are the two I've encountered), you're able to brew potions, provided you have a recipe. These potions take a certain length of time (for the basic healing potion, one potion takes 10 seconds). This is similar to growing plants. With herbology, you have a pot to grow things in, and if you have the seeds (which appear to be a one-time purchase), you can grow plants for potion ingredients or combat aids. Like brewing potions, it takes time. The first plant you grow takes 10 minutes. Now, I am not sure if it is 10 real-world minutes or 10 in-game minutes, I'm leaning toward in-game minutes, and that's what annoys me about the crafting, it just takes too long.
Story and Characters
Now, this is an RPG, so there's a focus on the story and characters with interesting personalities. So far (at the time of this writing, I am about 10 hours in), the main story hasn't truly revealed itself. You play as a 16-year-old witch or wizard who somehow slipped through the cracks when he or she turned 11 and just received your Hogwarts letter. Because of this, you're starting as a 5th-year student, despite being your first year at the school. This could provide some interesting aspects when it comes to what your character knows about the magical world, but from what I could tell, it doesn't - you seem to know a lot about the magical world, but the developers didn't go into your backstory at all, so I don't know if we were raised in a magical household, in a muggle household, in a magical orphanage, or a muggle orphanage (if we are an orphan). With that being said, the main story appears to be that there's a dark wizard on the loose that may be related to a Death Eater featured in the books, and the player character can see powerful ancient magic that a very limited amount of people can see and interact with. Now, the player character is busy attending classes, catching up on the previous 4 years that were missed, unraveling the mysteries surrounding the ancient magic, and stopping the dark wizard from accessing the hidden secrets of the magical world.
The character creation leaves a lot to be desired. This game follows the recent design trend that I first noticed in Cyberpunk 2077: you can completely customize the character to the point of stupidity: in this game, you cannot create a male or female character. You can get to choose from different body types, some of which are male and some of which are female, then you get to choose voice types, which consist of different pitched male voices and female voices, and then finally, you can choose whether you're a wizard or a witch, regardless of what other options you chose. And then, during the game, none of the NPCs refer to you as a wizard or a witch, despite what you selected in the character creation segment, and I am sure that it would cost too much more to have two different sets of lines when talking to you or in your presence, games in the past have figured out how to do that, and I think the developers could have figured it out too. After the character creation, your adventure starts.
In your adventures, you'll meet a variety of characters with various personalities, and this is where my problems with the story and characters come into play. Keep in mind that this game takes place in 1890 rural Scotland. One of the first characters I met in my play-through was an Indian, which seems weird given the time frame, same with the student from Uganda. Uganda didn't become a country until 1996 and wasn't a British Protectorate until 1894 - which means that this student wouldn't be from any place with Uganada in its name because of the timeframe given. The groundskeeper is Korean, the flying instructor is Japanese, the charms professor appears to be a Muslim or Arab, the owner of the Three Broomsticks is a tranny, and I met an open lesbian during my adventures. In 1890. This amount of diversity is outrageous given the year that they decided to set the game in. There should be no reason for the amount of immigration from the particular regions I mentioned to rural Scotland and the acceptance that they experience seems unlikely. These characters break the immersion of the game. It's almost like the developers didn't even do any research for the years they wanted to set a story in. If I was designing a game set during the Revolutionary War in America, it would be absurd to have a bunch of Japanese in the area given how closed off Japan was at the time, and it would also be absurd to include things like an M16 rifle. Both things would be immersion-breaking, and the amount of token diversity featured in this game is immersion-breaking. Other characters you'll meet include ancestors of characters featured in the books and movies, including members of the Gaunt family, the Weasely family, and the Black family, and there are plenty of fun characters to interact with (first that comes to mind is the main quest giver Professor Fig).
Conclusion
Overall adventuring in and around Hogwarts is fun and it's about time that we got an RPG that puts you into the shoes of a wizard without being tied to the games. My only wishes were that the amount of diversity was in line with the given year that the game takes place in, that the character creation wasn't so absurd, and that the RPG elements featured in the game were more in line with other RPGs like Pathfinder Kingmaker, Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic, and other older games. I want more stats, I want a serious character sheet, and more customization when it comes to the gear - maybe that occurs later in the game, though. But the game design choices will naturally limit some of the customization, which is to be expected when you're trying to cater to the largest possible group and not people who want an in-depth gear system. If you're wondering if you should buy it for PC, I would say potentially wait for it to go on sale. The same goes for buying on console, but I would expect that the console experience would be better, so you might be able to justify the full price on PS5 or Xbox Series X/S.