Hogwarts Legacy A Magical Mess

Hogwarts Legacy is already set to be one of the best-selling games of 2023 it's a smash hit both commercially and critically boasts its unique and interesting combat open world design but most of all the magic of being in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter being able to pick your own house explore a fully realized Hogwarts Castle grounds and worlds around it riding broomsticks and hippogriffs learning fan favorite spells like Expelliarmus and Wingardium Leviosa Hogwarts Legacy boasts a lot of Triumph in successfully adapting that Mega franchise into a well-conceived and reviewed video game and because as a video game it is very good I find the mechanical aspects of this to be at shining point and have to give a lot of praise to developers of avalanche for how they've approached and made this game but Hogwarts Legacy doesn't exist in a vacuum it's very much built on how popular the franchise of Harry Potter is which is simultaneously its greatest Triumph and deepest weakness there really is only a handful of Mega franchises Star Wars Marvel DC Lord of the Rings and a few others they successfully are able to capitalize on multiple different mediums with each variation becoming iconic in their own rights Harry Potter is certainly one of these starting is a series of novels these books took off and heavily popularized the genre of young adult this moved on to the movies successfully and somewhat Faithfully adapting these novels into blockbuster hits all of which still sit on the highest grossing movie charts making Mega stars out of their leading actors since then it seems the franchises waned a bit I mean there hasn't been much out but with the Fantastic Beasts movie spin-offs starting off at a higher before its second and third films not doing nearly as well at the box office as for my experience with this franchise growing up my older sister was a huge part of Hit the moves were constantly playing and as a child I used to sleep listening to audiobooks and Harry Potter was constantly in the rotation so as a child I very much knew this franchise back to front this ultimately leads me to having a lot of nostalgia for this franchise while simultaneously finding myself liking it less and less as I got older I think in part that had to do with the addition to the franchise the stories on Pottermore with other aspects of the Brazilian World as well as the cursed child play and Fantastic Beasts are all pretty disappointing and led me to the conclusion that the whizzing World shouldn't be a franchise but instead should just really exist as it does through the novels and movies of Harry Potter so when it came to Hogwarts Legacy I was incredibly skeptical as I don't really believe anything of much quality has existed in this franchise since the last film premiered and to be honest I found aspects of the World building figure out the shallow for example the four houses they each have their own attributes Slytherin is ambition Hufflepuff his loyalty Raymond Clara's wisdom and Gryffindor is bravery at least on paper but within the story of Harry Potter how these houses are represented is almost completely one-dimensional slytherins are really just evil ravenclaws are largely irrelevant hufflepuffs are kind to a fault everyone really important and good is in Gryffindor I really believe there's a lot of fantastic motifs visuals and World building to build more of this Wizarding World on but likewise so many boxes the books write the World building into are harder to escape when they are sole used to tell the story of Harry Potter [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] s Legacy has a lot of parts to it but I really think the reason most of us were here was to create our own journey through Hogwarts being able to pick a character that looks like us or that we want to be like picking our own house and attending our own classes and explore the castle for ourselves this is an aspect where Hogwarts Legacy shines historian Hogwarts is a treat so many nods and references to the books and movies peas floating the corridors the classrooms looking equivalent to the movies the different colored robes and exploring the unique Conroy having a fully explored and laid out Castle in itself is a spectacular achievement to the most open world design largely focusing on horizontal outdoor areas like oceans fields and forests the many different floors rooms corridors and secret passageways there's always something to find in this famous castle one part that disappointed me about this rendition of Hogwarts though is particularly to do with the lack of character interactions in the game there are a handful of characters that you interact with at any meaningful level and only three dedicated relationship questline getting to know and explore your relationship with these characters I feel this is a missed opportunity as so much of the quests involving students at Hogwarts just feel like fetch quests when there is so much potential for so much more the relationship quests are built between three different characters that's why from Gryffindor to deal with and take down Harlow and his gang of dark Wizards messing things up for locals in hogsmead and Hogwarts Valley Sebastian from Slytherin as he explores dark magic and unforgivable curses attempting to heal his sister and Poppy from Hufflepuff taking down poachers and rescuing rare beasts it's strange to me as the game seemingly sets up so much more of these there's a Ravenclaw character Amit who seemingly is going to get his own and then just doesn't at all as well I'm shocked there are no dedicated ones for faculty the teachers in this game really stand out as unique characters with lots to explore such as sharp the potions master who has history as an aura I'm also disappointed by how little importance is given to classes and being at school in the later sections of the game at the start of the game the classes exist to do three things introduce you to students introduce you to teachers and to learn new spells once spells are learned these classes stop and for so long in a game about Hogwarts I felt so disconnected from being at school so much this game is going going through different Open Water areas doing the same repetitive activities I really would have appreciated less of that and more exploration of the characters and Hogwarts as well as making being at school a focal point given this game is inherently an open world action adventure light RPG a certain emphasis has to be on the action which in the Harry Potter universe is quite limited the stories are mysteries about teenagers in school and there's not a whole lot of extended combat scenarios and when they are they are visually depicted as basically shooting different colored lightning out of their wands while this works visually for a story about magic use it feels creatively bankrupt and what I've seen of the preview of this game I thought the combat was going to be one of the weakest points I could not be more wrong the combat certainly has some issues but at its core it's really great and unique system that has a fair amount of depth and kept me wanting to come back for more first of all the most basic concept is that there is a basic spell tapping the right trigger this does a pretty small amount of damage but has no charge time secondly all other spells are in categories the red spells are for doing a lot of damage such as bombarda the purple spells are for stopping enemies in their place such as depulso and yellow spells offer immobilizing enemies such as levioso on top of this there are also three unforgivable curses able to bend enemies to your will put them in immense pain or immediately kill them with courtesy and enemy also have other status effects the game also has a block and Parry feature blocking with protego sets your own bubble shield around you while timing it well allow allows you to stupefy the enemy who just sent it the balance between these options allows some really unique combat encounters levitating a group of enemies to then all explode them at once transforming one into a fiery Barrel to launch into another the game rewards creativity and experimentation combining different spell uses to take down hordes of enemies or particular strong one there is a major caveat to this how spells are laid out they're all attributed to a different face button and the d-pad is used to select different variations of this layout while I understand why this had to be done with the number of spells in use it felt slightly tedious in this section to constantly have to switch between different layouts and I feel as though even after 100 of the game I still was never quite efficient with it that's just how the combat works with the Spells though as there are other systems in news 2. the first being the ancient magic which I'll go into more on the story aspect but here it serves the function of being able to grab and throw objects at enemies as well as a charge meter to build up and then unleash a flashy animation to finish enemies it's very standard and acts just like a super ability in any other game and was a nice addition that flowed well the other major systems is that of potions and plants potions give abilities such as turning the player's skin to rock having clouds of lightning shoot around them or even just making spells more effective or recharge rates faster plants on the other hand have different abilities such as mandrakes to immobilize enemies and chomping Chinese cabbages to attack enemies of their own accord in fact these are an important addition due to the law of the world but the system here feels really Bare Bones and I generally felt myself forgetting they were there a lot of the time but I do really see a lot of potential in a sequel for this section of the game the enemy encounters are almost just as important as the combat itself and here we have some very obviously familiar ones giant spiders lurking through the Forbidden forests on the Highlands trolls and other famous Harry Potter beasts as well as poachers looking to capture and sell those beasts at a profit but I'll tell you the bulk of enemies are made between dark Wizards or ashwinders and the Goblin loyalists the Goblins are largely melee based meaning distance between them and you is Paramount to these encounters while against the dark Wizards a lot of your spells they can use too and I found these to be the most interesting encounters as I could be trapped in one of their spells as they couldn't mine the stealth is the weakest aspect of the system there's an invisibility spell and a potion that works a bit better but other than sneaking up to enemies to paralyze them that's the only part of the system there are no other spells or tools to get creative with or do anything more the combat system here works really well it's well executed for what it is even if there are some key points to focus in a sequel to fully iterate on what they've done here and is the best example of shining praise that I personally have for this game Hogwarts Legacy largely focuses on its wide expansive open world that is in essence very similar to equivalent Ubisoft open world games that many have either come to love or hate finding them to be shallow checkbox type games move you from the same sort of encounter to the next never really utilizing its potential and being too bloated and a lot of similar criticism can be given to Hogwarts Legacy as I would say these types of games are definitely its biggest inspiration in how it designs its open world there are a few key changes that make a world of difference and make the open world of Hogwarts Legacy unique in its own right while I've just been talking a lot about the combat and my Praises for it and how I always excited to enter a new combat encounter there are significantly less Bandit camps and combat Encounters in this open world compared to other equivalent action adventure games which only makes sense being a student at Hogwarts having 50 bander camps within a stone's throw from the school is a bit ludicrous and the world is designed with that in mind while they do exist these combat scenarios are limited the closer Hogwarts you are and when you're going to areas far away from Hogwarts or particularly dangerous sections like the Forbidden Forest these combat encounters increase in likelihood instead the true magic behind Hogwarts legacy's open world is getting you to experiment with the Spells physics and mechanics the game grants you with the first example of this is the Merlin trials these are the little puzzles dotted throughout the open world that involve playing with the systems the game presents you with such as rolling the ball into the correct slot using lumos to have butterflies follow you using fire casting magic to light torches in time or in specific orders performing platform puzzles and many more while these are largely basic puzzles they do get very repetitive the more you do them as the game doesn't design enough unique Encounters of this compared to how many there are I do appreciate that it's not all running Bandit camps to fetch quests and back again and how experimenting with these systems play with each other is Paramount to your open world here there's also unique spells built solely for these that aren't used for combat reperto to repair things lumos to light dark areas when guardium Leviosa to manipulate and move objects and want to turn invisible traversing the open world is an important feature as for the bulk of the game you'll be in the air either on your broom or riding the hippogriff which to me in theory would ruin a lot of the exploration of the World created here flying over the top but it feels the opposite the experiences here are to bring you to the ground largely to heighten your experience as instead of running through it albeit beautiful open world to get to an objective when you're on the ground in this world you're constantly engaged whether it's Merlin trials Collectibles quests or shops being able to quickly get to the next thing only heightens the feeling of exploration here hogsmeade is an iconic location from the story it's quaint cute wizard town which really has extraordinary atmosphere and Vibes their shops are everything the player needs and constantly going back to it my one gripe is that there is a protective bubble where you can't fly around hogsmeade which I just found annoying as I would love to have flown over the rooftops and seen others doing it making it feel all that more magical I just mainly found this Odd as you can fly around Hogwarts there are also a couple of other standard open world features collecting Field Guide pages to fill out your book each one giving you information and law about the world many readers of Harry Potter will be familiar with or even learn some new things collecting chests giving you cosmetic rewards popping balloons in the sky on your broom little traversal puzzles to upgrade your ancient Magic another important aspect of this game is beasts capturing them and storing them in your vivariums is crucial to upgrading your gear on items feeding them and petting them rewards them with certain amounts of aspects of themselves they will drop such as a feather a part of this open world and game is General is experience moments dripped in Nostalgia by this franchise and experience it firsthand finding a unicorn riding in a thestral seeing marching centaurs in the Forbidden Forest all come through in this open world customization is core to the experience in Hogwarts Legacy as the core feature on the premise of this game is that it's your Hogwarts Journey this comes through in the opening section getting to pick what you want your character to look like the section here is pretty robust similar to most other RPG games but admittedly I'm out of my depth here character customization is something I've never particularly cared about I make sure I don't actively hate how my character looks but I've never been the kind to spend ages meticulously changing minor features throughout the game this customization comes in many different forms first off is out of the want picking how you want your wand to look even if there's no practical difference is important part of your witch or Wizards identity I'm glad it's a feature even getting down to pick what Corbett like whether the phoenix feather the Unicorn here or the Dragon heartstring perhaps the most talked about aspect is that of choosing your house something many of us from our youngest moments reading the books and watching the movies is imagining what house we would be in I had the experience too for all the achievements play up to a certain point with each house and they are for the most part very similar a lot of the Aesthetics of the game change based on whatever house you've chosen to do with the colors in the emblem but of course you can only experience the common room of the house you pick and your school rope will be based on that house you pick and you cannot wear other ones other than that the experience is mostly identical there is one main quest which is different which involves finding the ghost of jackdaw for Slytherin this involves exploring a cave by the Black Lake underneath Hogwarts for Gryffindor this involves heading to a headless hunt event with nearly headless Nick for Ravenclaw this is doing a puzzle in the allery and the Hufflepuff is by far the most interesting meaning a retired Aura and operating to Azkaban to talk to a prisoner there they all finish the same finding jackdaw and then the rest of the game isn't that particularly relevant to your house gear customization is something I'm surprised is such a focal point there's so many different outfits hats robes scars glasses Etc how these work statistically is very simple each will have a category EG all glasses increased offense and it's very simple when you get a new one that either will or won't be better than your previous and you will sell the most powerful and keep the most now this could in theory work in a way which could end up looking like a freak of nature in a classic RPG sense but thankfully this game allows for full trans modification allowing to keep the statistics of an item while making it look like something else you'll also gain the ability to upgrade your gear using aspects that you've taken from the beast in your vivarium I use this particularly to role play more of a student when being in and around Hogwarts I was in house ropes similar in main missions and ones to do with the students while I was out exploring the highlands I would pick other gear eccentric robes and coats and other things while also wearing scars and gloves in Winter as it just seemed to make more sense I was a little disappointed the word around me didn't do the same in changes between Seasons students always wore the same things and the same standard house ropes there wasn't the ditching of the vest in summer or the additional scars or anything in Winter as well as in the movies we saw characters on weekends especially in places like hogsmeade ditched their Hogwarts ropes more casual gear while in this games students are always in the same robes no matter where they are or the circumstances it would have been nice to see more variety to bring Hogwarts alive a bit more through its NPCs the room of requirement is a very practical place for customization a dedicated room to stylistically plot out how you would like as being able to grow plants store beasts and brew potions upgrades through this are essentially buying blueprints from hogsmead to grow more plants and Brew more prones at once this was not something I experimented with all that much I basically just used it very practically in a layout I thought worked but there's a lot of opportunity to fully customize the room how you would like we start our journey in this game with the screen opening on our very late acceptance letter on Hogwarts a quick or long character customization Journey whichever you prefer and we're off with Professor fig and his friend in a carriage on our way to Hogwarts examining a strange artifact a dragon attack and a death later we take a journey with Professor fig to First a Seaside ruin and then to a deep Vault within Gringotts and lastly back to Hogwarts the introduction section is obviously a tutorial and it teaches basic movement and mechanics some basic cars like lumos and revelio and some basic combat perhaps most importantly it introduces us to the ancient magic system something that is entirely made up in the Harry Potter law for this game and it serves three specific purposes mystery mechanic and McGovern first off Harry Potter and the stories within Hogwarts have always been a mystery and ancient magic powers within your character are the great mystery here mysterious pensives and old teachers making you go through trials to make sure you're trustworthy and ready Secret locations in and around Hogwarts all related to this mystery it's the prime storytelling aspect of this game secondly as a mechanic I've already spoken about how the ancient magic system is used in combat and that's largely its purpose mechanically to make it more gamified while not necessarily sticking to the law of Harry Potter lastly as a MacGuffin see the ancient magic is more than just a mystery for our protagonist and fig it is also the power that our main antagonist ranrock and Rookwood are seeking both for separate reasons Rockwood is one of the descendants of the teachers that hit it for the first place and feels it's his Birthright to other power to do what with I'm not sure just be bad I guess as since that's usually all the motivation an evil wizard in Harry Potter needs meanwhile ranrock wants to use the power to fight back against wizard oppression which is an understandable cause but of course has to go about it killing every wizard he can and even goblins he deems as traitors combining these into one aspect is rather efficient of the writing stuff here but unfortunately that's my good things I have to say about the writing ends look the writing here is not horrible it's just rather Bland characters never really feel like they develop all that much particularly the protagonist and that's because of the way they've chosen to go about this game it's a weird mix with a blank slate RPG where you can choose who you want your character to be but they don't give any choice to said character the main story at least is pretty much completely linear with no real major choices that affect all that much of the outcome it almost would have been better to point the game in either direction a strong RPG Focus or a linear action adventure with a set character this weird mix in between feels disjointed that said it doesn't come close to ruining the experience as the main story is just not the focus of this game at all the best parts about this game come from exploring Hogwarts and the open world doing assignments for teachers and interacting with the beasts and artifacts the story of ancient magic of goblin Uprising and dark Wizards feels really quite shallow in comparison to so much else in the game the historical story of previous ancient magic users through pensives is all fine but I largely find it so contrasting to the world it's in because the HP novels were all on the premise of how good the writing was through the World building character development and storyline and this here just doesn't even come kind of close while the main story was quite lacking I found the Side Stories and content to be much more mixed there are lots of different quests not related to the main story a lot of these finding students within the castle or other witches and wizards throughout hogsmeads and the hamlets and doing one-off quests to help them with something this can be fetch quests clearing an area or exploring a cave they're usually quick and come with some reward and a very standard assignments are a common Quest particularly early in the game as you've started as a fifth year it's Paramount to catch up and in a gameplay sense this comes through teachers giving you extra assignments that have a few objectives that can usually be done within the world and then returning to them to learn a new spell I always really enjoyed interacting with the faculty and learning a new spell out of it was a great reward this also combined the feeling of being a student at Hogwart with the endemic open world which was fantastic the core to the side stories is really the relationship quests these are quest lines that are sent around one student you meet particularly early in the game and continues through the rest of it Sebastian sallow is a student near me in your first defense against the dark arts class he's a Slytherin and invites you to a dueling Club throughout the game you learned his sister Anne was cursed by a goblin and had to drop out of school due to being in so much pain Sebastian cares deeply for his sister and is willing to do whatever it takes to cure her meanwhile her uncle their Guardian has given up on a cure trying to make her life as comfortable as possible with the often disdain of other Slytherin friend ominous gaunt this relationship questline involves looking for old artifacts and notes usually involving unforgivable magic to try and find a cure what's really interesting about this questline is two main things first off through this line and Sebastian is how you learn the three unforgivable curses and to learn them you often have to pick what I would call the less moral choice in this questline this culminates with Sebastian killing his uncle in a duel and new and ominous deciding whether to turn him in or not another questline is that of natsai Omar a Gryffindor student you meet in your first charms class Natty as she's referred to through the rest of the game her story arc is about stopping a particularly bad dark wizard called Harlow who is in the highlands capturing hippogriffs and terrorizing residents of hogsmeade this storyline brings Natty into conflict with the law but most importantly her mother who is a teacher at Hogwarts this is a very standard story about someone wanted to do good and the forces that be discouraging her so it's up to you and naddy to set things right and in the end she goes so far as dying in front of the cruciatus curse to save her from hitting you the last major relationship quest line is Poppy Sweeting a Hufflepuff student you meet in your first care of magical creatures class poppy is a textbook animal lover or creature lover in this case not having really any friends and finding Solace care and companionship in the creatures that call the highlands their home throughout this quest line you save dragons and return their eggs work with centaurs and find the thought to be extinct golden snidgets these creatures are always captured by or in the pursuit of poachers The Twist this however is that Poppy's parents are poachers and she escaped by living with her grandmother who shares her sensibilities about creatures puppies questline ultimately culminates in her having a friend you and rediscovering the thought to be lost species these are the three relationship quest lines throughout the game I found them to be the highlight in the Storyteller all three characters here had their own unique backstory and characterization and find myself gravitating to their presence my major issue with this game in general is how there isn't more of this I'm genuinely shocked reading it a questline for each major house Ravenclaw is just kind of Forgotten even though that one is set up had these relationship quests function is always the same meaning a character in a class having a mainstreal request involving them then a relationship questline shoots off from there for Ravenclaw there is a character called emit met in the first astronomy class and from there you'll explore a goblin facility with him I was expecting the relationship questline to pop up from there as it's clearly set up for but just never does it's very evident this was left on the common room floor which Sparks my major issue with the game in general there's so much traditional open World gameplay here that it gets very repetitive May email there is enough actual connecting and smaller stories through the characters in this game really the lifeblood of the environment I'd easily trade plenty of the Highlands to have a quest lines with more students but particularly also the faculty there's so many interesting character types just waiting to be explored in this game and it's a really huge missed opportunity it never does maybe the inevitable sequel this will come to fruition but there's a frustrating feeling of being unfinished and underutilized Hogwarts Legacy is ultimately a game that shines brightly in a lot of areas Hogwarts and the surrounding areas are a joy to inhabit the combat is unique and has a real amount of depth there's a charm and an atmosphere that brings you right into your own Hogwarts experience but my issues still come down to having so much of the content in this world be repetitive open world tasks instead of exploring more about Hogwarts and its characters and truly creating your own Hogwarts Journey the really bright spot for this is how Hogwarts Legacy being well received and selling well definitely puts a sequel on the horizon where a lot of the good can be doubled down the bad can be changed and we can see new features such as quidditch a new environments and scenarios maybe even centering the sequel around the tri-wizard tournament would be cool I think Hogwarts Legacy is the best thing that this franchise has put out since the last book released and is a clear North Star forward for this franchise with a potential sequel learning a lot from the shortcomings of this game could create something truly magical thank you so much for watching this video If you enjoyed this video please leave a like and let me know what you thought of Hogwarts Legacy in the comments below I think my opinion was rather mixed compared to a lot of other people and so I'm really interested to think where you all thought about it if you want to see more please subscribe until next time cheers and have a good one

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Keywords: hogwarts legacy review, hogwarts legacy, hogwarts legacy gameplay, hogwarts legacy game review, hogwarts legacy PS5, hogwarts legacy PS5 gameplay, hogwarts legacy game, harry potter game review, harry potter game, hogwarts legacy combat, hogwarts legacy open world, harry potter open world, hogwarts walkthrough part 1, hogwarts gameplay, Hogwarts Legacy Xbox Series X, hogwarts legacy part 1, hogwarts legacy full game, harry potter, gryffindor, slytherin, ravenclaw, hufflepuff

Id: pr4b0rOEQ7w

Length: 28min 20sec (1700 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 20 2023