![]() ![]() It?s even about combat and spell-casting. Given how much the heart of the Harry Potter story was really about the friendship between Harry and Hermione and that useless hanger-on Ron, it?s great to see you have the same opportunity to build up relationships here. As someone who doesn?t usually care for fetch quests, I was stunned by how quickly and how whole-heartedly I was throwing myself into helping an unpopular student find her gobstones, for example. It?s also interacting with other students. It?s seeing wizards who look and sound and dress every bit as eccentric as the books always described them. It?s seeing Peeves play tricks on students, or seeing ghosts roam the hallways, or seeing the paintings move. It?s petting the cats that roam the halls. It?s finding out that there are not only bathrooms in this version of Hogwarts, there are stalls within them that students have repurposed into snack rooms and potion-brewing stations. It?s not just scaling the stairs to take you to the top of the North Tower and finding the Divination classroom, it?s finding secret passageways that take you to mysterious rooms. You can ? and I literally did ? spend hours running around the castle, seeing what you can discover, and you?ll find that it?s the little things that make the world feel real and lived-in. I don?t want to get too deeply into it, but I can say that there?s enough here to carry the game through its dozens of hours of playing time, and if you?ve ever wished you were at the heart of your very own Potterverse story, this delivers on that.īut again, it does that more by allowing you to live out your dreams of being a Hogwarts student. The goblin rebellions are led by Ranrok, a goblin who sounds like a Cockney crime boss, and Victor Rookwood, whose last name is, of course, shared with a Death Eater. Your character is a chosen one of sorts, starting at Hogwarts at a later age than usual ? but it?s no Boy Who Lived situation, they just happen to have magic that helps them discover Hogwarts? rich history. To be sure, it helps that the story is pretty engaging too, blending together nods to the original Harry Potter series with flourishes all its own that feed into the game?s identity. It all feels magical, and I say that with the pun only partially intended. ![]() You meet other students and go on quests, helping you flesh out the world and discover every secret the school has hidden. You explore every nook and cranny, honing skills like arithmancy to open secret doors and using spells to uncover pages that tell you more about the game?s world. You go to classes like Herbology and Charms. But the real attraction here is playing as a fifth-year student at Hogwarts who?s a latecomer to her wizarding world education, and getting to discover what it?s like to be a student at that school. I mean, yes, officially you?re creating your own character and playing through a story about the goblin rebellions of the late 1800s ? and that?s fine, and I?ll get to it in a moment. It does so by making Hogwarts the star of the game. It contributes to that lore, and stands up as a worthy entry in the Harry Potter canon in its own right. If you?ve ever read Harry Potter or watched the movies, when you see places like Hogsmeade or the Forbidden Forest (to say nothing of Hogwarts itself) and see names like Weasley and Black it?s hard not to have all kinds of memories and feelings wrapped up in them.īut Hogwarts Legacy doesn?t just bathe in the reflected warm glow of nostalgia. In some respects, of course, it?s easy for Hogwarts Legacy to do that, since it has the weight of a few decades-worth of the Potterverse giving it substance. See, where Forspoken felt too insubstantial (and, frankly, mediocre) to deserve all the attention and debate it garnered, Hogwarts Legacy feels like something more ? something substantial enough that it?s easy to imagine having a strong opinion about, even if you?re just looking at it as a game, rather than as a symbol for some broader debate. And while you do that, I?m going to dig a little further into that Forspoken comparison. But let?s be honest: regardless of where you stand on?well, everything, you probably already know exactly how you feel about the idea of Hogwarts Legacy, and if you have a strong opinion one way or another, at this point you?re probably just looking for more content to either affirm your convictions or fuel your outrage.Īnd given how easy it is to find that content, if you?re after outrage or affirmation, I?ll simply direct you to literally the entire rest of the internet. In fact, given how large Harry Potter looms over the cultural landscape of the past twenty-plus years, it?s undeniably even harder to consider this game in isolation from everything being written about it. Much like Forspoken a few weeks ago, it?s kind of hard to consider Hogwarts Legacy in a vacuum given the state of The Discourse around the game. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |