Hogwarts Legacy is such a labor of love, a game crafted with an incredible amount of respect for the source material. Hogwarts itself is a joy to explore, there's always something going on, people chattering, ghosts flitting in and out of various rooms, a million locked doors begging you to break into them. The rest of the game world is like this too, just absolutely littered with things to do and places to explore. Imagine my surprise when I randomly stumbled upon a whole ass dungeon to delve into out in the wilderness.
Characters are interesting, voice acting is good. There are some genuinely beautiful moments in the game. I definitely don't feel like it's "several generations behind" in the graphics department. I would kill for an in game photo mode so I could capture all of the moments where I stopped and looked around and just remarked to myself "wow, this is really pretty."
My biggest gripes about the game are honestly just nitpicks.
1) Your primary means of income is going to be selling old gear you don't need, and there's no way to mark those items as junk or for sale, so you have to sell each thing individually, and hold the button for several seconds to confirm the sale. It's cumbersome.
2) There is no way to queue up potions for crafting. Making healing potions? Cool. Takes 15 seconds. Then come back and collect your single potion and make another for 15 seconds. Fortunately, human enemies drop health potions pretty generously so this shouldn't be an issue, but that brings me to nitpick number....
3) Crafting seems mostly superfluous. The potions you can make, and the plants you can grow are mostly pointless. You can make a handful of interesting potions, but the effects are either too conservative or they don't last long enough to be worth the effort. The plants you can grow act sort of like grenades with various effects. Think borderlands with grenade mods. The only really good potion is the healing potion, and the only really good plant is the cabbage, of which three can be thrown at a time and will autonomously seek out targets to attack- and they're fuckin strong.
4) The magic loom isn't that useful until you're maximum level. The gear you find is leveled to either -1/=/+1 of your level. Because you find gear- good gear- so rapidly, it doesn't make any sense to make the effort to upgrade your equipment until you're going to have it for a very long time, as it stands, the upgrade costs are quite steep for something you're just going to dump the next time you find a treasure chest with a legendary in it.
Here's my wishlist for any WB developers or producers reading this.
1) Photo mode. The game is pretty, why not?
2) Allow me to sell things quicker, and give me a sell all option.
3) Extend the damage/duration/radius of plants and potions. They're just not very useful.
4) Radically expand the gear crafting. You gave me a whole ass magic loom, let me use it to make clothes. I want to be able to break down gear that I find into a base material, and then use that to craft something better. Even if the new item is of a random stat/quality/appearance, it's still useful because any new gear appearance you discover is permanently available as transmog. So even if I craft something with shit stats but it looks cool, that was still a worthwhile craft.
5) Make distant towns interesting by giving their merchants unique or cultural crafting recipes. As it stands, basically everything you ever need can be purchased in Hogsmeade. Any other town has at least one merchant for you to offload goods to, but they sell super generic stuff for the most part.
6) Let me queue up crafting and plant growing. If I don't make the effort to come back every <duration>, no crafting is being done. Once that one item is made all progress stops, and that's dumb. There's a house elf whose job is literally to tend the room, and he's just hanging out picking his nose. scrubbing the floor. Why if I have the materials to make 50 health potions can't I just dump all that shit in there? The pot is stirring itself with magic! But I can't put the ingredients on the table and they magically work themselves into the the pot? Or just make like a huge batch and bottle it all up? That's a bridge too far.
7) Sweet christ let me skip the lockpicking minigame. There are 3 levels of Alohomora. Level 1 unlocks level 1 locks, and so forth. Well, level 2 should skip level 1 lockpick mini game. Level 3 should skip level 2 and 1. It's not especially taxing or time consuming, its just annoying to have to do it so often.
TL;DR: The game is super fun, there's a lot of love that went into it. There's always things to explore and do and lots of side content, the experience only being hampered by minor annoyances. Even if you stripped away Harry Potter/Wizarding World anything, the game still stands on its own as a fun, captivating fantasy rpg. It is my most genuine hope the game goes on to do tremendously well, and we see this grow into a greater series of titles. 9/10
