So I recently played through Hogwarts Legacy, a game I've been looking forward to playing through ever since I saw one of the original trailers. And, sadly, the game really fell flat for me. I wanted to take this post to explain why.
I wanted to caveat here that I can easily see why others might have a phenomenal time with it. I'm just here to explain why the game didn't work for me (and by extension, why the game might not work for you).
1. Too Much Dialogue (for a guy like me)
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| Message from my cousin Joseph |
Yes, yes, to be perfectly fair to Hogwarts Legacy, I'm very much a certified story-hater in video games. This isn't to say it's the case with every game. Celeste hit perfectly for me. I'm 15 hours into Clair Expedition 33 and the story/writing has been phenomenal so far. How Hades story fit into the gameplay loop was peak. There's some good stuff out there for sure. Buuuut, overall I often find dialogue cumbersome and the story disinteresting. Gameplay is by far and away more important to me. But, even with that in mind, this game has SO much dialogue. I thought it was going to calm down after the first initial story, but nope. I watched a vast majority of the cutscenes, but ahhhh so much time with textboxes, just let me play the game! It didn't take me terribly long to start skipping every textbox imaginable, which did improve my experience. But that didn't even let me skip all the dialogue! Because many quests began with you just following another character as y'all walk and talk. It was not fun.
2. Overall Too Easy (and this fed into many of my other problems)
There's more I could write here, but it felt like opening a can of worms, so I'm going to attempt the path of not writing anything at all (besides this sentence, of course).
3. Combat (and spells) Quickly Felt Samey
Initially I enjoyed combat and thought the different spells were cool. However, and I think definitely in part because of the lack of difficulty, combat became very spell spammy. I was literally just pressing whatever spell whenever. And spamming roll.
The different enemies had different weakness and stuff, but I just rarely felt the need to exploit them. You could just mash spells and it would be fine.
4. The Bosses were Uninspiring
They frequently just felt like normal enemies with larger health pools. Which meant it wasn't any more fun and instead just felt more annoying if you died.
5. Didn't Feel an Incentive to Explore
Because the game was too easy, I felt no real desire to go out of my way to level up. And because the combat became disinteresting to me, that core gameplay loop wasn't appealing either. This meant I never cared to do any Exploration Challenges in the Field Guide.
Conclusion
I feel like I could dig into those five reasons more alongside a couple others, but the more I tried to dig, the more incredibly subjective it felt. The way I have it currently written feels somewhat objective, though, which I want. Because, like, fundamentally I can tell there's a lot of good stuff in this game (it's simply fun to be in the wizarding world, flying is just cool, the storyline is solid, you have other cool wizarding things besides spells like potions and beasts, big skill tree to explore, the Field Guide is plump with things to accomplish), so I can see why someone else might love it.
And there was enough for me, even with my gripes, to finish it. I rather enjoyed my first ~10 hours. Next 10 it was okaaay. Next 10 I was honestly dragging my feet just to finish it. So, sadly, I walk away from the game with a generally negative view of it, or, at least, my time with it.
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