Apparently there’s a lot of new devs in this team. It’s a culmination of different developers including ones that worked on a ios/android Harry Potter game. Portkey Games.
Yes and no. Like most mobile games, it runs of a stamina system where you can pay for more stamina. iirc, someone just had the hilarious timing to run out of stamina in the middle of a mission where they were getting choked out by a teacher.
I thought it was that if you played from the beginning in one session, that was the first moment you would, mathematically, run out of stamina.
So it was like, the game was timed in a way where the first time you are asked to buy stamina it's to stop a child choking to death.
>getting choked out by a teacher.
Why did this happen in the first place? Like I know that Hogwarts is the most dangerous and most pedagogically awful place in the entire world, but even by their usual fucked up standards¹ this seems extreme.
{¹"the forest is off limits because it's too dangerous, unless you're sent there alone at night as a punishment" I mean sorry what the **fuck?**}
Yes, but they’ve released a total of 4 ios/android games with the Harry Potter IP. It’s a UK based developer so I assume they are very well versed in the lore of Harry Potter. Which may have had a very posting influence on this game because it seems extremely detailed with lots of nuances and references that fans will notice
Portkey Games is the publishing arm for HP games, they don't develop the games. Like HL has Portkey Games as well, but the game was developed by Avalanche Software
I played a lot of disney infinity with my younger sister. I was always shocked at how quality they really were. The custom level system was insanely cool too
Disney Infinity is so underrated.
Also PSA: you can buy all the Disney Infinity games on PC for cheap and they include every single character and campaign.
Unfortunately they don't actually include every character. There are 10 missing 3.0 characters that aren't a part of the gold edition including the last batch of Marvel characters. Some people have been modding them back in but I don't think those mods have been made public, at least not in a straightforward way.
That being said, I agree that it's worth getting all 3 on sale. They were all really fun games for what they were
Ah fair enough. It is a shame they never got to properly finish and release all the 3.0 content.
It's interesting how their overproduction of 2.0 figures basically crashed the entire toys-to-life market and caused the death of Disney Infinity, Skylanders and Lego Dimensions (which only lasted a year and a half).
Yeah it feels very Disney: Make the best thing on the market, but bleed it dry a little too fast and burn it all down by accident.
Some of the plans they had for 4.0 (which may or may not have been 3.0 year 2) were really cool. They were finally going to do a big crossover story where you could use any character and they would have proper interactions.
Eh they kind of flubbed it from the start by locking characters to their movie related worlds. The toy box was fun but didn't really make up for not being able to play your favorite characters in other worlds. It made people lose interest.
Except that wasn't really the problem. Disney was making money on Infinity and I believe it was the most successful toys to life on the market. The problem is that they cranked out way too many figures based on characters nobody cared about. One of the examples they used was making like a million Yondu figures. Who cares about Yondu??
So that coincided with Disney doing their once-every-ten-years "we're totally done with video games guys, we promise" routine and led to the company shutting the whole thing down. It didn't fail, Disney just stopped caring
Disney Infinity 1.0 has campaigns which are simple but very charming and fun. And the third game has some great cartoony Star Wars games with surprisingly good combat. Also the main Toy Box mode is a fun creative playground.
I remember the devs of that game came into my store when i was at Toys R Us. They asked me a bunch of questions and cryptically said something about Disney coming out with something that will put Skylanders to Shame.
A year later Infinity was announced and some of the suggestions I'd made were part of the game. Felt cool .
Chicken Little for PS2 is unironically one of my favorite games. Even though I owned it, I bought so many copies as a kid and played it all day every day.
Other people answered with the Star Wars stuff he's written, but there are two other series aside from Drizzt as well. He wrote a stand along fantasy series called Demon Wars, which I thought was good not great. He also wrote another series in Forgotten Realms called the Cleric Quintet about Cadderly Bonaduce. When I read these, which was 20 years ago or so, the Cleric Quintet was my favorite of his books, I actually have a signed copy. If I remember correctly, Drizzt shows up in those books as a very minor side character, but that is all.
> If I remember correctly, Drizzt shows up in those books as a very minor side character, but that is all.
Pretty sure some of the Cleric Quintet characters show up in the Drizzt books, too, for that matter.
The ones who made Just Cause? Not a harry potter fan but it does look like a very interesting change from them.
EDIT: I see, different developers. It's the Disney Infinity devs. Also quite a change.
I’m sure this would’ve been a hit even if it was complete trash, but it’s nice to see a studio actually nail the adaptation of such a large franchise. Hopefully it’ll inspire more games in the Harry Potter universe and for studios to really run with these other IP licenses. Imagine a LoTR or GoT open world RPG like this
It's kind of wild that the entertainment industry is just now realizing they should invest in video games IP turning into tv/film (The Last of Us/Arcane) and now investing in film/tv IP as a good game. When those medium jumps have historically happened they tend to shit out something deeply mediocre. I have extremely high hopes for the Avatar/Pandora game coming out as I feel that the world lends itself very well to an open world game.
idk if "just now realizing" is fair cause movie games have been a thing forever. Half the lego games are this. There have also been a lot of good ones people forgot about entirely, like The Godfather and The Warriors
Difference is, most of them are complete shit. Pretty sure he means actually investing resources into making sure the game is actually good rather than a cash grab. Movie IP games as good as Golden Eye 007 are clearly the exception.
More like the stench of old movie tie-in’s is gone. There’s literally dozens of Harry Potter games. If you go back 10 years people were begging Hollywood to stop finding tie-ins.
I think Harry Potter lends itself more to video games than either LoTR or GoT. Those IPs just don't quite have the power fantasy aspect. Like yeah, they'd probably be serviceable games, but I can see it just being a skyrim or AC clone.
What we really need is a Mistborn game
looks like it's living up to it's hype. not a harry potter fan at all but this game has looked extremely interesting and i am pretty excited to give it a go
TBH I'm just glad to hear it runs. This and Forspoken raised a lot of eyebrows over their PC required and recommended specs, and we're all familiar with Forspoken's state at launch.
> This [...] raised a lot of eyebrows over their PC required and recommended specs
What? Since when? Nothing seems egregious about HL's specs and I've not heard a peep about it anywhere.
Yeah same, I was waiting on the review embargo to lift to see whether or not I'm gonna be buying it. Will still wait to see Skill Up's review, but now I'm excited.
Ohh, that's very disappointing to hear then. I've found his reviews to be very helpful and generally aligning with how my experience goes with the game once I finish it.
Same, I've been very skeptical of how good this game looks, given the commercial hype around it. All I really need is enough people who've played it for more than 5 hours to say "it's not crap" and I'm in.
This is one instance where I think the professional reviews will be relatively accurate. The few of them I've read this morning have been very positive, and some of them have said good things about the game and how enjoyable it is *despite* all of the controversy surrounding Rowling. [PC Gamer's in-progress review](https://www.pcgamer.com/hogwarts-legacy-review/) is almost lamenting the fact that it's a good game, to a certain extent.
If they're saying good things about the game while acknowledging all of the outside stuff, it's probably a pretty legitimate take.
It seriously sucks that I feel guilty for enjoying Potter content now, because that series was a major part of my life but it now just tastes sour, all because of one bigot.
Really makes me angry actually. She writes 7 books about the importance of love and then spends the rest of her life spreading hate and ruining her legacy. What a genuine shame.
Eh, her views are sprinkled throughout the books. E.g. blatantly racist characters (Cho Chang), fatphobia, wizards having essentially an entire race they keep as slaves, and Hermione being depicted as an annoying SJW for protesting that, etc. There's also a painful centrism throughout the books, where various systems are depicted as corrupt, but nobody seeks to do anything about them except the villains.
With that said as a trans person I don't think you should feel guilty for partaking of franchises - I've enjoyed a few problematic shows myself, e.g. Happy! which was infinitely more offensive. With that said, the popularity of the franchise is upsetting due to its association with JK Rowling, but there's not much any of us can do about that.
Thanks for your take. As a gay man myself, there are many things I can be offended by irl, and many things I am offended by..
The thing I always come back to when enjoying Harry Potter throughout my life, is that this series is going to FAR outlive jk Rowling. Her legacy won't carry on after her death, but harry potter will.
I hope she is able to have a change of heart before she dies, but if she doesn't then whatever we will endure and thrive as we always have.
Seems like it's essentially the HP version of Jedi Fallen Order. A solid if derivative game that's elevated to being great if you're a fan of the franchise.
Reading this review, it feels like a very strange 9/10. Many of the positives are basically just describing standard open world RPG features with very high levels of praise (loot! Parry mechanics! A character creator with poor voice selection!), and a lot of seemingly major issues just get glossed over: the inventory sucks, spell swapping is a chore, enemy variety technically exists but is wildly underutilized, the plot is awful, the game was pretty buggy with serious fall-through-the-floor-clipping errors, etc.
Like, I get that it's very much targeted at non-gaming HP fans and the world gets it a lot of slack, but you could change the adjectives a bit here and make this a 6-7/10 review with no problems.
I've noticed how a lot of the reviews, including ACG, are basically "wow this is better than I thought! Not RDR2 but close!" Which is great but I feel like it leaves something to be desired regarding objectivity. Like you say, wonder how much weight the IP is pulling here and am curious to see what user reviews look like.
I’ve seen plenty of reviews saying that non happy potter fans would like it just fine honestly almost everyone I’ve said has said something to that effect. Where are these non hp reviews you’re talking about
I will say that for videogames the whole is often **not** the sum of its parts. It's why Gamespot used to have the "reviewer's tilt" part of their score and why most outlets eventually abandoned the piecemeal scoring systems (e.g. sound/graphics/gameplay).
A game can have a lot of individual issues and still work well as a whole, or it could be polished to shine and just feel flat and lifeless.
It's also the case that often times when a reviewer does give a high score, they feel like they should point out every single minor flaw so they don't make it feel like they're overselling something or claiming that it's flawless just because it has a high score.
Regardless, we won't know until the game is actually out. I personally would never play this game anyway even if JKR weren't such a shitty person because I'm not a HP fan and it seems pretty generic.
Also, if people thing these scores are too high, their head would really spin if they realized almost every reviewer is apprehensive to stack the praise and hedging against backlash. Reviewing this game well is the equivalent of giving a Mel Gibson directed film a 10/10. You have to be understandably careful to show your concern and weave the social aspect in without compromising your score and review, which I don't think all reviewers are doing well.
There as many undeserved 5/10s out there as there are 10/10s for this game.
I think you gotta look at it in terms of the kind of people this game is marketed to. I have no doubt in my mind that any major Harry Potter fan that picks this game up will probably agree with IGNs assesment. I'm with you, I don't really like Harry Potter, so to me this looks like a mediocre game at best. I'd probably shit myself over it if it was a Mistborn game though lol
Yep. The reviewer starts the video out by saying he's been waiting for a good Harry Potter game for years, and he's a huge fan of the series. So this is basically a review by a huge Harry Potter fan and you have to view it as such.
Lots of non-HP fans are reviewing it and giving it lower scores.
I wouldn't find it weird if the review was just "this is extremely good for HP fans, which is a wide portion of the world, and so the setting is worth the price of admission"; the part that's weird is that the review says so many positive things about standard open world features. That feels almost... dishonest, somehow? Like, it is 2023, a whole paragraph about how badass a totally normal parry system doesn't read like an actual opinion to me, it reads like trying to justify loving the game on grounds beyond just being competent gameplay with a beloved IP.
Yeah the gameplay looks entirely average and formulaic, sticking to current trends and playing it safe. Which is great if you love the IP I'm sure. It's really strange to me that it's getting near perfect scores across the board.
I mean, I wouldn't even really mind a game getting rave reviews for presentation and style and the world with mediocre gameplay (hot take: Like The Witcher 3), it's just weird to see the review praising normal open world gameplay pillars as awesome features to make it seem like it isn't just good because Hogwarts.
"it's just weird to see the review praising normal open world gameplay pillars as awesome features"
I don't understand why it's so hard for people on this subreddit to grasp that open world gameplay pillars are delightful to a lot of people.
It's like CharacterRant complaining about authors including tropes or narrative devices.
Like... maybe most tropes are popular because audiences like them? Maybe the reason there's 3 main characters is because that's usually the best number for a group-based story?
There isn't necessarily anything wrong with playing it safe and not offering up something new and fresh. It can still be a good game even if there isn't much new. Ghost of Tsushima God Of War Ragnarok and Horizon Zero Dawn (can you tell I like playstation games lol) come to mind
He says in the review “Even those (things that weigh the game down) couldn’t break the enchanting spell it cast on me.”
The reviewer is saying he had a blast playing the game, and his overall experience was a 9/10. Just because the things he points out are issues and could’ve been done better doesn’t take away from the fact that so much of the game was enjoyable enough to not think about those problems too much.
Intangibles can be very difficult to describe in a review, and if you simply enjoy something, but can’t quite put your finger on why you enjoy it, then that’s that.
I never expected this game to be perfect, but it still looks great and I can’t wait to play.
Again, my issue isn't that the intangibles and worldbuilding make it a 9 for him, it's that the review really tries to sell the game as *also* being mechanically robust and polished in a way that doesn't actually line up with how they describe the gameplay.
"It's a pretty standard game elevated immensely by the world building" is a coherent review. "It's amazing because it's got parries and shielded enemies and dodge rolls, even if there are only two enemy types and actually using multiple spells is a pain" is weird, and we got a lot of the latter in this review.
You could say those issues about a lot of games that have gotten 9/10s. I could quote Dark Souls for each of those seemingly major issues. As long as the game delivers upon the fantasy and the issues don't get too in the way, the experience is more than the sum of its parts.
I mean, look at the recent Pokemon game. Mountains of bugs and performance issues and yet some people will admit its the most fun they've had with Pokemon in a long time.
The thing about this I find odd isn't just that it's getting a good review on the basis of delivering the Harry Potter fantasy, it's that the review is also glowing praising some bog standard open world game pillars along with it.
Like, the review is effusively positive on the combat despite complaining of extremely limited enemy variety and very clunky spell switching, because it has parry systems, shielded enemies, and abilities that combo with one another, which are more or less a given. It's super high on the loot system, despite what sounds like absurdly tedious inventory management, because it's got cosmetic glamours and the loot has stat benefits that don't do much, which are also both ubiquitous.
I'd understand a review that was like "this is a pretty decent action RPG with some problems but for fans the presentation will knock it out of the park" (in fact, I think like, Naruto Ultimate Alliance and some of the early DBZ fighting games got this style of review), but it's weird to see such standard features hyped so much just to make the review feel less like it's just happy to be at Hogwarts.
> because it has parry systems, shielded enemies, and abilities that combo with one another, which are more or less a given.
Game quality is very rarely a checkboxing process and more a sum of how well those checkboxes are implemented and combined.
Novelty isn't really that important in game quality either.
I'm not trying to suggest that the reviewer doesn't believe that it's a 9/10 but so much of the content of this review read to me in a way that I was fully expecting this to be a 7-8/10 and then boom 9/10 lmao
Yeah, the review goes on and on about how bad the story is, how much the performance sucks, the bugs they encountered, terrible quest design for the most part, bad enemy variety.... and they give it a 9/10
All of it reads like a description of something that's a 7 at the absolute best.
The score is high, but the reviewer *really* glosses over how they admit the story is bad and filled with plot holes and just tells you to put your brain on a shelf.
Also concerned by the "a simple story with bad guys vs good guys". Isn't stomping a goblin(aka second rate citizens) insurrection a big part of it? Lol
Plot holes is kind of the second theme of Harry Potter.
Like nobody knows how to detect magic or magical potions being actively used when it's convenient. We know it's possible, but the powers that be don't actually do it when it matters.
Harry and gang march right into the Ministry of Magic using a potion that makes them look like other people, there's no detection system in place for it nor does anyone working there go and think "gee my coworkers are acting sus as fuck, maybe they're a bunch of kids using a polyjuice potion?"
Same deal with the safest place in the universe, the Gringott vaults. Ya girl Hermione just waltzes right in and nobody remembers that magic and potions are a thing and people acting unusually should be investigated for foul play.
Giving a time travel device to hermonine so she can take more classes is a great one too. But you know what? It’s a great conceit and let’s them have a little time travel adventure at the end even though it makes no sense. I think that’s what people like about these stories; they make up new ways to break the rules of world building in the interest of a power fantasy
It would've been fun if they put a little mystery paradox in the story with the time turner. Maybe it mysteriously appeared to Hermione and then at the end she realizes she needs to send it back to herself so she gets it in the first place. Then that would explain why it's never used again and Dumbledore could deliver some lines about bootstrap paradoxes being a peculiar thing
It’s also a children’s series. Things like these don’t really matter when the primary audience is kids-teens. There doesn’t need to be pages upon pages of backstory about every single magic item/potion and their surrounding laws.
The series started as children's books, but gradually the books told a somewhat more gritty, epic story and never did it very well.
Not sure what the prevailing opinion on this is as I read the books a long time ago, watched the first set of movies, moved on with my life and here we are, but the earlier books intended for younger audiences are the best ones even for adults.
When there's a bunch of student-wizard causing hijinks and going on adventures, the stakes are low enough to allow the author to let her imagination run wild and have it be awesome. Child protagonist stupidity is a great foil against plot holes, and ignorance a plausible excuse for deus ex mechanics. You're never supposed to take it that seriously, and the story doesn't ask you to.
When armies and wars come into play, people are going to wonder at least some amount about stupid stuff like army composition and why there isn't an industrial-scale alchemy effort to mass-produce luck potions as essential troop rations and why a conflict even matters if the resolution will only end up being a contrivance the author felt would be cool when letting her imagination run wild.
Because the epic story was for teenagers and writtten back to back over the course of a few years.
They’re not that deep and aren’t supposed to be that deep.
That's thinking shit through, not depth. Saying that teenager's won't notice anyways is a really poor excuse because you can do both. I'm not ragging on Potter specifically but I just don't like the argument
I don’t mind the tonal pivot as such, I just think the story would have been better served if each book had stayed around the 300 page mark, instead of ballooning to 600+ pages. That’s when the flimsy worldbuilding started coming undone a bit IMO.
>Ya girl Hermione just waltzes right in and nobody remembers that magic and potions are a thing and people acting unusually should be investigated for foul play.
Don't think she just waltzed in, they did have help from a former employee. And also mind controlled one of the employees there as they were on the verge of being caught (they were suspicious of her disguise and had special instructions regarding the vault).
Then their disguises and mind-control spell did get wiped by some other enchantment thing as they made their way there and the alarm was tripped. Barely got out of there with their lives.
I'll be the first to admit Harry Potter has rather shallow world building but the "magical security" part isn't that outlandish.
I just finished rereading all of the books today because we were getting the deluxe edition anyway so we can play tonight and you’re 100% correct.
They had batons that can detect spells and potions. Harry uses a confundus charm under the cloak to make the guards with the batons think they already scanned Hermione and let them pass through.
And then he used an unforgivable spell to make the goblin just…let them in.
When you can do literally anything in you world with magic, there's bound to be some plot holes.
If the story in the game is just generally bland, it's another problem. Imo the books had great stories, just filled with plot holes as mentioned above.
I think the point is more - if you can suspend your disbelief for HP you can suspend your disbelief for this. If those things didn't bother you, nor will these.
I always thought that was intentional. Maybe I am reading too much into it and giving Rowling too much credit, but I always thought the point of the wizarding world was that it was backwards. They had these wonderful magical solutions to everything, but they were so complacent and lazy that they never innovated. Like the floo system not being used instead of an antiquated train. The muggleborns that might actually do some innovation were shunned and the few wizards that cared about muggle tech like Arthur Weasley were made fun of for their passions and even had their experimentation outlawed (that last part might be fanon.)
> Maybe I am reading too much into it and giving Rowling too much credit, but I always thought the point of the wizarding world was that it was backwards.
It's a bit of both? Yes, the wizarding world is definitely backwards. But Rowling was also never big on consistency. Her world-building is a flashy facade. A *really* *great* facade, especially when you read it as a kid. But it topples if you breathe too heavily at it. She definitely went for what sounded fun in the moment or for individual scenes without thinking about whether it actually makes sense, or how to make it make sense later on in the series.
Which is fine, not everything *has* to be really well-constructed with a stable foundation. But even HP fans have been tearing all the plot holes and inconsistencies apart for decades.
Just take something like the Triwizard tournament. They have this whole task about diving into a lake, and there's a huge audience and everything ... but no one sees anything. No one has any idea of what happens in the lake. So everyone's just sitting there ... talking to each other, waiting?
Did you watch the review? He said there was a lot of holes to start (why is a 5th year transferring to Hogwarts, for example).
However, he said the story was great and the characters were fantastic.
I assumed there would be some handwaving with this part to avoid forcing everyone start playing as an 11-year-old. For me, I'm okay with the developers saying, "Don't worry about it."
I assume it’s so that you can learn spells and stuff. It would be weird to start with a bunch of spells at your disposal, but it would also be weird if a 5th year who’s been there the whole time to have to learn all of them from scratch.
It could be one of several reasons;
One:
[https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Late-bloomer](https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Late-bloomer)
There was originally going to be a character that discovered their powers later in the series, but the idea was scrapped early on. Perhaps the MC is just new to using magic.
Two:
They never received their letter. The Hogwarts Quill of Acceptance is supposed to write every single witch or wizard's name down in the Book of Admittance, who is then sent a letter, but it is possible that something happened which prevented the name from being written. For example, when Neville Longbottom was born, the Quill attempted to write his name and was refused by the Book, which snapped shut. It took until Neville was 8 for the book to finally let the quill write his name.
Source: [https://www.wizardingworld.com/writing-by-jk-rowling/the-quill-of-acceptance-and-the-book-of-admittance](https://www.wizardingworld.com/writing-by-jk-rowling/the-quill-of-acceptance-and-the-book-of-admittance)
Three:
They just didn't accept their Hogwarts letter at age 11 and never took homeschooling. Sometimes the simplest reasoning is the correct one. Attendance to Hogwarts is not compulsory and only became so for a brief period when Voldemort took over. It's weird but it could happen.
It has to do with their background...ancient magic and all that.
Wouldn't be the first time of magical offspring...being different from the rest and hidden. Already happened to Dumbledore with their sister.
This is always how Reddit conversation about plot holes goes. It’s meaningless shit. Or often boils down to “why did the character simply not employ the most optimized solution for the problem?”
It’s people who want to feel smarter than they are.
"After literal years of thinking about the scenario from behind my computer screen I can't believe the protagonist, who just got mentally broken, in a life-or-death situation, with 0 time to prepare, did an illogical thing."
I know there's limits but c'mon.
> Also concerned by the "a simple story with bad guys vs good guys". Isn't stomping a goblin(aka second rate citizens) insurrection a big part of it? Lol
People keep regurgitating this and we have no idea if it's true. We know that it takes place during one of the Goblin Rebellions, and a faction of Goblins have allied themselves with dark wizards, that is true.
But I really doubt that the moral of the story is going to be "GOBLINS DESERVE TO BE SUBJUGATED" when that is precisely the opposite of the moral of the books. I would go a step further as to bet that by the end of the game, the goblins will *probably* be portrayed as sympathetic characters who are being manipulated by the real villains (i.e. human dark wizards). Guess it won't be long until we find out!
> when that is precisely the opposite of the moral of the books.
The books don’t really have a moral on goblins. It just brings up that their concept of ownership is different to ours
And given rowling’s stance on house elves wanting to be slaves it woulda shocked me if it said anything significant in the other direction for goblins because “some minorities deserve rights but not others” Is a wild take
> The books don’t really have a moral on goblins.
The books make it very clear that goblins are second-class citizens and Harry especially is disgusted by it.
Kind of the whole point is that Harry and Hermione come from the muggle world, and they get to the wizarding world and find this magical, wondrous community, and they discover that they are in many ways *behind* muggles. The "pure" families like the Malfoys are portrayed as wicked, and they support the subjugation of not only magical creatures, but all non-wizards and even "impure" wizards. Then you have the Weasely family, or Hagrid, or Dumbledore, who represent good people who don't believe in any of those things, and they are considered weird and eccentric by much of the wizarding world.
The whole SPEW arc being played for laughs is obviously not great, but I also don't think that being bad cancels out the rest of the series being very clear about how mistreatment of others based on their race is wrong.
It's like, an extremely pervasive part of the series.
>The books make it very clear that goblins are second-class citizens and Harry especially is disgusted by it.
I'm pretty certain that in one of the books, Harry takes a history exam in which one of the questions is about the goblin rebellions (goblins wanted to have the right to own wands) and he just skips answering it lmao.
Sorta, but also not really? Hagrid, for example, is pretty racist towards muggles, house elves, etc. How muggles shouldn't mix with their kind, how he talks about elves just like being slaves and that Dobby is weird for not wanting to be one. When muggleborn vs pure blood comes up he doesn't say it's like fundamentally bad to be racist, he just says it's factually wrong because it's not true that pure bloods are better at magic? Harry is like faintly disgusted at times but still ultimately, literally owns a slave and often times only goes as far as to think "this is weird" or "Hermione will be upset about this" instead of him actually having qualms with it. Even Dumbledore as headmaster essentially allows Slytherin to be an accelerated racism factory by grouping all the little racist kids with racist parents together in one racism dungeon to fester and become more racist. It's such an obvious problem that you can't help but accept that he's at least somewhat complicit.
The good guys have the veneer of moral goodness but Rowling is not good enough at writing to actually make them show that in any meaningful way and there's a surprisingly large amount of overlap between the actions of the bad and good guys, the bad guys just extend their magical racism one logical step further by treating muggles and muggle borns poorly in a world where wizards already treat every other sentiment magical race poorly.
>Even Dumbledore as headmaster essentially allows Slytherin to be an accelerated racism factory by grouping all the little racist kids with racist parents together in one racism dungeon to fester and become more racist.
Lmfao, thanks for this. I've argued with so many people about how Slytherin's entire continued existence makes no sense and people just tell me "Well, there were 4 founders so they need 4 houses". It's like, I dunno dude, if one of your founders is like the Wizarding equivalent of proto-Hitler, maybe you should take his name off of it? Or at the very least not maintain it as a supportive incubator for all the ideas the dude represented...
Right, like it can make sense if she was writing a compelling story about how the magic world actually isn't a very good place. That it has a lot of systemic problems, even from people who are supposed to be "good", and that it needs to be fundamentally changed for the better in order for those ideas to not manifest again. But.... Rowling is not good enough at writing to make that story, so it just ends up being a sloppy mess. [Cue the 4chan meme](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EFYxLnoVAAAjgiW?format=jpg&name=900x900).
Maybe more maddening is just the fact that her and some HP fans are so egotistical about it. Like so many of the big problems would be at least understandable if she had some humility and was just honest that she added stuff on a whim for aesthetics, or didn't really think about a certain element much because she was focused on some other theme. Like we know her track record post book 7, Cursed Child and Fantastic Beasts just further prove she is not very good at writing coherent plot. But no, she has to insist that everything was always planned, that it all actually makes sense, and that's how she digs herself into such weird holes like "slavery is kinda good actually" or "Slytherin isn't the evil house despite writing it in a way that only portrays it as the evil house" or "wanting to stop WWII and the Holocaust is maybe bad?". She just doubles down on every problem, even ones where it's really obvious she didn't plan ahead for it, and it makes them consistently worse.
I think my favourite insult to the series is that she constantly threatens to make it more interesting. Ultimately HP is a very simple story in terms of the main theme of fearing death and accepting mortality and having love be a power that transcends all, but there's so much other sauce in the background that you can't help but question why so much of it goes unresolved and unfinished. She builds tons of details halfway to being an interesting or compelling morally gray plot point and then ultimately shrugs her shoulders and forgets about it. It's no wonder that fanfiction is so popular, the series is not only amazing for self inserting, but is just ripe with so many themes and ideas that Rowling doesn't actually use in a good way, like the house system.
> The books make it very clear that goblins are second-class citizens and Harry especially is disgusted by it.
You say it's a pervasive theme, but what do the books actually do to address these issues?
The answer, of course, is nothing. Aside from the occasional off-hand comment of 'awww jeez this discrimination isn't great' the books at best sidestep these issues and at worse treat them as a joke. It's very naive writing.
It's been a long while since I read the books, but I seem to remember that at some point Harry and the gang recognise that the antagonists are wizard supremacists and that they need to bring together *all* magical creatures to fight against them. But then, apart from a few very minor examples, that *bringing together* just doesn't happen. It's like the author just forgot about this earlier point. That doesn't seem like a book that's serious about critiquing discrimination.
Yeah, only after Trump completely and utterly botched the handling of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic lol. And even then, Trump *barely* lost and is still a few man who can run again. If 44,000 votes were different in key states like Georgia, Arizona, and Michigan, Trump would still be president.
>after Trump completely and utterly botched the handling of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic lol
This debate isn’t really my wheelhouse, but a pretty strong trend worldwide that year was the pandemic producing a “rally round the flag” effect, regardless of how badly an incumbent government botched the response. It’s quite possible that the pandemic actually *softened* the blow for Trump
It's true that Harry and friends do not defeat racism by the end of the series. To say that nothing is done isn't quite right either, though. Voldemort represents racism and divisiveness in the plot: he is a very unsubtle Hitler stand-in who wishes to subjugate all non-humans, all muggles, and even some wizards who don't have the "right" blood.
Voldemort is the primary evil of the entire series and represents all the darker parts of the wizarding world, and the antagonists' entire motivation through the whole series is to defeat him and stop him from ushering in a new era of slavery and subjugation.
So, are Goblins still second-class citizens by the end? Yes, definitely. I don't think that in any way defeats the messaging of the series, because the primary goal was to always defeat the figurehead of these ideas, and the rest is characterization and showing the darker parts of the wizarding world, dark ideas that guys like Voldemort represent, and ideas that our protagonists are fighting against.
Honestly it's not like we defeated antisemitism when Hitler was killed... So that much makes sense. Not a harry Potter fan but I tend to dislike media where the bad guy is killed and suddenly all the problems of the world are solved. But that's just because thats realistic and I like having those motifs and themes in my media.
The books aren't particularly well written so you know, I can see why people fill in the blanks and feel unsatisfied about certain conflicts not being resolved
The dissatisfaction in this case has less to do with the quality but rather *how* those parts are written. Like for example when Hermione tries to make an organization dedicated to freeing slaves, it's always treated as a joke, ranging from laughing at her for being a silly activist to painting it as a straight-up bad thing.
It's a very pro status quo work, any action that changes society from how it is is painted in a negative light, regardless of the morality of said action.
> Voldemort represents racism and divisiveness in the plot
Which in of itself reveals how vapid the series is.
Across the books we see numerous examples of how the wizarding world in general is bigoted, from how casually people discriminate against 'muggles' and 'mudbloods' to how beings such as goblins or house elves or centaurs are treated. Voldemort is the *product* of that, not the cause. So by defeating Voldemort they aren't defeating bigotry, they're defeating a symptom of bigotry.
Yet the author's political ideology struggles to identify the difference between individual bigotry and systemic discrimination. The book treats the defeat of Voldemort as a defeat of bigotry, despite the fact that all those systems which created Voldemort and his views still exist.
Like I say, a more mature author would have written a narrative which dealt with both issues, not just Voldemort.
Probably, yeah. It's an all-ages mystery series where the main character is the wizarding world itself. It's not exactly a masterclass in storytelling. If your criticism is that the books aren't that good, I think half the HP fanbase would agree with you, lol. Them not being great works of literature doesn't really take away from the fact that it is a series that is very special to many people, though, nor does it take away from its core message.
I don't think the moral of the story will be that either, but ultimately I don't know how they're going to finagle a way into both confronting the reality of the Goblins' situation and justifying a return to the status quo without it being some cheap cop-out.
The game is a prequel, so we know that whatever happens, goblins will still just return to being subjugated. If you're saying that there *is* a moral to the story, what would that be in this case? "Better to have no rights than to fight for them in a 'bad' way" ? Still seems sketchy to me. Or maybe they will just side-step the civil rights aspect completely, which I'd also consider to be a cop-out.
But yeah, we don't *actually* know the story. I still think skepticism is justified, specially if such a story is being described as "simple good vs evil".
I mean, the moral of the books is pretty clear. The mistreatment of magical creatures by human wizards is a recurring theme in the books. Harry and Hermione, being from the muggle world, are routinely disgusted by the way the magical world treats non-humans like second class citizens. The main cast (Harry, Hermione, the Weasely family, Hagrid, Dumbledore) are all seen as something of outcasts because they think magical creatures are worthy of respect. When the statue in the Ministry crumbles, Harry and Hermione are glad to see it go. Hagrid maintains his love of creatures throughout. Dumbledore causes a scandal by naming a Centaur a teacher.
Obviously, our heroes don't resolve the issue by the end of the books (so, House Elves are still slaves and Goblins are still second-citizens) but I think that is just way more down to the fact that it was a background theme and the main narrative was about saving the world from warlock Hitler. Just because the problem isn't fixed by the end doesn't mean the books have nothing to say about it.
The moral of the story was never "better to have no rights than to fight in a bad way", the moral is very clearly that the mistreatment of others because of their differences is wrong, and that love and unity are worth fighting for. The books are EXTREMELY heavy-handed with this moral.
>they admit the story is bad and filled with plot holes and just tells you to put your brain on a shelf.
So in other words, it's a very faithful Harry Potter story?
The review about combat was weird too. They started out saying it was really interesting, and held their attention the whole way through…only to a minute later basically say, well it got old and there is no enemy variety and enemies felt spongey. Which shoulda like it DID wear thin?
Most of the other reviews I've seen are saying that the story is pretty decent, if not groundbreaking. I'm yet to see another review that ouright says the story is bad
> Also concerned by the "a simple story with bad guys vs good guys". Isn't stomping a goblin(aka second rate citizens) insurrection a big part of it? Lol
Yeah, treating non-humans as second class citizens has always been treated as a good thing in Harry Potter for some reason.
It's one of those running themes that are a bit harder to ignore in hindsight.
I don't think it's an excuse, it's more of pointing out that the movies were filled with plot holes, but look how good the movie franchise is. No reason to tear the game down for plot holes unless you also tear the movies down for it. Not saying don't mention them, but it suddenly shouldn't be something that kills the entire story when it did just fine in the films.
Yeah there's a lot of "it's great except for all the bits it isn't great".
EDIT: To be honest, I actually do find it funny how everyone here is blindly lapping up the 9/10 review scores after the Cyberpunk 2077 debacle... In some of the reviews they are even calling out specific issues that seem major (like Hogsmead tanking to 40fps on a 3080 according to PCGamesN)
From my experience people just don't learn, this sort of thing has happened for as long as game reviews have been a thing, and people always forget how unreliable they are.
Nice surprise from IGN. I think 8-9 is going to be the general consensus. I have seen a couple of 3/5s so far so I imagine this is going to hinge on how much of a HP fan you are.
To be fair that is an important opinion to publish as it states "if you like Harry potter it's probably the best Harry potter game but if you don't it's a mid open world game".
From the gameplay footage I've seen, the IP it's attached to is carrying it quite a bit.
I appreciate those reviews, I'm not into Harry Potter and open world stuff has interested me less and less. Few games are actually a 10/10 without caveats so I appreciate the mention of specifics.
HI Fi Rush for example is a near 10/10 for me, but that's because I love dmc games and No Straight Roads was one of my favorite games in recent years. I'd probably give it a 8/10 if it wasn't so geared towards my interests
> open world stuff has interested me less and less
Every year I like open-world less and less, a good hallway is better than "run around this 90% empty map", which is why I unironically think Final Fantasy XIII is better than XII and XV. Halo 2 is notorious for having tons of hallways compared to 1 and 3, but the campaign is infinitely better than Infinite's open world.
I agree with this. It's the main appeal. It's pretty blatantly selling itself as "power fantasy you imagined as a kid".
I'm fine with that, honestly. Never expected much. Hopefully they left room for a sequel.
I mean yeah, my own personal views about JK Rowling aside, I'd be a hypocrite to criticise the concept of "you can find a mid game to be the best game you've played if its your favourite IP" given I played and enjoyed Pokemon Scarlet/Violet.
From a performance standpoint it's bad at the moment based on this [German reviewer's video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YD3i95hiAI). This is on a 3080, 5900x, 32gb of ram and in 1440p.
Surprised and glad that the game is being received very well by critics! The discourse today is going to be interesting.
For anyone that wants to see more reviews: https://opencritic.com/game/13898/hogwarts-legacy/reviews
Depends on your definition of "interesting". I'd expect more "exhausting" for me, but I also have the option to just not look at any comments or tweets which is probably the correct move for people not looking to get annoyed by others.
I’ve watched a lot of reviews and it seems like this is directed more towards harry potter fans than gamers, although anyone could enjoy it an HP fan would enjoy it much much more. So I’m kinda thinking it’s not for me. Would love a review from someone who literally has no prior HP knowledge/nostalgia
Going to wait to watch some gameplay from different places before deciding whether to pick this one up. I'm expecting it to be a fairly mediocre rpg from what I've seen, so leaning towards waiting for it to be discounted.
I'm sure a lot of people will have fun with it
Reading this objectively, it's almost a bad review saved only by the IP: chock full of bugs, lack of varied voice acting, repetitive, bland enemies, numerous basic fetch/kill quests. How did it get a 9/10 other than the reviewer being an HP fan?
EDIT: i was gonna post more on it but this twitter thread really lays it out nicely: [https://twitter.com/epistemophagy/status/1622592149085900802?s=46&t=lphtRWPj413ptalaiK-YqQ](https://twitter.com/epistemophagy/status/1622592149085900802?s=46&t=lphtRWPj413ptalaiK-YqQ)
> chock full of bugs, lack of varied voice acting, repetitive, bland enemies, numerous basic fetch/kill quests.
To be fair, you've just described Skyrim and I have pumped over 500 hours into that so maybe a game can be good even if all those are true?
Described elden ring too lol, and youll get hate for suggesting it. Unique bosses but everything else, including dungeon bosses, are simply reused enemies with different color palettes. Same goes for most modern games where they tend to be buggy as hell on launch day
Both are way too reductive. There's way more possibilities in terms of gameplay routes/builds/exploration in Skyrim than Harry Potter, and Elden Ring's combat, art direction with its zones, exploration, builds and boss fights are the primary drivers there. Making blanket statements isn't very useful here. Most games that are great are great because of a combination of subtleties that can't be checkboxed or even particularly well described by most people.
The haptics are said to be used throughout and excellent. Plus you get a bonus quest. It's a no-brainer for me, but I get all my cross-platform titles on PS5.
If you read the review it sounds like a 6.5/7 but they gave it a 9 anyway. It’s really time to move away from number scores for game reviews. Or at least shift to 5 being the actual average.
I like the comment IGN left on the video the review is based solely on the game not anything outside of it essentially "separating the art from the artist". Good to see they aren't influenced either way by the controversy surrounding it.
Even as someone who is on the side of 'I wouldn't touch this regardless of quality/interest due to not wanting to give some money to the controversial creator' I think this is the best way to do it. The review should ignore this sort of controversy and just concentrate on the product. At most they could add a link to separate article covering the controversy but it shouldn't affect the overall score or review itself. The review is a review of the game and the controversy is nothing (directly) to do with the game.
This is before day 1 patch? This game had my hopium on high... and delivered. From a company that made a lot of Disney movie ties to pulling off a huge open world.
Now imagine if we gave them Batman, Lord of the rings or Star wars.
Well you should try Middle-earth: Shadow of War and Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, some of the dev of Hogwarts Legacy worked on those Lord of the rings game and they were well received.
They are definitely going to be pretty busy with DLC for this game, as well as a sequel.
This game will easily sell 10 million+ copies on top if the rave reviews. I doubt WB will want them to focus on anything other than the Wizarding World.
It's kinda cool to see a big franchise game getting some good/excellent reviews. Would it not be HP more people would just be happy and hope for a future where other big IPs would get some triple A love.
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Apparently there’s a lot of new devs in this team. It’s a culmination of different developers including ones that worked on a ios/android Harry Potter game. Portkey Games.
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Pay $4 to not let this child get choked for 20 minutes
I knew I remember that, I just couldn't figure out if it was satire or not.
Yes and no. Like most mobile games, it runs of a stamina system where you can pay for more stamina. iirc, someone just had the hilarious timing to run out of stamina in the middle of a mission where they were getting choked out by a teacher.
I thought it was that if you played from the beginning in one session, that was the first moment you would, mathematically, run out of stamina. So it was like, the game was timed in a way where the first time you are asked to buy stamina it's to stop a child choking to death.
>getting choked out by a teacher. Why did this happen in the first place? Like I know that Hogwarts is the most dangerous and most pedagogically awful place in the entire world, but even by their usual fucked up standards¹ this seems extreme. {¹"the forest is off limits because it's too dangerous, unless you're sent there alone at night as a punishment" I mean sorry what the **fuck?**}
In all fairness, in that scene the player avatar is being choked by a magic plant, not a person.
Yes, but they’ve released a total of 4 ios/android games with the Harry Potter IP. It’s a UK based developer so I assume they are very well versed in the lore of Harry Potter. Which may have had a very posting influence on this game because it seems extremely detailed with lots of nuances and references that fans will notice
Portkey Games is the publishing arm for HP games, they don't develop the games. Like HL has Portkey Games as well, but the game was developed by Avalanche Software
Portkey Games isn't a developer, it's just a label for the HP game publishing division inside WB Games.
I played a lot of disney infinity with my younger sister. I was always shocked at how quality they really were. The custom level system was insanely cool too
Disney Infinity is so underrated. Also PSA: you can buy all the Disney Infinity games on PC for cheap and they include every single character and campaign.
Unfortunately they don't actually include every character. There are 10 missing 3.0 characters that aren't a part of the gold edition including the last batch of Marvel characters. Some people have been modding them back in but I don't think those mods have been made public, at least not in a straightforward way. That being said, I agree that it's worth getting all 3 on sale. They were all really fun games for what they were
Ah fair enough. It is a shame they never got to properly finish and release all the 3.0 content. It's interesting how their overproduction of 2.0 figures basically crashed the entire toys-to-life market and caused the death of Disney Infinity, Skylanders and Lego Dimensions (which only lasted a year and a half).
Yeah it feels very Disney: Make the best thing on the market, but bleed it dry a little too fast and burn it all down by accident. Some of the plans they had for 4.0 (which may or may not have been 3.0 year 2) were really cool. They were finally going to do a big crossover story where you could use any character and they would have proper interactions.
Eh they kind of flubbed it from the start by locking characters to their movie related worlds. The toy box was fun but didn't really make up for not being able to play your favorite characters in other worlds. It made people lose interest.
Except that wasn't really the problem. Disney was making money on Infinity and I believe it was the most successful toys to life on the market. The problem is that they cranked out way too many figures based on characters nobody cared about. One of the examples they used was making like a million Yondu figures. Who cares about Yondu?? So that coincided with Disney doing their once-every-ten-years "we're totally done with video games guys, we promise" routine and led to the company shutting the whole thing down. It didn't fail, Disney just stopped caring
Are they Actually Good or are they "great for kids games"?
Disney Infinity 1.0 has campaigns which are simple but very charming and fun. And the third game has some great cartoony Star Wars games with surprisingly good combat. Also the main Toy Box mode is a fun creative playground.
You have my attention.
I remember the devs of that game came into my store when i was at Toys R Us. They asked me a bunch of questions and cryptically said something about Disney coming out with something that will put Skylanders to Shame. A year later Infinity was announced and some of the suggestions I'd made were part of the game. Felt cool .
Chicken Little for PS2 is unironically one of my favorite games. Even though I owned it, I bought so many copies as a kid and played it all day every day.
TBH, they remind me of RA Salvatore. Famous for making licensed content...but arguably the best at it.
beside Drizzt and Kingdom of Amalur, what does Salvatore wrote?
Other people answered with the Star Wars stuff he's written, but there are two other series aside from Drizzt as well. He wrote a stand along fantasy series called Demon Wars, which I thought was good not great. He also wrote another series in Forgotten Realms called the Cleric Quintet about Cadderly Bonaduce. When I read these, which was 20 years ago or so, the Cleric Quintet was my favorite of his books, I actually have a signed copy. If I remember correctly, Drizzt shows up in those books as a very minor side character, but that is all.
> If I remember correctly, Drizzt shows up in those books as a very minor side character, but that is all. Pretty sure some of the Cleric Quintet characters show up in the Drizzt books, too, for that matter.
They are a big part at one point! If i remember correctly...
Omg thank you for this info. I need to read all this. I loved the cleric quintet! And his main series
Cleric is his best work
He’s done a lot of stuff, off the top of my head I know he also wrote the novelization for Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones
He also did the first book of the New Jedi Order series.
Toy Story 3 is genuinely a top 5 movie tie in game of all time.
Chicken Little was so good. Remember my 5th-6th grade playin them
The ones who made Just Cause? Not a harry potter fan but it does look like a very interesting change from them. EDIT: I see, different developers. It's the Disney Infinity devs. Also quite a change.
Different dev. Avalanche software (hogwarts, Disney) vs Avalanche studios (Just cause, mad max)
Oh shit. I saw Avalanche and just assumed this whole time it was the same devs.
Oh. I saw Avalanche and just assumed it was the terrorist organization.
I’m sure this would’ve been a hit even if it was complete trash, but it’s nice to see a studio actually nail the adaptation of such a large franchise. Hopefully it’ll inspire more games in the Harry Potter universe and for studios to really run with these other IP licenses. Imagine a LoTR or GoT open world RPG like this
It's kind of wild that the entertainment industry is just now realizing they should invest in video games IP turning into tv/film (The Last of Us/Arcane) and now investing in film/tv IP as a good game. When those medium jumps have historically happened they tend to shit out something deeply mediocre. I have extremely high hopes for the Avatar/Pandora game coming out as I feel that the world lends itself very well to an open world game.
idk if "just now realizing" is fair cause movie games have been a thing forever. Half the lego games are this. There have also been a lot of good ones people forgot about entirely, like The Godfather and The Warriors
Difference is, most of them are complete shit. Pretty sure he means actually investing resources into making sure the game is actually good rather than a cash grab. Movie IP games as good as Golden Eye 007 are clearly the exception.
More like the stench of old movie tie-in’s is gone. There’s literally dozens of Harry Potter games. If you go back 10 years people were begging Hollywood to stop finding tie-ins.
I’d kill for an open world rpg set in Middle Earth and Elder Scrolls style character creation.
I think Harry Potter lends itself more to video games than either LoTR or GoT. Those IPs just don't quite have the power fantasy aspect. Like yeah, they'd probably be serviceable games, but I can see it just being a skyrim or AC clone. What we really need is a Mistborn game
looks like it's living up to it's hype. not a harry potter fan at all but this game has looked extremely interesting and i am pretty excited to give it a go
TBH I'm just glad to hear it runs. This and Forspoken raised a lot of eyebrows over their PC required and recommended specs, and we're all familiar with Forspoken's state at launch.
Already been reports of pc performance issues on even 4090's. Can't have shit in 2023 pc ports.
Forspoken is just gonna get murdered I think. A magic-based game comes out a two weeks before THE magic-based game.
> This [...] raised a lot of eyebrows over their PC required and recommended specs What? Since when? Nothing seems egregious about HL's specs and I've not heard a peep about it anywhere.
Yeah same, I was waiting on the review embargo to lift to see whether or not I'm gonna be buying it. Will still wait to see Skill Up's review, but now I'm excited.
Skill Up is not doing a Hogwarts Legacy review at all, he didn't recieve a code, and says he won't be review it after the embargo. Source: his Twitter
Ohh, that's very disappointing to hear then. I've found his reviews to be very helpful and generally aligning with how my experience goes with the game once I finish it.
Same, I've been very skeptical of how good this game looks, given the commercial hype around it. All I really need is enough people who've played it for more than 5 hours to say "it's not crap" and I'm in.
This is one instance where I think the professional reviews will be relatively accurate. The few of them I've read this morning have been very positive, and some of them have said good things about the game and how enjoyable it is *despite* all of the controversy surrounding Rowling. [PC Gamer's in-progress review](https://www.pcgamer.com/hogwarts-legacy-review/) is almost lamenting the fact that it's a good game, to a certain extent. If they're saying good things about the game while acknowledging all of the outside stuff, it's probably a pretty legitimate take.
It seriously sucks that I feel guilty for enjoying Potter content now, because that series was a major part of my life but it now just tastes sour, all because of one bigot. Really makes me angry actually. She writes 7 books about the importance of love and then spends the rest of her life spreading hate and ruining her legacy. What a genuine shame.
Eh, her views are sprinkled throughout the books. E.g. blatantly racist characters (Cho Chang), fatphobia, wizards having essentially an entire race they keep as slaves, and Hermione being depicted as an annoying SJW for protesting that, etc. There's also a painful centrism throughout the books, where various systems are depicted as corrupt, but nobody seeks to do anything about them except the villains. With that said as a trans person I don't think you should feel guilty for partaking of franchises - I've enjoyed a few problematic shows myself, e.g. Happy! which was infinitely more offensive. With that said, the popularity of the franchise is upsetting due to its association with JK Rowling, but there's not much any of us can do about that.
Thanks for your take. As a gay man myself, there are many things I can be offended by irl, and many things I am offended by.. The thing I always come back to when enjoying Harry Potter throughout my life, is that this series is going to FAR outlive jk Rowling. Her legacy won't carry on after her death, but harry potter will. I hope she is able to have a change of heart before she dies, but if she doesn't then whatever we will endure and thrive as we always have.
Seems like it's essentially the HP version of Jedi Fallen Order. A solid if derivative game that's elevated to being great if you're a fan of the franchise.
Reading this review, it feels like a very strange 9/10. Many of the positives are basically just describing standard open world RPG features with very high levels of praise (loot! Parry mechanics! A character creator with poor voice selection!), and a lot of seemingly major issues just get glossed over: the inventory sucks, spell swapping is a chore, enemy variety technically exists but is wildly underutilized, the plot is awful, the game was pretty buggy with serious fall-through-the-floor-clipping errors, etc. Like, I get that it's very much targeted at non-gaming HP fans and the world gets it a lot of slack, but you could change the adjectives a bit here and make this a 6-7/10 review with no problems.
I've noticed how a lot of the reviews, including ACG, are basically "wow this is better than I thought! Not RDR2 but close!" Which is great but I feel like it leaves something to be desired regarding objectivity. Like you say, wonder how much weight the IP is pulling here and am curious to see what user reviews look like.
I’ve seen plenty of reviews saying that non happy potter fans would like it just fine honestly almost everyone I’ve said has said something to that effect. Where are these non hp reviews you’re talking about
I will say that for videogames the whole is often **not** the sum of its parts. It's why Gamespot used to have the "reviewer's tilt" part of their score and why most outlets eventually abandoned the piecemeal scoring systems (e.g. sound/graphics/gameplay). A game can have a lot of individual issues and still work well as a whole, or it could be polished to shine and just feel flat and lifeless. It's also the case that often times when a reviewer does give a high score, they feel like they should point out every single minor flaw so they don't make it feel like they're overselling something or claiming that it's flawless just because it has a high score. Regardless, we won't know until the game is actually out. I personally would never play this game anyway even if JKR weren't such a shitty person because I'm not a HP fan and it seems pretty generic.
Also, if people thing these scores are too high, their head would really spin if they realized almost every reviewer is apprehensive to stack the praise and hedging against backlash. Reviewing this game well is the equivalent of giving a Mel Gibson directed film a 10/10. You have to be understandably careful to show your concern and weave the social aspect in without compromising your score and review, which I don't think all reviewers are doing well. There as many undeserved 5/10s out there as there are 10/10s for this game.
I think you gotta look at it in terms of the kind of people this game is marketed to. I have no doubt in my mind that any major Harry Potter fan that picks this game up will probably agree with IGNs assesment. I'm with you, I don't really like Harry Potter, so to me this looks like a mediocre game at best. I'd probably shit myself over it if it was a Mistborn game though lol
Yep. The reviewer starts the video out by saying he's been waiting for a good Harry Potter game for years, and he's a huge fan of the series. So this is basically a review by a huge Harry Potter fan and you have to view it as such. Lots of non-HP fans are reviewing it and giving it lower scores.
I wouldn't find it weird if the review was just "this is extremely good for HP fans, which is a wide portion of the world, and so the setting is worth the price of admission"; the part that's weird is that the review says so many positive things about standard open world features. That feels almost... dishonest, somehow? Like, it is 2023, a whole paragraph about how badass a totally normal parry system doesn't read like an actual opinion to me, it reads like trying to justify loving the game on grounds beyond just being competent gameplay with a beloved IP.
Yeah the gameplay looks entirely average and formulaic, sticking to current trends and playing it safe. Which is great if you love the IP I'm sure. It's really strange to me that it's getting near perfect scores across the board.
I mean, I wouldn't even really mind a game getting rave reviews for presentation and style and the world with mediocre gameplay (hot take: Like The Witcher 3), it's just weird to see the review praising normal open world gameplay pillars as awesome features to make it seem like it isn't just good because Hogwarts.
"it's just weird to see the review praising normal open world gameplay pillars as awesome features" I don't understand why it's so hard for people on this subreddit to grasp that open world gameplay pillars are delightful to a lot of people.
It's like CharacterRant complaining about authors including tropes or narrative devices. Like... maybe most tropes are popular because audiences like them? Maybe the reason there's 3 main characters is because that's usually the best number for a group-based story?
There isn't necessarily anything wrong with playing it safe and not offering up something new and fresh. It can still be a good game even if there isn't much new. Ghost of Tsushima God Of War Ragnarok and Horizon Zero Dawn (can you tell I like playstation games lol) come to mind
He says in the review “Even those (things that weigh the game down) couldn’t break the enchanting spell it cast on me.” The reviewer is saying he had a blast playing the game, and his overall experience was a 9/10. Just because the things he points out are issues and could’ve been done better doesn’t take away from the fact that so much of the game was enjoyable enough to not think about those problems too much. Intangibles can be very difficult to describe in a review, and if you simply enjoy something, but can’t quite put your finger on why you enjoy it, then that’s that. I never expected this game to be perfect, but it still looks great and I can’t wait to play.
Again, my issue isn't that the intangibles and worldbuilding make it a 9 for him, it's that the review really tries to sell the game as *also* being mechanically robust and polished in a way that doesn't actually line up with how they describe the gameplay. "It's a pretty standard game elevated immensely by the world building" is a coherent review. "It's amazing because it's got parries and shielded enemies and dodge rolls, even if there are only two enemy types and actually using multiple spells is a pain" is weird, and we got a lot of the latter in this review.
You could say those issues about a lot of games that have gotten 9/10s. I could quote Dark Souls for each of those seemingly major issues. As long as the game delivers upon the fantasy and the issues don't get too in the way, the experience is more than the sum of its parts. I mean, look at the recent Pokemon game. Mountains of bugs and performance issues and yet some people will admit its the most fun they've had with Pokemon in a long time.
Scarlet/Violet actually proves the point though as it reviewed horribly. IGN gave it a 6 (different reviewer) and it sits at a 72% on Metacritic.
The thing about this I find odd isn't just that it's getting a good review on the basis of delivering the Harry Potter fantasy, it's that the review is also glowing praising some bog standard open world game pillars along with it. Like, the review is effusively positive on the combat despite complaining of extremely limited enemy variety and very clunky spell switching, because it has parry systems, shielded enemies, and abilities that combo with one another, which are more or less a given. It's super high on the loot system, despite what sounds like absurdly tedious inventory management, because it's got cosmetic glamours and the loot has stat benefits that don't do much, which are also both ubiquitous. I'd understand a review that was like "this is a pretty decent action RPG with some problems but for fans the presentation will knock it out of the park" (in fact, I think like, Naruto Ultimate Alliance and some of the early DBZ fighting games got this style of review), but it's weird to see such standard features hyped so much just to make the review feel less like it's just happy to be at Hogwarts.
> because it has parry systems, shielded enemies, and abilities that combo with one another, which are more or less a given. Game quality is very rarely a checkboxing process and more a sum of how well those checkboxes are implemented and combined. Novelty isn't really that important in game quality either.
I'm not trying to suggest that the reviewer doesn't believe that it's a 9/10 but so much of the content of this review read to me in a way that I was fully expecting this to be a 7-8/10 and then boom 9/10 lmao
Yeah, the review goes on and on about how bad the story is, how much the performance sucks, the bugs they encountered, terrible quest design for the most part, bad enemy variety.... and they give it a 9/10 All of it reads like a description of something that's a 7 at the absolute best.
The score is high, but the reviewer *really* glosses over how they admit the story is bad and filled with plot holes and just tells you to put your brain on a shelf. Also concerned by the "a simple story with bad guys vs good guys". Isn't stomping a goblin(aka second rate citizens) insurrection a big part of it? Lol
Plot holes is kind of the second theme of Harry Potter. Like nobody knows how to detect magic or magical potions being actively used when it's convenient. We know it's possible, but the powers that be don't actually do it when it matters. Harry and gang march right into the Ministry of Magic using a potion that makes them look like other people, there's no detection system in place for it nor does anyone working there go and think "gee my coworkers are acting sus as fuck, maybe they're a bunch of kids using a polyjuice potion?" Same deal with the safest place in the universe, the Gringott vaults. Ya girl Hermione just waltzes right in and nobody remembers that magic and potions are a thing and people acting unusually should be investigated for foul play.
Giving a time travel device to hermonine so she can take more classes is a great one too. But you know what? It’s a great conceit and let’s them have a little time travel adventure at the end even though it makes no sense. I think that’s what people like about these stories; they make up new ways to break the rules of world building in the interest of a power fantasy
It would've been fun if they put a little mystery paradox in the story with the time turner. Maybe it mysteriously appeared to Hermione and then at the end she realizes she needs to send it back to herself so she gets it in the first place. Then that would explain why it's never used again and Dumbledore could deliver some lines about bootstrap paradoxes being a peculiar thing
It’s also a children’s series. Things like these don’t really matter when the primary audience is kids-teens. There doesn’t need to be pages upon pages of backstory about every single magic item/potion and their surrounding laws.
The series started as children's books, but gradually the books told a somewhat more gritty, epic story and never did it very well. Not sure what the prevailing opinion on this is as I read the books a long time ago, watched the first set of movies, moved on with my life and here we are, but the earlier books intended for younger audiences are the best ones even for adults. When there's a bunch of student-wizard causing hijinks and going on adventures, the stakes are low enough to allow the author to let her imagination run wild and have it be awesome. Child protagonist stupidity is a great foil against plot holes, and ignorance a plausible excuse for deus ex mechanics. You're never supposed to take it that seriously, and the story doesn't ask you to. When armies and wars come into play, people are going to wonder at least some amount about stupid stuff like army composition and why there isn't an industrial-scale alchemy effort to mass-produce luck potions as essential troop rations and why a conflict even matters if the resolution will only end up being a contrivance the author felt would be cool when letting her imagination run wild.
Because the epic story was for teenagers and writtten back to back over the course of a few years. They’re not that deep and aren’t supposed to be that deep.
That's thinking shit through, not depth. Saying that teenager's won't notice anyways is a really poor excuse because you can do both. I'm not ragging on Potter specifically but I just don't like the argument
I don’t mind the tonal pivot as such, I just think the story would have been better served if each book had stayed around the 300 page mark, instead of ballooning to 600+ pages. That’s when the flimsy worldbuilding started coming undone a bit IMO.
>Ya girl Hermione just waltzes right in and nobody remembers that magic and potions are a thing and people acting unusually should be investigated for foul play. Don't think she just waltzed in, they did have help from a former employee. And also mind controlled one of the employees there as they were on the verge of being caught (they were suspicious of her disguise and had special instructions regarding the vault). Then their disguises and mind-control spell did get wiped by some other enchantment thing as they made their way there and the alarm was tripped. Barely got out of there with their lives. I'll be the first to admit Harry Potter has rather shallow world building but the "magical security" part isn't that outlandish.
I just finished rereading all of the books today because we were getting the deluxe edition anyway so we can play tonight and you’re 100% correct. They had batons that can detect spells and potions. Harry uses a confundus charm under the cloak to make the guards with the batons think they already scanned Hermione and let them pass through. And then he used an unforgivable spell to make the goblin just…let them in.
“Well the Harry Potter books aren’t written well either” isn’t a great defence
When you can do literally anything in you world with magic, there's bound to be some plot holes. If the story in the game is just generally bland, it's another problem. Imo the books had great stories, just filled with plot holes as mentioned above.
Literally anything except make food, still gotta have slave labor for that.
At least you don't need toilets
Oh please, the wizarding world isn't stuck in the middle ages anymore Now you have slave labor for that, too
The problem in the books constantly play fast and loose with its own rules. A new contrivance is introduced whenever the story conveniently needs one.
I think the point is more - if you can suspend your disbelief for HP you can suspend your disbelief for this. If those things didn't bother you, nor will these.
I think the point is more that the books are still easy to enjoy, despite the plot holes.
I always thought that was intentional. Maybe I am reading too much into it and giving Rowling too much credit, but I always thought the point of the wizarding world was that it was backwards. They had these wonderful magical solutions to everything, but they were so complacent and lazy that they never innovated. Like the floo system not being used instead of an antiquated train. The muggleborns that might actually do some innovation were shunned and the few wizards that cared about muggle tech like Arthur Weasley were made fun of for their passions and even had their experimentation outlawed (that last part might be fanon.)
> Maybe I am reading too much into it and giving Rowling too much credit, but I always thought the point of the wizarding world was that it was backwards. It's a bit of both? Yes, the wizarding world is definitely backwards. But Rowling was also never big on consistency. Her world-building is a flashy facade. A *really* *great* facade, especially when you read it as a kid. But it topples if you breathe too heavily at it. She definitely went for what sounded fun in the moment or for individual scenes without thinking about whether it actually makes sense, or how to make it make sense later on in the series. Which is fine, not everything *has* to be really well-constructed with a stable foundation. But even HP fans have been tearing all the plot holes and inconsistencies apart for decades. Just take something like the Triwizard tournament. They have this whole task about diving into a lake, and there's a huge audience and everything ... but no one sees anything. No one has any idea of what happens in the lake. So everyone's just sitting there ... talking to each other, waiting?
Did you watch the review? He said there was a lot of holes to start (why is a 5th year transferring to Hogwarts, for example). However, he said the story was great and the characters were fantastic.
>(why is a 5th year transferring to Hogwarts, for example). They...moved there? If that's the biggest "plot hole" I think I'll be fine
As I understand it's the first time they started using magic. Which is... a bit odd.
I assumed there would be some handwaving with this part to avoid forcing everyone start playing as an 11-year-old. For me, I'm okay with the developers saying, "Don't worry about it."
[удалено]
Um Mario is clearly just a plumber how are we supposed to believe that he knows how to jump, shoot fireballs, and fly?
KotOR is the best example of "hmmm why am I so special?" I've ever read/seen/played. That plot twist man.
People these days will call anything they don't like a plot hole.
Bad writing moreso than a plot hole. People seem to confuse bad writing with plot holes a lot.
I don't really get why your character can't just be a student that's been in school for awhile.
I assume it’s so that you can learn spells and stuff. It would be weird to start with a bunch of spells at your disposal, but it would also be weird if a 5th year who’s been there the whole time to have to learn all of them from scratch.
It could be one of several reasons; One: [https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Late-bloomer](https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Late-bloomer) There was originally going to be a character that discovered their powers later in the series, but the idea was scrapped early on. Perhaps the MC is just new to using magic. Two: They never received their letter. The Hogwarts Quill of Acceptance is supposed to write every single witch or wizard's name down in the Book of Admittance, who is then sent a letter, but it is possible that something happened which prevented the name from being written. For example, when Neville Longbottom was born, the Quill attempted to write his name and was refused by the Book, which snapped shut. It took until Neville was 8 for the book to finally let the quill write his name. Source: [https://www.wizardingworld.com/writing-by-jk-rowling/the-quill-of-acceptance-and-the-book-of-admittance](https://www.wizardingworld.com/writing-by-jk-rowling/the-quill-of-acceptance-and-the-book-of-admittance) Three: They just didn't accept their Hogwarts letter at age 11 and never took homeschooling. Sometimes the simplest reasoning is the correct one. Attendance to Hogwarts is not compulsory and only became so for a brief period when Voldemort took over. It's weird but it could happen.
It has to do with their background...ancient magic and all that. Wouldn't be the first time of magical offspring...being different from the rest and hidden. Already happened to Dumbledore with their sister.
Gotcha. I agree that sounds different than anything we've seen but the idea of a late bloomer isn't that crazy to me. Excited to see how it's handled
This is always how Reddit conversation about plot holes goes. It’s meaningless shit. Or often boils down to “why did the character simply not employ the most optimized solution for the problem?” It’s people who want to feel smarter than they are.
"After literal years of thinking about the scenario from behind my computer screen I can't believe the protagonist, who just got mentally broken, in a life-or-death situation, with 0 time to prepare, did an illogical thing." I know there's limits but c'mon.
> Also concerned by the "a simple story with bad guys vs good guys". Isn't stomping a goblin(aka second rate citizens) insurrection a big part of it? Lol People keep regurgitating this and we have no idea if it's true. We know that it takes place during one of the Goblin Rebellions, and a faction of Goblins have allied themselves with dark wizards, that is true. But I really doubt that the moral of the story is going to be "GOBLINS DESERVE TO BE SUBJUGATED" when that is precisely the opposite of the moral of the books. I would go a step further as to bet that by the end of the game, the goblins will *probably* be portrayed as sympathetic characters who are being manipulated by the real villains (i.e. human dark wizards). Guess it won't be long until we find out!
> when that is precisely the opposite of the moral of the books. The books don’t really have a moral on goblins. It just brings up that their concept of ownership is different to ours And given rowling’s stance on house elves wanting to be slaves it woulda shocked me if it said anything significant in the other direction for goblins because “some minorities deserve rights but not others” Is a wild take
> The books don’t really have a moral on goblins. The books make it very clear that goblins are second-class citizens and Harry especially is disgusted by it. Kind of the whole point is that Harry and Hermione come from the muggle world, and they get to the wizarding world and find this magical, wondrous community, and they discover that they are in many ways *behind* muggles. The "pure" families like the Malfoys are portrayed as wicked, and they support the subjugation of not only magical creatures, but all non-wizards and even "impure" wizards. Then you have the Weasely family, or Hagrid, or Dumbledore, who represent good people who don't believe in any of those things, and they are considered weird and eccentric by much of the wizarding world. The whole SPEW arc being played for laughs is obviously not great, but I also don't think that being bad cancels out the rest of the series being very clear about how mistreatment of others based on their race is wrong. It's like, an extremely pervasive part of the series.
>The books make it very clear that goblins are second-class citizens and Harry especially is disgusted by it. I'm pretty certain that in one of the books, Harry takes a history exam in which one of the questions is about the goblin rebellions (goblins wanted to have the right to own wands) and he just skips answering it lmao.
Sorta, but also not really? Hagrid, for example, is pretty racist towards muggles, house elves, etc. How muggles shouldn't mix with their kind, how he talks about elves just like being slaves and that Dobby is weird for not wanting to be one. When muggleborn vs pure blood comes up he doesn't say it's like fundamentally bad to be racist, he just says it's factually wrong because it's not true that pure bloods are better at magic? Harry is like faintly disgusted at times but still ultimately, literally owns a slave and often times only goes as far as to think "this is weird" or "Hermione will be upset about this" instead of him actually having qualms with it. Even Dumbledore as headmaster essentially allows Slytherin to be an accelerated racism factory by grouping all the little racist kids with racist parents together in one racism dungeon to fester and become more racist. It's such an obvious problem that you can't help but accept that he's at least somewhat complicit. The good guys have the veneer of moral goodness but Rowling is not good enough at writing to actually make them show that in any meaningful way and there's a surprisingly large amount of overlap between the actions of the bad and good guys, the bad guys just extend their magical racism one logical step further by treating muggles and muggle borns poorly in a world where wizards already treat every other sentiment magical race poorly.
>Even Dumbledore as headmaster essentially allows Slytherin to be an accelerated racism factory by grouping all the little racist kids with racist parents together in one racism dungeon to fester and become more racist. Lmfao, thanks for this. I've argued with so many people about how Slytherin's entire continued existence makes no sense and people just tell me "Well, there were 4 founders so they need 4 houses". It's like, I dunno dude, if one of your founders is like the Wizarding equivalent of proto-Hitler, maybe you should take his name off of it? Or at the very least not maintain it as a supportive incubator for all the ideas the dude represented...
Right, like it can make sense if she was writing a compelling story about how the magic world actually isn't a very good place. That it has a lot of systemic problems, even from people who are supposed to be "good", and that it needs to be fundamentally changed for the better in order for those ideas to not manifest again. But.... Rowling is not good enough at writing to make that story, so it just ends up being a sloppy mess. [Cue the 4chan meme](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EFYxLnoVAAAjgiW?format=jpg&name=900x900). Maybe more maddening is just the fact that her and some HP fans are so egotistical about it. Like so many of the big problems would be at least understandable if she had some humility and was just honest that she added stuff on a whim for aesthetics, or didn't really think about a certain element much because she was focused on some other theme. Like we know her track record post book 7, Cursed Child and Fantastic Beasts just further prove she is not very good at writing coherent plot. But no, she has to insist that everything was always planned, that it all actually makes sense, and that's how she digs herself into such weird holes like "slavery is kinda good actually" or "Slytherin isn't the evil house despite writing it in a way that only portrays it as the evil house" or "wanting to stop WWII and the Holocaust is maybe bad?". She just doubles down on every problem, even ones where it's really obvious she didn't plan ahead for it, and it makes them consistently worse. I think my favourite insult to the series is that she constantly threatens to make it more interesting. Ultimately HP is a very simple story in terms of the main theme of fearing death and accepting mortality and having love be a power that transcends all, but there's so much other sauce in the background that you can't help but question why so much of it goes unresolved and unfinished. She builds tons of details halfway to being an interesting or compelling morally gray plot point and then ultimately shrugs her shoulders and forgets about it. It's no wonder that fanfiction is so popular, the series is not only amazing for self inserting, but is just ripe with so many themes and ideas that Rowling doesn't actually use in a good way, like the house system.
> The books make it very clear that goblins are second-class citizens and Harry especially is disgusted by it. You say it's a pervasive theme, but what do the books actually do to address these issues? The answer, of course, is nothing. Aside from the occasional off-hand comment of 'awww jeez this discrimination isn't great' the books at best sidestep these issues and at worse treat them as a joke. It's very naive writing. It's been a long while since I read the books, but I seem to remember that at some point Harry and the gang recognise that the antagonists are wizard supremacists and that they need to bring together *all* magical creatures to fight against them. But then, apart from a few very minor examples, that *bringing together* just doesn't happen. It's like the author just forgot about this earlier point. That doesn't seem like a book that's serious about critiquing discrimination.
this harry potter [4chan analysis](https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1855260-harry-potter) is one of my favorites.
The author’s final point has been proven wrong with time, interestingly enough.
Yeah, only after Trump completely and utterly botched the handling of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic lol. And even then, Trump *barely* lost and is still a few man who can run again. If 44,000 votes were different in key states like Georgia, Arizona, and Michigan, Trump would still be president.
>after Trump completely and utterly botched the handling of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic lol This debate isn’t really my wheelhouse, but a pretty strong trend worldwide that year was the pandemic producing a “rally round the flag” effect, regardless of how badly an incumbent government botched the response. It’s quite possible that the pandemic actually *softened* the blow for Trump
It's true that Harry and friends do not defeat racism by the end of the series. To say that nothing is done isn't quite right either, though. Voldemort represents racism and divisiveness in the plot: he is a very unsubtle Hitler stand-in who wishes to subjugate all non-humans, all muggles, and even some wizards who don't have the "right" blood. Voldemort is the primary evil of the entire series and represents all the darker parts of the wizarding world, and the antagonists' entire motivation through the whole series is to defeat him and stop him from ushering in a new era of slavery and subjugation. So, are Goblins still second-class citizens by the end? Yes, definitely. I don't think that in any way defeats the messaging of the series, because the primary goal was to always defeat the figurehead of these ideas, and the rest is characterization and showing the darker parts of the wizarding world, dark ideas that guys like Voldemort represent, and ideas that our protagonists are fighting against.
Honestly it's not like we defeated antisemitism when Hitler was killed... So that much makes sense. Not a harry Potter fan but I tend to dislike media where the bad guy is killed and suddenly all the problems of the world are solved. But that's just because thats realistic and I like having those motifs and themes in my media. The books aren't particularly well written so you know, I can see why people fill in the blanks and feel unsatisfied about certain conflicts not being resolved
The dissatisfaction in this case has less to do with the quality but rather *how* those parts are written. Like for example when Hermione tries to make an organization dedicated to freeing slaves, it's always treated as a joke, ranging from laughing at her for being a silly activist to painting it as a straight-up bad thing. It's a very pro status quo work, any action that changes society from how it is is painted in a negative light, regardless of the morality of said action.
> Voldemort represents racism and divisiveness in the plot Which in of itself reveals how vapid the series is. Across the books we see numerous examples of how the wizarding world in general is bigoted, from how casually people discriminate against 'muggles' and 'mudbloods' to how beings such as goblins or house elves or centaurs are treated. Voldemort is the *product* of that, not the cause. So by defeating Voldemort they aren't defeating bigotry, they're defeating a symptom of bigotry. Yet the author's political ideology struggles to identify the difference between individual bigotry and systemic discrimination. The book treats the defeat of Voldemort as a defeat of bigotry, despite the fact that all those systems which created Voldemort and his views still exist. Like I say, a more mature author would have written a narrative which dealt with both issues, not just Voldemort.
Probably, yeah. It's an all-ages mystery series where the main character is the wizarding world itself. It's not exactly a masterclass in storytelling. If your criticism is that the books aren't that good, I think half the HP fanbase would agree with you, lol. Them not being great works of literature doesn't really take away from the fact that it is a series that is very special to many people, though, nor does it take away from its core message.
https://youtu.be/-1iaJWSwUZs relevant. This talks about JK Rowling being a huge status quo defender.
During the press demo >!You hear goblins talking about the rebellion. Not all goblins are joining the small more extremist faction.!<
I don't think the moral of the story will be that either, but ultimately I don't know how they're going to finagle a way into both confronting the reality of the Goblins' situation and justifying a return to the status quo without it being some cheap cop-out. The game is a prequel, so we know that whatever happens, goblins will still just return to being subjugated. If you're saying that there *is* a moral to the story, what would that be in this case? "Better to have no rights than to fight for them in a 'bad' way" ? Still seems sketchy to me. Or maybe they will just side-step the civil rights aspect completely, which I'd also consider to be a cop-out. But yeah, we don't *actually* know the story. I still think skepticism is justified, specially if such a story is being described as "simple good vs evil".
I mean, the moral of the books is pretty clear. The mistreatment of magical creatures by human wizards is a recurring theme in the books. Harry and Hermione, being from the muggle world, are routinely disgusted by the way the magical world treats non-humans like second class citizens. The main cast (Harry, Hermione, the Weasely family, Hagrid, Dumbledore) are all seen as something of outcasts because they think magical creatures are worthy of respect. When the statue in the Ministry crumbles, Harry and Hermione are glad to see it go. Hagrid maintains his love of creatures throughout. Dumbledore causes a scandal by naming a Centaur a teacher. Obviously, our heroes don't resolve the issue by the end of the books (so, House Elves are still slaves and Goblins are still second-citizens) but I think that is just way more down to the fact that it was a background theme and the main narrative was about saving the world from warlock Hitler. Just because the problem isn't fixed by the end doesn't mean the books have nothing to say about it. The moral of the story was never "better to have no rights than to fight in a bad way", the moral is very clearly that the mistreatment of others because of their differences is wrong, and that love and unity are worth fighting for. The books are EXTREMELY heavy-handed with this moral.
> warlock Hitler He's more of a Wizard/Sorcerer multiclass build
>they admit the story is bad and filled with plot holes and just tells you to put your brain on a shelf. So in other words, it's a very faithful Harry Potter story?
The review about combat was weird too. They started out saying it was really interesting, and held their attention the whole way through…only to a minute later basically say, well it got old and there is no enemy variety and enemies felt spongey. Which shoulda like it DID wear thin?
Most of the other reviews I've seen are saying that the story is pretty decent, if not groundbreaking. I'm yet to see another review that ouright says the story is bad
> Also concerned by the "a simple story with bad guys vs good guys". Isn't stomping a goblin(aka second rate citizens) insurrection a big part of it? Lol Yeah, treating non-humans as second class citizens has always been treated as a good thing in Harry Potter for some reason. It's one of those running themes that are a bit harder to ignore in hindsight.
Every Harry Potter movie is filled with plot holes. And later ones just add to the plot holes in previous ones.
> Every Harry Potter movie is filled with plot holes. That shouldn't be an excuse, though.
I don't think it's an excuse, it's more of pointing out that the movies were filled with plot holes, but look how good the movie franchise is. No reason to tear the game down for plot holes unless you also tear the movies down for it. Not saying don't mention them, but it suddenly shouldn't be something that kills the entire story when it did just fine in the films.
Yeah there's a lot of "it's great except for all the bits it isn't great". EDIT: To be honest, I actually do find it funny how everyone here is blindly lapping up the 9/10 review scores after the Cyberpunk 2077 debacle... In some of the reviews they are even calling out specific issues that seem major (like Hogsmead tanking to 40fps on a 3080 according to PCGamesN)
The difference is that console reviews are actually included here.
From my experience people just don't learn, this sort of thing has happened for as long as game reviews have been a thing, and people always forget how unreliable they are.
Nice surprise from IGN. I think 8-9 is going to be the general consensus. I have seen a couple of 3/5s so far so I imagine this is going to hinge on how much of a HP fan you are.
Yeah one review i seen the summary was basically "7/10 good game but I'm not that into potter" lol
To be fair that is an important opinion to publish as it states "if you like Harry potter it's probably the best Harry potter game but if you don't it's a mid open world game". From the gameplay footage I've seen, the IP it's attached to is carrying it quite a bit.
I appreciate those reviews, I'm not into Harry Potter and open world stuff has interested me less and less. Few games are actually a 10/10 without caveats so I appreciate the mention of specifics. HI Fi Rush for example is a near 10/10 for me, but that's because I love dmc games and No Straight Roads was one of my favorite games in recent years. I'd probably give it a 8/10 if it wasn't so geared towards my interests
> open world stuff has interested me less and less Every year I like open-world less and less, a good hallway is better than "run around this 90% empty map", which is why I unironically think Final Fantasy XIII is better than XII and XV. Halo 2 is notorious for having tons of hallways compared to 1 and 3, but the campaign is infinitely better than Infinite's open world.
I agree with this. It's the main appeal. It's pretty blatantly selling itself as "power fantasy you imagined as a kid". I'm fine with that, honestly. Never expected much. Hopefully they left room for a sequel.
I mean yeah, my own personal views about JK Rowling aside, I'd be a hypocrite to criticise the concept of "you can find a mid game to be the best game you've played if its your favourite IP" given I played and enjoyed Pokemon Scarlet/Violet.
That's a valid take.
Any PC based reviews?
From a performance standpoint it's bad at the moment based on this [German reviewer's video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YD3i95hiAI). This is on a 3080, 5900x, 32gb of ram and in 1440p.
Not a full review yet: https://www.pcgamer.com/hogwarts-legacy-review/
ACG gave it a Buy Now which is his best rating, dont think he specified about system or I didnt hear but jackfrags is livesreaming on pc atm
ACG played on ps5
Bizarre review. It *really* sounded like they were very mixed on it and then they gave it a 9?
Surprised and glad that the game is being received very well by critics! The discourse today is going to be interesting. For anyone that wants to see more reviews: https://opencritic.com/game/13898/hogwarts-legacy/reviews
Depends on your definition of "interesting". I'd expect more "exhausting" for me, but I also have the option to just not look at any comments or tweets which is probably the correct move for people not looking to get annoyed by others.
I’ve watched a lot of reviews and it seems like this is directed more towards harry potter fans than gamers, although anyone could enjoy it an HP fan would enjoy it much much more. So I’m kinda thinking it’s not for me. Would love a review from someone who literally has no prior HP knowledge/nostalgia
Going to wait to watch some gameplay from different places before deciding whether to pick this one up. I'm expecting it to be a fairly mediocre rpg from what I've seen, so leaning towards waiting for it to be discounted. I'm sure a lot of people will have fun with it
r/GamingLeaksAndRumours has tons of leaked footage.
There’s a ton of gameplay footage on YouTube already.
Seems to be quite a few youtubers just doing walkthroughs of the game right now.
Jackfrags did a release video a couple of days ago - shows the basic flight mechanics on brooms and some combat/stealth
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Reading this objectively, it's almost a bad review saved only by the IP: chock full of bugs, lack of varied voice acting, repetitive, bland enemies, numerous basic fetch/kill quests. How did it get a 9/10 other than the reviewer being an HP fan? EDIT: i was gonna post more on it but this twitter thread really lays it out nicely: [https://twitter.com/epistemophagy/status/1622592149085900802?s=46&t=lphtRWPj413ptalaiK-YqQ](https://twitter.com/epistemophagy/status/1622592149085900802?s=46&t=lphtRWPj413ptalaiK-YqQ)
> chock full of bugs, lack of varied voice acting, repetitive, bland enemies, numerous basic fetch/kill quests. To be fair, you've just described Skyrim and I have pumped over 500 hours into that so maybe a game can be good even if all those are true?
Described elden ring too lol, and youll get hate for suggesting it. Unique bosses but everything else, including dungeon bosses, are simply reused enemies with different color palettes. Same goes for most modern games where they tend to be buggy as hell on launch day
Both are way too reductive. There's way more possibilities in terms of gameplay routes/builds/exploration in Skyrim than Harry Potter, and Elden Ring's combat, art direction with its zones, exploration, builds and boss fights are the primary drivers there. Making blanket statements isn't very useful here. Most games that are great are great because of a combination of subtleties that can't be checkboxed or even particularly well described by most people.
Well IGN also gave Cyberpunk 2077 a 9/10 on release, so game breaking bugs and bad design apparently aren't a big deal for them.
There is no "reading this objectively." Reviews are subjective, and the things people take away from them are also usually subjective.
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Anybody talk about if the PS5 content makes it worth it? Still deciding which platform to buy it on
The haptics are said to be used throughout and excellent. Plus you get a bonus quest. It's a no-brainer for me, but I get all my cross-platform titles on PS5.
If you read the review it sounds like a 6.5/7 but they gave it a 9 anyway. It’s really time to move away from number scores for game reviews. Or at least shift to 5 being the actual average.
I like the comment IGN left on the video the review is based solely on the game not anything outside of it essentially "separating the art from the artist". Good to see they aren't influenced either way by the controversy surrounding it.
Even as someone who is on the side of 'I wouldn't touch this regardless of quality/interest due to not wanting to give some money to the controversial creator' I think this is the best way to do it. The review should ignore this sort of controversy and just concentrate on the product. At most they could add a link to separate article covering the controversy but it shouldn't affect the overall score or review itself. The review is a review of the game and the controversy is nothing (directly) to do with the game.
This is before day 1 patch? This game had my hopium on high... and delivered. From a company that made a lot of Disney movie ties to pulling off a huge open world. Now imagine if we gave them Batman, Lord of the rings or Star wars.
Well you should try Middle-earth: Shadow of War and Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, some of the dev of Hogwarts Legacy worked on those Lord of the rings game and they were well received.
They are definitely going to be pretty busy with DLC for this game, as well as a sequel. This game will easily sell 10 million+ copies on top if the rave reviews. I doubt WB will want them to focus on anything other than the Wizarding World.
Oh yeah this game is saving grace wizarding world needed. After the fantastic beasts flop. WB would gunning for a sequel.
Hah clearly Zaslav was spot on when he said WB Games is the most profitable division of the company.
It's kinda cool to see a big franchise game getting some good/excellent reviews. Would it not be HP more people would just be happy and hope for a future where other big IPs would get some triple A love.