Not just bad morally, but bad qualitatively. It’s one we see in the latest Wizarding World films as well. Combined with who this game helps and who it harms, well, it's definitely not worth it unless your goal is to cause harm. Even despite the controversy around Rowling herself, the game feels like it was put together to tap the eager nostalgia of fans without any attention to making it actually worth playing.įor that reason alone, I can't in good conscience recommend spending your money on it. It says it’s Hogwarts, but it doesn’t feel like Hogwarts. And speaking of which, the characters often flat-out state their motivations, but they don’t feel believable or even particularly coherent. It feels muddy, a minefield of unanswered questions and unexplained motivations. The story, besides being rooted in anti-Semitism (a global “cabal” is trying to end slavery but that's bad because the slaves like being slaves), doesn’t even feel compelling. There’s a hole where this game’s heart should be. So when I got a code for Hogwarts Legacy, I braced myself. I was afraid I’d have to tell 12-year-old me that she couldn’t play it, and explain why. I was afraid to see the lavish visuals of the films recreated on modern gaming hardware, realized in 4K and full HDR. I avoided them like the plague because I was afraid I would be conflicted, that I’d see a game that captured the magic of the books and my heart would leap out of my chest. I didn’t want to see the gameplay, I didn’t want to be awed by trailers. I avoided press about Hogwarts Legacy when it was first announced. After Prisoner of Azkaban, I was in deep. In Hermione, I saw my relentless and often annoyingly assertive sense of right and wrong, and how it often got her, and me, in trouble. In Ron, I knew what it was to go to school in hand-me-downs, to worry about money in a way that no child ever should, and I also knew what it was like to be made fun of for being a redhead. I shared his frustration with the adult world and that tight knot of anger he couldn’t really understand boiling away in his chest. In Harry, I saw my own rough childhood reflected. Watching these characters I knew contend with adult-level-peril, I felt seen. It was the first one that felt dangerous to me. It was the third book, The Prisoner of Azkaban, that wrapped its world around me and drew me in. I didn’t open the cover and get transported to a world of magic and mystery. It wasn’t a Neverending Story situation for me. At the time, it was just another chapter book on the shelves beside the likes of Bunnicula and Goosebumps. The gangly boy on the cover illustration. When one of those voices comes from the author who taught you about accepting yourself, a person you thought truly saw you and kids like you, it hurts in a way I honestly hope she never understands. For a lot of us, we fight those voices every day. We hear relatives, friends, and parents say awful things about us and to us. Every homophobic or transphobic thing queer kids hear growing up becomes a voice that follows them for a long time. Rowling’s pen wrote magic into my world, but now every word she puts out just hurts my heart. When I was a kid, every word that flowed from J. She’s even gone as far as to suggest that we’re inherently dangerous, a threat to real (ouch) women everywhere. Since 2019 though, the once-beloved children’s author has-well, she’s had some opinions. She created a place where weird lonely kids would be told they were special, where kids who had survived abuse were more than just fundamentally broken. Within the pages of her books, she made the ordinary seem extraordinary. Nothing with a Wizarding World stamp on it can be viewed outside the context of it being a product of Dame J. This is important because she’s always been inseparable from her work and from work that she’s inspired (and licensed), for better and now mostly for worse. In case you need a refresher, those books, the Wizarding World setting, and the Harry Potter film franchise are all the intellectual property and brainchildren of author J. Hogwarts Legacy is a third-person action-RPG set in the same universe as the classic Harry Potter series of children's books. Pull up a chair, pour yourself some tea, wrap yourself in a blanket, scream into a pillow (or the abyss), because this one’s gonna take a lot out of both of us. We’re here to talk about Hogwarts Legacy, and to do that we need to discuss the whole mess. I don’t even smoke and I feel like I need a cigarette before I get this thing started.
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