Hogwarts Legacy Isn’t the Dream Harry Potter Game Because It Fails as an RPG

However, that’s not exactly what Hogwarts Legacy offers. You’re actually playing as a fifth-year student who is only just now attending Hogwarts. That’s certainly unusual enough, but it turns out that your character also has the rare ability to see and use a secret form of ancient magic and seems to be a person of great interest to many of the prominent people you’ll encounter. You can determine their name and looks, but those options often feel like window dressing on a character that isn’t entirely your own and is closer to being of the developers’ design.

While the Hogwarts Legacy team has only offered passing explanations for why you start the game as a fifth-year student, it’s easy enough to assume why that decision was made. Not only does a fifth-year student naturally have more access to certain parts of the Wizarding World lore (taking their O.W.L.S., visiting Hogsmeade, etc.), but they’re able to learn more complicated and interesting spells. Playing as a first-year student would have presented several gameplay hurdles. 

The problem is that Hogwarts Legacy struggles to adequately address the inherent awkwardness of starting Hogwarts as a fifth-year. Most of the ways they do try to address that strange situation involve treating your character as if they’ve been there all along. Your character makes friends with ease right away, they’re going on world-spanning adventures on their first or second day, and they stumble upon some of Hogwarts’ biggest secrets in record time.

The biggest issue with that setup, though, is your character’s power level. You would think that a student joining Hogwarts in their fifth year would be far behind on everything. Your character is different, though. They’re incredible at pretty much everything and they’re able to learn it all pretty much right away. There’s no such thing as slowly getting better at spells as you use them (outside of Talent Points that offer basic ability upgrades), and Hogwarts Legacy doesn’t do the thing most other RPGs do by forcing you to be good at some things and worse at others. You’re not really building your own Hogwarts student; you’re furthering the agenda of this character that the game needs to exist.

There are story explanations for your character’s power level, but they don’t address the core problem of having to play as a “chosen one” regardless of what kind of character you really want to be. Actually, being the chosen one isn’t inherently the problem. Harry was a classic example of the chosen one archetype, and he wasn’t the best at everything or someone who fits in so easily with so many different people. A big part of what made the Harry Potter character so compelling was that he was constantly being challenged and constantly had to overcome a series of hurdles that often showed how his main character status was a blessing and a curse.

Meanwhile, your character is much closer to the cliche fan fiction writer avatar that everyone knows, loves, and respects. Maybe that’s what some are looking for, but having such limited control over the growth of a character that is positioned as your avatar in this world goes against one of the core tenants of the entire role-playing genre.