Review: There Is No Magic in Hogwarts Legacy

Yikes, y’all. I don’t even smoke and I feel like I need a cigarette before I get this thing started. We’re here to talk about Hogwarts Legacy, and to do that we need to discuss the whole mess. 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. (Or get heavy.)

Hogwarts Legacy is a third-person action-RPG set in the same universe as the classic Harry Potter series of children's books. 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. K. Rowling. 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. Nothing with a Wizarding World stamp on it can be viewed outside the context of it being a product of Dame J. K. Rowling, CH, OBE.

Within the pages of her books, she made the ordinary seem extraordinary. 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. Since 2019 though, the once-beloved children’s author has—well, she’s had some opinions. About people like me. And whether or not we should exist. She’s even gone as far as to suggest that we’re inherently dangerous, a threat to real (ouch) women everywhere.

When I was a kid, every word that flowed from J. K. Rowling’s pen wrote magic into my world, but now every word she puts out just hurts my heart. Every homophobic or transphobic thing queer kids hear growing up becomes a voice that follows them for a long time. We hear relatives, friends, and parents say awful things about us and to us. For a lot of us, we fight those voices every day. 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. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

I don’t hate her. It would honestly be easier if I did. Inside me somewhere, there’s a kid who still loves her despite everything. That kid has a lot of experience loving people who hurt her. She never asks why; she just wants to know what she did wrong and how she can fix it. It’s hard to tell her there’s nothing left to fix. And that there are places we can’t return to. Places like Hogwarts.

I remember when the first book came out. The gangly boy on the cover illustration. The school book fair. At the time, it was just another chapter book on the shelves beside the likes of Bunnicula and Goosebumps. I’ll be honest. It wasn’t a Neverending Story situation for me. I didn’t open the cover and get transported to a world of magic and mystery. I liked it, but that was that. It was the third book, The Prisoner of Azkaban, that wrapped its world around me and drew me in.

It was the first one that felt dangerous to me. Watching these characters I knew contend with adult-level-peril, I felt seen. In Harry, I saw my own rough childhood reflected. 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 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. 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. After Prisoner of Azkaban, I was in deep.

I avoided press about Hogwarts Legacy when it was first announced. I didn’t want to see the gameplay, I didn’t want to be awed by trailers. 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 was afraid to see the lavish visuals of the films recreated on modern gaming hardware, realized in 4K and full HDR. I was afraid I’d have to tell 12-year-old me that she couldn’t play it, and explain why. So when I got a code for Hogwarts Legacy, I braced myself.

I thought I’d spend a lot of time in this section nitpicking. Going over every grievance I have with how this game deviates from the source material, how dated it looks and feels, and how every character just feels like an animatronic Chuck-E-Cheese robot waiting for you to come by and put a quarter in so it can say its one line of dialog and perform a grim, herky-jerky facsimile of a living being. But there are no nits to pick, it’s just lice all the way down.

The longer I spent in this version of Hogwarts, the more I could feel a tangible absence. There’s definitely something missing. I thought maybe it was the lackluster art direction, the one-dimensional characters that feel like store-brand versions of the ones we know and love, or even the conspicuous lack of the iconic John Williams score. But there’s a bigger absence here.

There’s a hole where this game’s heart should be. You can’t see it at first. You have to really feel around its edges, stop looking for what is there and start noticing what isn’t. There’s no sense of place. The world is lifeless. Character models and facial animations are present but somehow absent. The characters are animated, but they certainly don’t feel alive. 

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. It feels muddy, a minefield of unanswered questions and unexplained motivations. And speaking of which, the characters often flat-out state their motivations, but they don’t feel believable or even particularly coherent. It says it’s Hogwarts, but it doesn’t feel like Hogwarts. 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. 

For that reason alone, I can't in good conscience recommend spending your money on it. Combined with who this game helps and who it harms, well, it's definitely not worth it unless your goal is to cause harm.

This is a familiar problem though. It’s one we see in the latest Wizarding World films as well.

The new movies are bad. Not just bad morally, but bad qualitatively. They’re not fun to watch. There’s spectacle, but it all feels flat and kind of confusing. If you look closely, you can see the steady decline in quality as the new movies go on, with IP owners trying to wring any remaining semblance of life from a franchise all but poisoned by its owner, despite attempts to right the ship. Some reviews chalk it up to Rowling having more direct control, and fewer people to tell her no or give her edits. The George Lucas problem. But Hogwarts Legacy makes me think this isn’t the case.

There’s a direct correlation between how open Rowling becomes about her bigotry, and how flat and heartless Wizarding World media becomes. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I think it’s because LGBTQIA+ people and genuine allies are some of the best creative minds in the world, and these films and this game were made largely without them. 

The game industry is far queerer than most people realize. All the things you know and love about your favorite games were made by queer people. I don’t just mean directors or executive producers. I mean the concept artists who bring your favorite games to life, the sound designers, the engineers, the technical artists, the composers, the musicians, the writers, the testers, the producers—the hands that make the best games in the world are queer. We’re the life, the heartbeat, and the magic of great games.

In the yawning emptiness at the heart of Hogwarts Legacy I see the quiet solidarity of queer people and our allies in game development. The people who just said no when the job offers came their way. The ones who didn’t answer the emails from Portkey Games, the ones who politely let their coworkers know that working on a Harry Potter game would be harmful to the trans community, the ones who listened and said, “Okay, yeah, thanks for letting me know.” The people who put their morals, and their loved ones, above an easy paycheck.

I probably won’t ever know your names. But you know who you are—I see you, and I appreciate you more than words can ever express. Thank you for making it easy for me to close the book on Hogwarts and Harry Potter. The magic is gone and won’t ever return, because without us, the Wizarding World is as heartless as its creator.