Sadly - for a number of reasons - Hogwarts Legacy offers a decidedly middle-of-the-road take on wizarding cosplay.
“Magic,” the trailer said, “binds together our long history.” Warner Bros., the owners of the Harry Potter IP, clearly wanted this game to appeal to everyone and all play styles, and that very first trailer tried to preemptively address the divided cultural waters that the game would be released into. For a generation of readers who had grown up wishing they’d received a Hogwarts acceptance letter, it seemed like the next best thing. The trailer spoke of players adding their “own story” to the “hallowed walls” of Hogwarts and “shaping the future” of the Wizarding World. Showing various witches and wizards engaged in quintessential Wizarding World activities - donning the Sorting Hat, brewing potions, battling fantastical creatures - it appeared Avalanche Software, the studio developing the game, was cooking up an open-world role-playing game to finally scratch the magical-boarding-school itch after years of subpar video games. When Hogwarts Legacy was announced in September 2020, the reveal trailer seemingly promised everything game-playing Potterphiles had long craved. This is an insecure game, one you can tell is buckling under the weight of everything that accompanies it: the discourse, fan expectations, and J.K. Its repetition sums up almost the entire emotional register of Hogwarts Legacy - the wish-fulfillment fantasy of inhabiting the Potterverse it seeks to offer and the lack of confidence with which it does so.
Then, as you hear the phrase for the fifth, tenth, and 15th time, you may begin to feel as if the long-in-development video game is trying too hard to convince you of this fact. The higgledy-piggledy Hogsmeade Village is indeed cozy, a market town filled with a plethora of shops to purchase various wizarding wares. “Does it get any more cozy than Hogsmeade?” The first time you hear this refrain in Hogwarts Legacy, the new blockbuster open-world video game based on the Harry Potter franchise, you may find yourself agreeing with your character, who has just said it.
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