Game completed: Hogwarts Legacy

Those are basically my feelings right now. But I've done everything the game offers and now I either have to wait for new content or until enough time has passed that I'll feel good about playing it again.

The first part of this post will be general stuff. I'll warn before we go into story and spoilers. 

Before I even got the game I made sure to connect my Wizarding World account with my Warner Bros account so I could have my official House and my actual wand in the game. Connecting those two also provides a bit of extra cosmetic goodies in the game :) Of course I also preordered the Deluxe edition so I could get all those extra goodies and the 72 hours of early access. 

When I first booted up the game it preset everything at Medium settings. I changed them to High and got started. Didn't have any stuttering or fps drops or graphic bugs or glitches throughout until they dropped the first patch and then I started getting stuttering the first few seconds whenever I started the game... Thanks... 

The world is huge with lots to explore and throughout there is a slightly changed version of the soundtrack from the movies and it just keeps hitting me deep in my fangirl heart. It's been a long time since I was this invested in a game and it managed to meet my every expectation and it completely deserved the hype. 

The combat is fast-paced, fun and instinctive/reactive and I enjoyed it way more than I usually enjoy combat in games.

I managed to get all of the achievements for the game. Most of them were either story based or based on collectables so most of them were easy to get if you really went and did everything the game had to offer. Two of them were combat based, but neither of them were too difficult to achieve even for a filthy casual like me :) The last three requires you to replay the intro up until level 9-10 ish, because those three are House-specific. 

From this point on there will be spoilers! Major ones! Don't say I didn't warn you!

I've played the intro four times by now, but the action-y almost movie-like story sequences of it never get boring. It definitely starts with a bang. Dragon attack, ancient magic shenanigans, pensieves... You name it, they got it. When the camera first panned over Hogwarts with the game version of Hedwig's Theme I started crying. I've cried a few times during the course of this game. 

I loved going to classes and I wish they'd included more of them. Especially Potions classes. I need more Professor Sharp in my life. And Professor Garlick. Actually, Professor Hecat is cool too. Just give me more classes. My favourite class is probably the first Defence Against the Dark Arts when I got to beat Sebastian's ass. I love Sebastian. And his quest to save his sister and subsequent accidental delve into the Dark Arts breaks my heart but it makes so much sense. I think I actually audibly gasped when he used the Killing Curse on his uncle. 

Natty started out as the least interesting character you build a friendship with, but the end of her questline had me really fricking invested and the cutscene at the very end which shows her facing off against a boggart that takes the shape of her dead father just had me in tears and I was so proud of her. 

Poppy was so sweet. So fitting that her name is Sweeting. Her story didn't pull me in as much as Natty and Sebastian, but damn if it wasn't amazing to fight alongside centaurs and meet hippogriffs and find snidgets ♥ 

The quest leading up to finding Jackdaw's rest was different depending on which House you were in, which is why there were separate achievements for it, I assume. For Ravenclaw the quest involved helping Ollivander find a stolen family heirloom wand of unusual make and core. For Gryffindore the quest involved Nearly-Headless Nick and going into the Hogwarts kitchen in an attempt to help Nick join the Headless Hunt. For Hufflepuff the quest was to solve a really old murder mystery and it brought us straight to Azkaban! o_o I wasn't expecting to go there in this game... For Slytherin the quest involves the Headmaster's personal house-elf Scrope and going into Apollonia Black's personal and hidden cavern by the Black Lake. All in all very different quests, but doing all of them served to create a very complete portrait of who Richard Jackdaw was. 

The main quest really had its moments too. San Bakar's trial was the most memorable and amazing. Getting to tame and ride a huge graphorn was just *_* And using polyjuice potion to transform into Phineas Nigellus Black for one single quest to get inside his office was so much fun and I was laughing the whole time.

I wish there had been some kind of interaction with Morganach as well as the Keepers, but no such luck. The end of Rookwood was disappointing, but the final fight against Ranrok really made up for it. I loved seeing all the professors come together and help with the battle underneath Hogwarts. 

This is my Game of the Year. Not even a challenge.