The First Reviews Of Hogwarts Legacy Are In

The long-awaited magical tale is finally coming to us— the hype and controversy around this game alone make me curious, and every Harry Potter fan’s old fantasy – an open-world RPG title- sounds terrific in itself. Critics like the game so far, but there’s more to it. Players can review it from the 8th of February.

So Hogwarts Legacy is releasing today. When it was first announced in 2020, everybody got excited, even those who were not die-hard fans of the Harry Potter franchise. With myself in this group. But I like RPG games, I like the freedom and the consequences of my choices in the playthrough, and I like that I can create my character and give it a little backstory in my head. Also, I like the idea that I can act differently in given scenarios than I would act in real life. Hogwarts Legacy captures the ambiance and mystical atmosphere of J.K. Rowling’s imaginary world. The critics feel this too because the game has its first reviews sitting around 90 on Metacritic, on every platform. But what about the controversies? Doesn’t it affect the game’s rating? Not yet.

In 2020 J.K. Rowling shared an opinion post about ‘people who menstruate’, and took issue with the phrase. She wrote:

“People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”

This started a huge twitter-avalanche about trans rights, women’s rights, gender, and biological sex. Days after, Warner Bros. released a statement about their stand on diversity, social issues, cultural inclusiveness, and their empathy towards all communities of people, but did not mention Rowling. The case became huge. Actors of the franchise shared their opinions and the biggest media outlets covered it. This happened in June, and Hogwarts Legacy was announced in September, so the community and their allies started to vouch to boycott the game. They’re doing it since. Their reason is J.K. Rowling has not worked on the game directly, but the developers collaborated with her team on the narrative direction, and will probably earn money through royalties.

Then why the critic scores are this good? Because Warner Bros. was careful about who to give pre-release codes to the game. This game will sell millions of copies, and might even be a contender for the game of the year, so the first reviews are very important. And now some people are not happy, because they think that the boycott of the game failed. But after the public release, every journalist can write their review, and users can review bomb the game easily.

In conclusion, everybody can express their opinions, and we can have debates about our beliefs and approaches on different topics. But nothing can change the fact that Hogwarts Legacy is a phenomenal game and should be treated as one.