Hogwarts Legacy...Yikes, what a weak story

SPOILERS if you haven't finished the game!

Its a HP game. Its made for people that don't play video games, so to them, that's perfectly seviceable.

I thought the main strengths of Harry Potter was on the world building and characters, and less on the story. Though the stories are quite fun to read as well!

I didn't finish or really get very far into Hogwort's Legacy; it was a decent game, just not good enough to pull me away from other games. I'll get back to it at some point haha

If you go into any game for its story you've already lost imo.

Some games force feed you the story making it hard to ignore it. No names shall be mentioned.😎

@Pedro: Do tell? But in a sense every game force feeds you the story as its unavoidable unless you're just playing mp.

Not every game but most games have story elements even single player. The games that force feed story directly prioritize storytelling and cinematics over gameplay. This comes in the form of walking cutscenes, frequent interruptions to gameplay where some parts are simply moving from one cutscene to the next etc.

I have yet to play it myself until I can upgrade my GPU to either a 4070 or 4080 cause I wanna use DLSS3.

@Pedro: Oh I understand all that, but you need to name names, that's the fun part lol.

It's an intellectual property fan-wank game. Of course it's going to be as insipid and risk-averse as possible, so not to piss off the Hermione body pillow huggers and the Facebook-snorting parents who flip out when their kiddies say "crap" one time.

Still gonna buy it some day in a deep sale, cause I could always use a blandly inoffensive time sink to waste some hours in.

Hellblade and almost any JRPG. 😁

@Pedro: No such thing as a JRPG, but I agree on Hellblade.

There is no such thing as a JRPG? Is this one of those personal beliefs thing?

@Pedro: It was a term made up by Westeners because they think they're clever. Japanese devs class it as an insult. And well, before someone who thought they were clever by coming up with it came along, I was playing RPG's that happened to come from the East, and they didn't put a J on their box art. So I will call it what the creators of their games do.

If you have a problem with that, then you can take it up with them. Good luck 👍

@last_lap:

I don't see how JRPG is an insult. Most Japanese devs I've seen embrace the term as its own sub genre. JRPGs are significantly different from Western RPGs in terms of game design and that's kinda why it needs its own classification.

A good example of this is looking at games like Persona 5 and Atelier Firis. These are designed around the concept of juggling time and various things like school life along with the usual dungeon crawling. Sounds good on paper but the execution is very hectic and there's a lot of time management you have to go through.

-You'll also notice that the presentation is different too. Characters using obvious animation cycles, sometimes you'll see talking faces or talking pictures - depending on the game. It can be a little archaic but that's kind of the charm. It can be old school turn based combat or real-time, there's no set way a JRPG has to be but the design is typically influenced by Japanese culture. It's not necessarily a bad thing - I love JRPGs, they're some of the most creative games you'll ever see.

It's a perfectly appropriate label not stemming from any animosity or maliciousness. "JRPGs", in general, have very specific design choices, art direction, and more. Just like Western RPGs, action-RPG, etc.. It's simply a sub-genre, a classification, etc.

If you want to come up with a different name for it that's fine but until then JRPG will have to do.

I absolutely loathe JRPG's because of those design and aesthetic choices, and would be super disappointed if someone was telling me about an RPG and it sounded cool, only to find out it was a JRPG and I didn't like it.

I also think non-Japanese developers, as a result of this, can make JRPG's (or I suppose Japanese-inspired RPG's). It's more of a technical thing than cultural at this point. It's why brewers can make Belgian beers in Canada, Americans can make English ales, and people can make Pilsners outside of Pilsen, Czech Republic.

@mrbojangles25: @nepu7supastar7: I will just leave this here. And end with when I started playing RPG's back in the day there was never a J put on the cases of their games. It's a Western thing, if you want to call them that then all good, but I will call them RPG's.

"No such thing as a JRPG,"

As you have clearly indicated, there is such a thing as JRPG, you don't like the term and you are free to dislike it. But, it is just a category of games. When someone states JRPG, there is a set of game tropes that these games follow. This is why we as humans create categories. Metroidvania, Soulslike etc.

It is weird to end your comment as if I had a problem. I call them JRPGs and you have an issue with the therm, not me. I don't need clearance from a dev or devs in another country about the categorization of games.

@Pedro: I will call them what they are rpg's, i've said what I wanted to say.

At no point in time did I implied, hinted or suggested what you should call them. However, you were telling me that the genre didn't exist. Let's get that clear and I will also call them what they are. 😊

@last_lap: I've heard this a lot, but I have to say I just don't agree. I am someone who falls head over heels in love with stories, and RPGs are usually my genre of choice--Dragon Age, Mass Effect, The Witcher 3 are some of my favorites of all time. I just hoped Hogwarts Legacy would borrow a little something from them...like, I don't know, a narrative that's worth a Knut?

Just to clear this up. The gaming industry have been using JRPG for decades and I don't see it changing anytime soon. Any RPG from Japan is also called JRPG, regardless of traits or features. We started seeing this term after western RPG's like Elder Scrolls started to become popular. I guess to differentiate between development styles, and gameplay styles that are typically used. In the end, IMO, the terms represent where the game was created, and nothing more.

And just to add more details, a notable difference is that JRPG's sometimes utilizes an Anime art style (Pokemon, Xenogears, Dragon Quest) while WRPG's are generally unwilling to deviate from "gritty realism" is why we use the terms in the first place.

Fun fact: They used to be called Console RPGS's until PC (Computers) RPG's started appearing on consoles, and by that, I mean JRPG and WRPG terms started showing up not long after Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was released for Xbox 2003.

I've been gaming since 1993, (with SNES & Sega Genesis) things were way different before JRPG/WRPG became a thing, it just happened so fast.

@pokemon4597: I'm the opposite, gimme great gameplay, a good world and tool to play around with in that world and a skip cutscenes (ie story) and i'm good.

For the most part video games stories are the usual tripe.

Without the J in RPG how I'm I suppose to know it's a 10 hour game stretched to 170?

What an incredibly racist comment.

You're gonna be in for a laugh when 99% of AAA games get announced with a cinematic story trailer.

If this were Twitter we would be getting racism wars right now, and one of your or both would be getting (their COD skins) cancelled.

Luckily this is Gamespot and we can all have a good laugh.

lol

Better than Zelda's 'story'

@R4gn4r0k: Once upon a time i made the mistake of saying on twitter that I loved yearly 00s *** movies and I was immediately called a racist. I was super confused.

Edit: Holly shit even GameSpot doesn't allow it. J4p! Japanese!!! I shall called them *RPGs from now on.

I thought the whole game was pretty damn good myself. I would have got the platinum if it weren't for bugs, thing is, I'm done with the game now and don't want to go back when all thats left is finding things like pages, landing zones, and balloons. The story was a little weak at points, but not all that weak compared to 95 percent of games out there. Still the best newer open world rpg in quite a while.

By the time the GOTY season rolls around, no one will be talking about this game. There are just too many great games this year. Ultimately, this is a game sold on the popularity of its IP and does not have the quality to stand out among them.

@last_lap:

That's fine and all, I'm just saying that it's not really an insult. It's like calling Japanese cartoons anime despite the fact that they're clearly still cartoons. It's a different sub genre but it doesn't make it any less than everything else out there. A label is just that.

@last_lap:

Also, are you frigging kidding me with that article? So just because ONE Japanese producer doesn't like the term - it's suddenly discriminatory?! The video game industry has been using this JRPG term for a REALLY long time. As I've said, many other Japanese devs embrace it in a way that means it has its own league. It doesn't mean "lesser" to any extent.

Yeah, the story was very bland and uninteresting. Once I got bored of the gameplay, I stopped playing as the story did not have enough juice to make me want to see it through, granted Im not a huge Harry Potter guy.

I agree. The story and characters were really weak to me especially when comparing it to the books. I hated going in those underground dungeons too. The lack of quidditch, morality system, and house points really sucked too. Game was pretty damn mediocre and I doubt I will play it again

I like how basically no one talks about this game anymore (from what I see), and how everyone found it merely "ok", but sold 5 billion times more copies than way better games.

Stahp.

How it should have ended.

Getting motivated by political and sociological agendas tend to be disingenuous that way. People will jump aboard these wagons, just 'cuz, and no other reason.

When those Just 'Cuz Stan's have sucked the life out of one thing they will abandon it and move on to the next thing. That's why Hogwarts has seemingly been left at the curb.

Pretty accurate ... people wanted to have a game set in the HP universe ... and they got it. That was the main point of this game.

Its a Trash game. like worst game of 2023 so far.