The castle itself is the best part of the game, and the open world around it never quite catches up.
Walking into the Great Hall for the first time, candles floating overhead, the four house tables stretching out under a false night sky, is worth the price of Hogwarts Legacy on its own. Avalanche Software clearly understood that the castle was the pitch, and it's the one part of the game they refused to pad. I spent my first two evenings ignoring the main quest entirely, following staircases to see where they went, finding a hidden room behind a portrait because a ghost looked at it funny, watching the paintings argue with each other. The castle rewards aimlessness the way the rest of the game rewards checklists, and I'd have traded half the map for one more wing of it.
Sebastian Sallow's storyline is the other thing here I'd call great. It's a thirteen-quest thread about a Slytherin classmate trying to cure his cursed sister, and it walks further into the dark than I expected a game this family-friendly to go, including offering to teach you the Unforgivable Curses along the way. I said yes to learning Crucio because a fifteen-year-old asked nicely, used it through the entire back half of the game, and no professor, prefect, or plot consequence ever said a word about it. That's either the funniest oversight in the game or the bleakest thing about wizard society, and I've decided not to investigate which.
“The castle itself is the best character in the game.”
The open world outside the castle gates is a checklist wearing a wizard hat. There are 95 Merlin trials, the same handful of puzzles repeated across the whole map. I did about sixty before admitting nobody was making me, and the bandit camps and collectible clutter fold up the same way around hour twenty.
Combat is better than a licensed game needed to be. By midgame you're chaining Confringo into Levioso into a well-timed counter, flinging enemies into each other's attacks, and it holds up for the whole run.
The Room of Requirement nearly rescues the middle hours on its own, a customizable space for growing plants, brewing potions, and housing the beasts you rescue. I lost more time arranging furniture in there than I spent on the last three main quests combined. House choice, meanwhile, changes your common room and a couple of side characters and nearly nothing else. I picked Hufflepuff for the kitchen-adjacent common room and stand by it.
I played on PS5, where performance holds steady outside a few crowded courtyards. The PS4 and Xbox One versions that came later reportedly struggle, so play it on current hardware if you can.
By the credits my map was still crusted with icons I'll never clear, and my honest summary is a great castle wrapped in a good-enough game. The last thing I did before quitting out wasn't a quest. I walked back to the Great Hall one more time, at in-game night, just to look at it.