Hogwarts Legacy

[Dragonus45]

This morning had a good bit more combat, mostly against spiders. The fighting is really growing on me. It’s a ranged game, but it feels quite like a melee system, with its emphasis on blocks and guard breaks. If it was a melee game, it would have one of the best systems I've played in ages, since the guard breaks have some depth to them, what with needing different types of spell to break different guards, but each spell carrying its own effect and range and so on. It's way, way better than the extremely samey light/heavy attack system every bloody game uses now.

Yea the best way I have been able to describe the combat system is snappy. It's fast paced and captures the wizard duel thing really well, and I love the way I can build my own combos and experiment for combining effects.

And it is definitely true that the whole house elf thing is clumsily handled, and a sort of weird B plot. I think it would have worked much better to have, say, free elves working at Hogwarts from the get go, but owning elves is still legal and something a lot of older families do. That would make it clear that elves are not by their general nature inclined to be slaves, and that wizarding society is split on the issue.

You know, in the hands of a writer who is less of a blunt instrument then Rowling is I could see the moral conundrums of interaction with a magical species of elf being naturally servile and the question of how to ethically interact with them making for an interesting plot. Rowling however is not the woman for something that delicate.