Hogwarts Legacy (Zero Punctuation) 

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Something I find strange is how quickly the character just flat out fine with commiting magical murder. Like set that dude on fire and flung him into his mates.

I just love how you rescue animals from poarchers in the game.. by capturing them and either putting 12 of them in a pretty small (magical) cage or just selling them of at Hogmeade. Which is totally different from the things poarchers would do!

I remember meeting the charms professor and thinking “hey this guy is fun, I can’t wait to attend class with him throughout the game.” As I foolishly assumed the game would follow the Bully formula of having you attend classes every day and play mini games to gain new skills and bonuses. That guy did absolutely nothing for the rest of the game and only appeared briefly to teach you one spell and then has no dialogue whatsoever from that point forward. Quite frankly, if your game takes place in a school, you should strive to be Bully. Bully is the very picture of what a school-based game should be. RIP Bully 2.

Yeah that unforgivable spell where you kill someone being bad but turning them into a barrel of doom and using said barrel to kill their friends being fine kinda rubbed me the wrong way. I mean is the barrel still sentient? Is it's last thought as it flies at 30 knots toward its friends "watch out Dave"?

This game legitimately has bandit camps. Damn you far cry!

"Don't blame me if I give everyone tinnitus" Bold of you to assume that that bloody intro and outro haven't done so already, being about 6 times the volume of the rest of the video all these years.

The morality of this game is all over the map. So much of the game has you going after poachers, but then it also has you "rescuing" animals by knocking them out and stuffing them in a sack. So they are the poachers, and you just rescue them. Yes, money does change hands, and the "rescued" animals are ultimately unaccounted for once you sell them off, but trust us, you are the good person here.

Ah yes... I feel so bad for using the unforgivable killing curse after TKing a full grown man into the air and slamming him violently into the ground over and over again breaking all the bones in his body and rupturing his vital organs.

Due to RU-vid’s new guidelines they put out this week, you can now officially start swearing before the 30 second mark. I hope this brings you joy Yahtzee………

Yes, that spell that instantly kills and is completely painless is totally unforgivable, but lighting your enemies on fire is totally fine. Oh but the curse requires you to WANT to kill your enemy to use it... which makes you totally worse than a pyromaniac that would light someone on fire.

You know what really took me out of HL? Officer Singer. Hogwarts Valley is literally being besieged by a fucking folk music festival's worth of dark wizards and yet the ENTIRE valley, where I will remind you is located the one school that every single wizarding family in the British Isles sends their young children, has only a single either shamelessly corrupt or painfully incompetent wizard police officer assigned to it, when the sheer amount of poachers, mobsters, and rebels hanging about would justify the deployment of the fucking Wizarding National Guard, or whatever passes for a magic military in this universe... Once that glaring incongruity struck me, I just couldn't shake it off and it stuck with me for the rest of my playthough. Every single bandit camp I slaughtered my 15-year-old-wizard-serial-killer way through, i'd have this niggling thought in the back of my head. "Isn't there some kind of official authority that should be taking care of this?"

If your game has menus that you must navigate often during the game play loop they must animate transitions instantly. Not quickly but instantly. I will die on this hill.

Everyone brings up the murder spell, but honestly I think the weirdest unforgivable interaction is the torture spell. There's a student in the game who has an entire backstory around Crucio being cast on people around him and himself, to the point that being forced to cast it broke him inside and he's never really healed from it. He repeatedly and insistently states that there is absolutely no gray area with the Unforgivable spells; If you use them you've picked the absolute worst option and there's no downplaying or mitigating that. Especially Crucio, since it's deeply personal for him. He's a companion in a mission or two, and if you use Crucio in front of him he basically goes "Hey man cut it out."

Surely hogwarts legacy is about a Wizard Jump Street detective being sent to find out why hundreds of goblins and gang members are hanging about within 10km of a school. Why else would the protag be willing and able to learn spells on the first try, kill hundreds to no effect, and blitz through class with no effort?

Controversy aside, going Jiminy CT for this game is just such a weird move. The hook of the HP franchise was never about fashion souls or killing nameless mooks. It was about using your spells (and occasionally magic items) to solve obstacles and play shenanigans on a roster of named classmates. Trying to cram Zelda into Life is Strange would've been a closer approximation. A crafting system only really makes sense for potions, and even then, they could've gone a Resident Evil route instead; do you want to use this Green Herb for offense, or error correction? Choose carefully! Thinking critically about how to use fewer resources > needing to collect a gazillion resources that don't have any mechanical depth. And it's like they don't understand _why_ the unforgivable curses were unforgivable. 'Oh it's because you killed that guy _by stealing his soul,_ it would've been fine if you killed him by throwing him out a window.' Like, no; the whole point of magic scuffles in HP was that death usually wasn't even an option, so you had to care about other stakes. In some ways, Psychonauts was more of a Harry Potter game than this.

Yahtzee's "contempt" for Nick is probably my favorite running "fourth wall break." Reminds me when he'd preface his reviews with a very fast spiel about sponsoring the channel and ending it by yelling, "was that slow enough, Nick?!"

I have Tinnitus, and yahtzee is right. The bleeps do indeed aggravate my tinnitus. Now I can't sleep! Darn you Nick!

Yatzhee fighting with the editor in chief of the escapist is the sketch routine I didn't realise I needed

I feel like they should have put more role playing into this RPG.

I've always wondered what it is about the killing curse that makes it unforgivable, but somehow it's okay to turn people into animals and leave them like that to be eaten by predators, set people on fire and kill them more painfully, or just cast the petrificus totalus spell on a dude and then leave him there indefinitely. At some point, isn't it a little weird that the instant painless death spell is the only one that's illegal?

I'm glad you brought up the outfits. It's the "When your custom character appears in a cut scene" meme.

Wizard101>>>

Yahtzee knew he was going to get flak for this one. How dare he call Istanbul boring???

There's no way I could pretend it's an adaptation of Discworld, it's not hilariously clever enough.

Discworld would be a more fun setting. Can see the orangutan librarian or have to deal with the horrors from outside reality wanting your magic. Maybe every time you die death turns up as a character

I feel like the books themselves don't do a good job of distinguishing "good" and "evil" magic! "Oh no, don't Kill, Torture, or Control people, that's awful! Here's a spell that lets you put people in Rigor Mortis WHILE THEY'RE ALIVE, have fun!"

I love the disclaimer in the credits: "official company policy is probably a bit less sweary"

"Be the main character in a work of self-insert harry potter fanfiction" so this is My Immortal: The Game.

I don’t care if I’m just screaming into the void, but I need to get this out there. I don’t think this video emphasizes how truly terrible the pseudo live service mechanics are in this game. All of your throwables need to be either bought for about 500 gold (selling LEGENDARY equipment only nets you around 200) or waiting for TWENTY PLUS MINUTES for a single plant to grow in your base. You can’t even pregrow a bunch of them because your inventory limit’s so low. If you use them in combat a lot, you need to pop in and out of your base after every few fights to restock (two terrible menu navigations and loading screens each time). Believe it or not, that’s not even as bad as upgrading your gear. You can’t just spend gold, you also need animal parts which is what the totally-not-poaching, single-party consent animal “rescuing” is for. You need to capture an animal, bring it back to the base, and feed and brush it before it’ll grant you ONE piece of upgrade material for the worst upgrades ever. You’ll need around three to five items to upgrade your gear and-you guessed it-you need to wait around 20-30 minutes before an animal is ready to give you another item just so you could apply Make Gobins Do Less Damage or something equally banal to your stupid wizard hat. Hogwarts Legacy is a truly terrible game. About 14 hours in I realized I was completely not having fun and instead just mindlessly zooming between collectibles. I firmly believe this game was intended to be a live service but they saw Marvel’s Avengers getting its kneecaps broken and chickened out. This was one of the most miserable, boring games I’ve played in recent memory and I resent it for wasting 14 hours of my precious free time.

We live in a world where you can describe blowing up three people with improvised explosive made from the fourth guy, but can't call someone a c*nt.

The one thing I realised about this game by the end is that there is no actual reason why this game HAS to exist around Hogwarts. Like, every plot point could easily have been anywhere else at the end of the day and the story would have still worked perfectly fine. Combine that with how rapidly you complete everything in the castle and it became quite obvious to me that the "Hogwarts" part of the name was a selling point alone and not at all an integral part of the game. (This also explains why you're a fifth year, too. So you have magical ability, but still an excuse to be at the school) Oh, also several achievements couldn't always be gained at launch due to bugs, too.

Wow, that BEEPING sound was so good that I'm still hearing it

The biggest issue with Hogwarts is that it DESPERATELY wanted to be a TES/Star Wars game and was held back by having to be about nominally good people. The devs clearly wanted this to be about the freedom of being an absolute shitheel wrecking ball but the narrative kind of restricts that way too much. I hope we can have more out of this team.

It is always a pleasure to hear Yahtzee tear apart british voice acting in games.

I literally said "NO!" when Yahtzee mentioned the crafting. Like...whyyyyyyy

Speaking of how disconnected the game is with morality - the game's money system is only obtainable in the world by looting, INCLUDING looting everyone's house in front of them yet no reprocussions what so ever. HEY POTIONS MAN don't mind I grab this glove you have in your chest in front of you and sell it right back to you because RNGelatinous didn't give me better stats from it.

Joke's on you Yahtz, I already have tinnitus

Putting the moderators into overtime on the comments of this one.

"just don't blame me if we give everyone tinnitus" he says a quarter second before playing his outro music at double the volume of the rest of the video haha.

"...and more "Be the main character in a work of self-insert Harry Potter fanfiction." Nah, this game not nearly as funny as reading "My Immortal".

There needed to be more role playing in this role-playing game. Some actual impactful decisions, or something as basic as they way your character talks - honestly, say what you like about Dragon Age 2's copy-pasted dungeons it has the most player-chosen main character personality ever. Even if the main plot beats are the same being able to chose to react to situations and characters as a smarmy git, or goody-two-shoes, or jokester, or calm professional, or angry thug makes so much difference to game feel. Also - Putting a basically linear story in an open world game doesn't make it non-linear. Yes, you can technically do certain missions in any order, but when those same missions play out exactly the same regardless that's still linear. And player choices really don't matter in this game.

all these years, yahtzee still going strong

I felt like Malfoy’s coke dealer with the way the best gear looked

Man I remember reading my first non-Harry Potter story about a boy going off to wizarding school (also published before Harry Potter). The main character had to actually learn magic, deal with school housing, pass tests to avoid getting expelled (unless you gave them a lot of money they really weren't interested in wasting time on students who didn't want to learn), and when demons invaded the mortal plane at the end of the school year you bet the board of regents had some pointed questions for him about the matter. There was no headmaster playing favorites in that school. Honestly, it could have made for a better wizarding school game.

Wow a worst witch reference, I knew the author Jill Murphey as I grew up in the same village. She died a few years ago.

"An open world who's vastness is matched only by it's pointlessness. Copy pasted grassy hills with the occasional Hamlet. That is one house one pub and a communal sheep tied to a fence." Yahtzee taking shots at Scotland.

Hogwarts Legacy is the most middling open world game possible, but has very fancy set dressing. So, naturally, it's already the best-selling game of the year. :/

Should be called Bogshorts because of that one bit of lore that magic people just doody their pants and enchant it away.

I'd pay serious money for a Unseen University Legacy, but I guess that would put me in the same fanboy demographic as this game's target market, wouldn't it? ...screw it, Discworld is worth fanboying over.

Directly magicing someone dead is unforgivable. Using magic to create a situation where someone dies is just fine.

It took me about 60% of the game before I noticed that you had to manually activate the bag space upgrades from the challenges menu. So yes that bag space joke hit home hard

Glad I don't care for Mr. Pottah and I can watch this forest fire with no attachments.

Well the developers definitely made _one_ correct design choice - they chose to make a Harry Potter game, ensuring that it'll be played by millions of people who've _literally_ never played a better game. Or _any_ other game for that matter. Millions of Potterites who have only heard of video games in passing, and for whom an Ubisoft open world bandit camp shooter will be _a work of pants-shitting genius._

I actually thought the male Mc was trying to sound like Danial Radcliff's Harry. Tonally at least. The accent seemed a directorial decision.

The morality is all over the place in the game because the morality is all over the place in HP in general. It's fitting that the stories cover the high school years of a wizard because it's about roughly on par with a child's level of complexity towards morality in a story. "I'm good guy, they bad guy".

ALL HANDS BRACE FOR THE COMMENT SECTION

Being a real Hufflepuff means being able to hear all of the jokes made about you and go “Ha, good one, friend!”

you get to PICK your house? Have these people ever actually witnessed harry potter in the flesh?

> […] when you try to hit a specific dude and the auto-target thinks its more of a "to whom it may concern" situation […] > Better get grinding lest thy numbers not go up. What a startingly apt statement on the modern education system. Well, on the plus side: Without Hogwarts Legacy we wouldn't have gotten this treasure trove of a quote collection :) Especially the first sums up the sins of so many badly implemented combat systems so on point it's almost scary.

Ah... So, Assassin's school for Horizon Far Wizardry. Customized for fans successfully.

This game was great... for the first 6-8 hours... in Hogwarts.

The facade coming loose moment for me was when i had been flying over all the places i could go too leveling up and solving puzzles on the way, very triple a generic world and combat so i give it a 5 or a 6 of 10.

Yah, the curse that instantly kills is such a big deal, but setting dudes on fire and throwing them off cliffs is fine. This isn't even ludonarrative dissonance, the game told me to slow burn an enemy to death for extra XP...

I appreciate the alternate wizarding universe recommendations

Someone I know played this game and I can attest to the outfit stuff mentioned. They played the entire thing wearing a suit of armour and a pumpkin head.

Let's be honest, Bully is the superior Hogwarts game

All this game needed was a really well designed Hogwarts, and a decent Hogsmead. Who needs an open world for a Harry Potter game? All you really want to do is explore the stuff from the books or movies anyway. Maybe throw in a bus ride over to Diagon Alley or something.

3 types of enemies and it might instead be 2 types because there's apparently an arachnophobia filter

I'm guessing a big part of why conversation surrounding this game has been so focused on the author of the books is that the game's so aggressive bland and by the numbers that there's literally nothing else to talk about.

no joke, about halfway through the game my strategy became "hurl everything at everyone" and combat became exceedingly trivial. Even the final boss has projectiles that you can fling back at it and it does stupid high damage if you go all in on the damage upgrades for it.

2:52 - "School uniform, school uniform, school uniform, lanky kid dressed as a clown, school uniform..."

I just wanted basically magic Bully but noooo

Jokes on you, I already have tinnitus.

Looking forward to seeing this one getting a "Bland-iest" award at the year-end roundup!

wait stealthing in a wizard game................what are you going to do jump out of a bush to shove your singular fancy chopstick up their nose to stab their brain

That final tinnitus joke 🤣 I don't think I've ever laughed that hard before while sober

Had to pause and collect myself after "more of a to-whom-it-may-concern situation". What a great way of describing exactly that experience.

I never realised how much I want to see Discworld get more games. For whatever reason the games have been kind of small and niche.

The cognitive dissonance of Yahtzee pointing out his Britishness with Grammar school education then pronouncing it Tin-aye-tus not Tin-it-us, is jarring.

Ian Dorsch the guy made the intro music also teaches my Opera Workshop

I'm looking forward to the wonderful comment section under this ZP. I'm sure humanity will not fail me.

Only tangentially related, but it's always weirded me out that certain spells are illegal directly. Obviously murder should be illegal, and whatever your opinion there's a sane rationale behind restricting ownership of guns, but everyone has a handy multitool which includes a gun and for some reason it's more illegal to fire the gun at someone than it is to slit their throat with the knife. Heck, "wingard levioser" isn't even a real spell and I'm pretty sure it could still kill someone.

Yes, unlocking everyones doors and chests, taking their belongings is something a good protagonist would do. Dont get me started on the Avada Kedavra usage that goes totally undetected.

Lmao that exploding spell joke was exactly what I was waiting to be talkies about 😂😂😂

''Hey we have all this Warner Brothers Potter money, maybe we can use it to make really interesting quests and content!'' ''What? Fuck no, crafting, collectibles and a giant open world where you follow a breadcrumb trail anyway.''

Yahtzee pretending to be worried about giving people tinnitus, when his outro has been like 30 decibels louder than the video for over a decade

Am I the only one that thought the protagonist's voice had a very slight echo to it? Kind of a hollow, metallic undertone? I played as a witch, then a wizard, and both sounded off, but in the same way. Earphones, earbuds, they just had a slight metallic echo I couldn't not notice. That's not the right description, but that's the closest I can think to call it.

As someone who has the closed captions switched on... Your attempt at self-censorship will not impact the literate.

Boy I'd love to see Yahtzee review Pizza Tower

No, you don't have to worry about the bleeps harming my eardrums. Those were already destroyed by the cripplingly loud intro/outro music. -_-

He really has developed a hatred of jimminycockthroats, hasn't he. I remember when he said that all AAA games should be making this kind of game.

Glad to know there's the option to bypass the ethics question and go right to "It's not even that good" in the Hogwarts Legacy discussion. The AAA industry has a great way of doing that of late.

Oh God, the sheep labeled Red Light District

Watch the escapist version to hear the C-Words in all their glory

I have a couple of friends who got this game and told me I'd like it, but it just sounds like an MMO that never actually made it to MMO status (and desperately should have to make grinding seem worthwhile). I've also never been a fan of HP or its stories and I rarely care about open world games, so it had no draw for me. It's nice to see that it sincerely isn't worth the time investment or money.

You know what would make sense for a Harry Potter game? Well, not "Harry Potter" game, but a "kid going to a magic school that definitely doesn't violate anyone's IP" game? Ripping off the Persona series! You know, that way, it feels like you're going to school for a whole year, and you have time to make friends and enemies, and you have to balance solving this year's mystery (hint: It's not the obvious culprit!) with the social shit you really care about, and there are excuses to break things up with plot developments and events like holidays.

I was alright with the equipment crafting. It definitely didn’t feel required since they're just upgrades and materials for it can be found raising animals (although you do have to wait in unpaused,in-game for them to drop). The mounts bothered me though. Your broom is your main, but you get two more. One is a hippogriff which isn’t as good as your broom since it can’t be upgraded. The other is gained in the second to last story mission and it’s a ground mount so there’s no reason to use it.

Was kind of hoping to actually attend class at Hogwarts with stuff going on in the background, so you would go investigate between classes to figure out what's going on and solve puzzles to get to places. Like the movie if you were just an average student. The cosmetics might have fit more if they were variations that still fit the school's dress code. It's nice that the combat is so fluid, but I can't take it seriously when they are pointlessly spinning around and rolling all over the place. Doing that in real life would give me a massive headache if the enemies don't shoot me in the back for attempting it.

Really have to commend Yahtzee for still being able to always giving me a good laugh even after a decade of this shit.