I wish there was a 3 1/2 stars as an option because I did have a ton of fun playing the game. There were some aspects which I didn’t feel were quite finished though hence the reluctance to give it a 4 star rating.
I was obsessed with this game, I bought it in January 2025 and finished it in about a month. I had my little character playing as a self-assured 15/16 year old witch. I’m sure you’re on the edge of your seat wondering what house I got sorted into/chose (you can actually change your mind if you want) and I did end up picking Slytherin mostly because literally every single time I do any “What’s your Hogwarts house?” quiz, I ALWAYS end up in Slytherin… including the Pottermore one, which I think it the one that counts the most really.
I really liked the Slytherin common room, except it’s cool to look at and then you never return there ever again until you start a new ‘section’ and wake up in your bed. That was pretty disappointing considering that the four common rooms are totally different and it looks like the developers put in a lot of effort into customising them.
I thought the gameplay was fun and the main quests are varied enough. I love a good side quest and the secondary-main character quests were pretty good and did actually kind of tie into the overarching plot line in some way. I think my favourite was Poppy’s quest line mostly because Centaurs and cute animals killing poachers etc. etc.
Every time I go into one of these game I’m always like “I’m going to get 100% on everything” and then doing that is too much of a grind and half of the things are repetitive so I never end up doing it. This was no different. There are so many things to collect but they pretty much all follow the same structure, especially the Merlin Trials (ifykyk) I just thought they could benefit from more variety. I did end up giving up on doing them mostly as none of them further your understanding of the story and I’d gotten to a point where the rewards gained got to a decent point.
Spoilers coming, don’t read if you don’t want to know the ins and outs
So this is an actual screenshot from my game, I did play it on the switch hence the slightly terrible graphics. Madame Kogawa was having a day of it apparently.
So the premise is your character is a super special Ancient Magic seeing/wielding main character (hence the pink anime hair I chose). There’s a bad boy goblin, Ranrok who’s a power hungry maniac and employs some wizards even though wizards and goblins hate each other. This is introduced and then just left unmentioned for quite a while which really throws the pacing off. It could just be that I spent too much time looking around at everything with wonder but let me know if I’m wrong.
You do meet a few cool characters, Sebastian Sallow, Poppy Sweeting, Natsai Onai, Ominis Gaunt (which is a very cool link and has the best back story). I think that they were all very well thought out as well so credit goes there. As I mentioned, Poppy’s quest line was my favourite mostly because you get to go to a bunch of different locations and meet magical beasts which is right up my alley plus you get to make friends with Centaurs and feel like special girl.
So your friend/mentor Professor Fig helps you along the way and you end up discovering a map chamber where the portraits of previous Ancient Magic users appear and tell you to complete their trials. In essence it’s to figure out if you’re worthy. The first two are pretty samey, especially as you kind of go into some whole Ancient Magic portals before the trials so you already assume they’re looking pretty similar and there will be a boss battle at the end. The third one was my favourite by faaaaarrrrr. It was told as if you were in a storybook and the art-style was very very cool and looked like the pages in a black and white picture book and it stood out so much against the other trials by a lot. Also you get the deathly hallows stuff for the duration of the trial so I felt very Voldy-esque.
The last trial I think came a little bit too late, by the time you complete it, get a Graphorn it’s end game territory anyway so I didn’t really use the Graphorn that much really. And I think it was the shortest trial of the four which is maybe why it fell flatter. Or I’m just really dumb and couldn’t figure out the second one as quickly as I could have done.
By the final battle, I think I was so overpowered I’d gotten through the little enemies so quickly before the final Ranrok boss fight. I did think it was very cool that all of the Hogwarts professors came and started doing their Wizard bits, did bring a small tear to my eye. But I Crucio’d and Confringo’d these level 25 Goblins meanwhile I was here at level 34 killing them all as quickly as I possibly could have. Big end spoilers on the next paragraph btw:
So at the end, once you smack Ranrok around, professor Fig comes out and helps you stop the cave from collapsing. He pointed his wand so hard he died, which was a sad moment, I was sad, I just wasn’t as devastated as the developers intended that scene to be.
To try and keep this brief, I did think the main story was interesting but there was defo room for more in terms of fleshing it out and incorporating more elements of it into the auxiliary gameplay or having some of the gaps filled earlier. Like Lodgok (nice goblin) gets revealed as Ranrok’s brother but then instantly dies, isn’t able to get the book containing the secrets of the Ancient Magic reserves to you and then you just leave and it doesn’t feel as big a deal as it probably should be? I wish there had been more with Lodgok and with Sirona Ryan.
Onto the side quests/relationship quests. Mainly Sebastian’s. So it starts off fairly innocent, his sister is cursed and he wants to cure her so sets his sights on dark magic. It’s a pretty easy breezy way to learn the curses (which I had SO MUCH FUN using). Sebastian kind of turns out to be a power hungry terrible guy, even though his intentions are noble, he actually doesn’t listen to anyone when they try and tell him he’s going to far. To the point where he kills his uncle. I mean his uncle was trying to kill us first but what happened to being the bigger person?
Well anyway I of course was encouraging him to dig deeper so I could learn the curses and once Sebastian taught me all of them it was bye bye Hogwarts and hello Azkaban for him.
The final thing I want to mention is the Room of Requirement and the vivariums. I was expecting a lot more from both. It’s cool that everything in the room is customisable but I found myself going there mostly to brew potions which was useful in itself. The vivariums on the other hand fell very flat, I wish there had been more interaction options with the beasts you put in there, the baby beasts you breed don’t ever grow up so apart from if you want to get achievements there’s not that much point. I just wish we’d gotten the option to ride unicorns if we had them in the vivarium, to actually play or do other things rather than get a ball out and brush them for materials.
I know I haven’t even dived into all of the exploration bits you can do but in all honesty they were all exactly the same. They just unlock either increased inventory, extra power up meter or some gear. And they’re pretty much the same after you’ve done one.
I did really enjoy playing the game, I will defo be playing again in a different house but not for a while because apparently the house doesn’t affect that much of the actually side quests. It felt complete in some ways and very incomplete in others. At times it seemed like they tried to cram so many elements in there that none of them felt particularly useful and the novelty wore off fairly quickly. I did really like combat though, that was good fun and probably my favourite thing to do in the whole game was fight other wizards.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading. Feel free to like this post or leave a comment if you have thoughts on the game, or just want to say hi, if you want to be the first to read the next thing I post, why not subscribe?
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