Hogwarts Legacy wants to make everyone happy, but Harry Potter gets in the way

polygon.com:

Hogwarts Legacy is not so much a video game as it is an attempt to resolve what was a particular writer’s very specific point of view into a “universe” that will please everyone, regardless of whether that ever coheres into something that makes sense.

Joanne Rowling wrote Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, famously, as a single mother struggling in poverty. It would make her richer than most people in the world. When the series began in my youth, whether I would be into it was not really a question. I was 11, the same age as Harry when he first went to Hogwarts. Of course I read the damn books. We were all reading the damn books.

Describing my fandom for the series is telling the story of an entire generation. People still casually drop their Hogwarts house in their dating profiles; proper nouns like “Voldemort” have been adopted into our language as shorthand for a tyrant or proto-fascist who comes into power; god knows how many people have Deathly Hallows tattoos. Even after the original book series ended, as Potter has waned in popularity, it remains a cultural touchstone. The post-canon Broadway play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child won six Tony Awards, and the Wizarding World areas at Universal Studios theme parks earned the ire of Disney for beating the company at its own game. Harry Potter is influential enough that NBCUniversal bought the broadcast and streaming rights to the franchise for an estimated quarter of a billion dollars in 2016. Rowling initially sold the film rights for the first four books to Warner Bros. for £1 million ($1.65 million) in 1999.

Hogwarts Legacy has the fortune, or burden, of being an essential piece of a financial portfolio that is otherwise teetering on the edge of collapse.