Hogwarts Legacy and Forspoken are the two most discussed games of 2023 — for entirely different reasons. Despite a slew of controversy surrounding it, Hogwarts Legacy saw a successful launch built on positive initial reviews, strong interest from streamers, and record-breaking sales for Warner Bros. The Harry Potter game has earned a significant wave of detractors too, but that hasn’t stopped it from becoming a phenomenon among a sizable swath of mainstream players.
Forspoken’s launch, on the other hand, didn’t go quite as well. Hampered by questionable marketing, Square Enix’s open-world game was the subject of ridicule before it even came out. It quickly became a social media laughing stock, as several “cringe-worthy” dialogue sequences went viral on Twitter. Middling reviews and underwhelming sales seemed to seal its fate as a big budget disappointment, while developer Luminous Productions has since been absorbed into Square Enix.
The narrative behind those two releases couldn’t be more dissimilar, but the games themselves aren’t actually all that different. Both are story-heavy, fantasy open-world games built around magic-based combat and exploration. Each has different strengths and weaknesses, but the more I’ve had time to reflect on them, the more puzzled I am by the enormous gulf in public reception. For all its grating dialogue and scattered design decisions, Forspoken‘s creative approach to magic is miles ahead of Hogwarts Legacy. If the Harry Potter game is going to be lauded as a genre-defining work, then Forspoken deserves a cynicism-free revisit.
You’re a wizard?
When I played Hogwarts Legacy, I wasn’t coming at it as a Harry Potter fan. I’ve never read the books or seen the films, but that shouldn’t have influenced my thoughts on it much. Whether I’m personally connected to an IP or not, I come to every video game looking for a mechanically engaging experience. I was curious to see how developer Avalanche Software could reinvent the open-world genre by replacing guns and swords with spells. Strictly coming in from that perspective, I was left cold.
Magic in Hogwarts Legacy offers a bit of a mixed bag. The core combat system, for instance, revolves around a single-button magic strike that essentially fires like a peashooter pistol. Early on, battles simply had me pulling my right trigger over and over again with no strategy or nuance. Combat widens out as players learn new spells, some of which help to mask that thin core. Depulso pushes enemies back to help players from getting overrun, while a transformation spell can turn smaller enemies into exploding barrels. Abilities like that can create some exciting moments, though several of the game’s more fun spells don’t have any effect on larger foes and bosses — something that makes the back third of the game sag considerably. It’s a shooter with one gun.
While I had fun levitating enemies up into the air and slamming them to the ground, I was surprised by how unmagical a lot of the magic feels. Several spells act as stand-ins for standard video game tropes, painting over basic mechanics with an extra flash of color. There’s a spell that allows players to instantly kill an enemy when sneaking up on them, a la backstabs in Wolfenstein, while Crucio may as well just be your typical poison attack. Each one adheres more to the rules of action games than the Wizarding World.
Magic outside of combat is even more disappointing. Revelio winds up being a catch-all for a lot of generic tropes — I laughed out loud when I used it for a generic “follow the footstep trail” mission as the established logic of the spell seemingly went out the window. Alohomora is the worst offender, though, as it’s simply a way to trigger a lockpicking minigame. Why I have to physically pick a lock after casting a spell that magically unlocks doors is still beyond me.
Little decisions like that stacked up by the end of my playthrough. I usually felt like I was going through the motions of a video game rather than experimenting with an arsenal of spells. Hogwarts wouldn’t train me to feel like a powerful wizard as I’d hoped; for that, I’d need to visit the world of Athia.
Sorcerer supreme
Though much of the discourse surrounding Forspoken has zoomed in on its Marvel-like dialogue, its excellent combat and traversal systems haven’t gotten nearly as much attention. In Square Enix’s action epic, Frey battles waves of corrupted creatures using a wide array of offensive and defensive spells. Like Hogwarts Legacy, the game opens on its weakest foot. The first spell set revolves around Earth magic and largely involves Frey peppering enemies from afar with pebbles.
That one starting ability pack, though, features more versatility than we see by the end of Hogwarts Legacy. In that set alone, Frey can call up a shield of rocks to defend herself from attacks before blasting it apart into enemies, first a stony burst shot that can be charged up, and a rapid-fire spray that ends in a finishing explosion. Each one has specific strengths, both when it comes to which enemies they’re effective against and what range they function best at.
That’s only a small piece of the puzzle, though. Frey gets several other magic sets by the end of the game, each of which is entirely distinct from one another. Red magic turns combat on its head by giving Frey the power to slash enemies with a fiery sword. That’s cracked open further with water-based blue spells and green air magic. By the end of the game, I could chuck a flaming spear at an enemy, rain icy arrows down on a wide area, and toss an electric dart out that ping-ponged between foes.
All of that is before digging into Frey’s much wider array of defensive skills, which is where Forspoken really excels at making her feel like a powerful sorceress. The developers’ creativity is on full display here, as I get to play around with a massive collection of inventive abilities. Bind ties enemies up in weeds, Oubliette traps enemies in a floating water ball, and Tempest summons a lightning storm.
Like Hogwarts Legacy, some of these spells also tend to reskin basic tropes with magic. Distortion, for instance, functions the same way as Imperio, tricking an enemy into fighting its allies. The difference is that Forspoken generally does a much better job at making those powers feel like the product of magic. Each spell is linked to an element, which brings a visual identity to each. When I fire my stone shield, I can see it split off into individual rocks that pelt my enemies. Similarly, activating the Surge ability triggers a detailed animation of Frey smashing her fist onto the ground and sharp rocks shooting up in front of her. With each attack, I get the feeling that she’s connected to the Earth in some way and calling upon an unexplainable connection to bend it to her will.