Harry Potter and the Bad Video Game

Hogwarts Legacy, notes from Final Fantasy XIV and more.

Hi all,

Well, I did it. I reviewed Hogwarts Legacy for Polygon. Personally I just don’t think it’s a very good video game. I know I am biased in that I particularly dislike open world action games, a genre which this game so tediously tries to wring for new experiences, but the world of Harry Potter is also uniquely unsuited for this kind of game.

It’s clear that Hogwarts Legacy is, in part, an attempt to position Harry Potter as a franchise that does not need direct involvement from Rowling. Like with Star Wars after it became a Disney property, Warner Bros. seems to see a great opportunity here to tell new stories and make boatloads of money doing it. But Rowling’s world-building isn’t strong enough to sustain anything outside of her original vision. A wizarding world without her reveals the awful truth of the Potter franchise: It has always been a house of cards, threatening to collapse if you remove just one pillar.

Here’s the link on Polygon! I also wrote something for them about The Menu in January.

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Other than playing this very boring video game, I have been spending a lot of time playing Final Fantasy XIV, which is honestly very fun, though not without its problems. After a break of many months, I finally worked my way through the expansion Stormblood, where many of the problems I was having with the game originate from.

On the whole, Stormblood suffers from very bad storytelling. It’s the story of a revolution that the plot has been building to for years, but very little of the story actually takes place in the occupied nation that you’re meant to liberate. For reasons that are honestly pretty convoluted, you end up first freeing another occupied nation by… reinstating the emperor? Okay.

What’s remarkle about the failure of Stormblood is that it feels like a story about revolutionaries written by the oppressors. The depiction of colonized peoples is truly bizarre. So often when you meet people in the colonized cities and towns, they’re angry at you for even suggesting they rebel. The game goes out of its way to say that the children born under occupation are the ones most likely to comply, because they’ve never known a free nation. I can’t think of a single historical precedent for that notion—it feels like something someone just made up without bothering to look at the history of things like, I don’t know, slave revolts.

While I was playing Stormblood I was also watching Andor, which really made the issues with Stormblood all the more obvious. I have issues with Andor too, but they’re mostly structural. I have no idea how to rearrange the events of the first three episodes to make them less boring, but the pacing in the series often suffers from being overly slow. Getting through those first three episodes to the good shit was a trial, but I’m glad I did it. Everyone is right when they say that the prison break episodes are a real treat. I still do not think the show is anarchist agit-prop—Disney simply saw a growth market among mid-30s people who like Star Wars and identify with the rebels—but it’s political point of view is well researched and coherent.

Mostly what makes Andor stand out as good entertainment with comprehensible politics is that its portrayal of non-revolutionaries who just have to get by is both more judgemental and more empathetic than something like Stormblood. No one likes living under occupation, but they make do. They know how to protect their own, and they do have a breaking point, but at the beginning of Andor no one’s at the point of outright rebellion. Stormblood would tell you that they don’t want to—but the characters of Andor do want to, they just don’t know how. Stormblood paints it as totally natural to become a collaborator for the empire; Andor shows how narrow your perspective must be to link up with fascists. What I like most about Andor is that the show demonstrates how people get radicalized against fascism, the very gradual process that Cassian Andor goes through in the show.

The point of Stormblood is that rebellions are lead by Leaders, and that everyone falls in line behind the Leader. It’s essentially the story of Lyse Hext, and her journey from a determined kid with low confidence to a real revolutionary leader. But her journey is obscured by the whole rigamaroll of having to free another occupied country—it mostly happens off screen. Cassian Andor’s gradual transition from guy who is in it for himself to someone willing to die for a cause has a lot to do with the people he meets. In fact, it’s in their spirit that he eventually offers to join the revolution fully. The revolution depicted in Andor is not lead by a Leader—it’s made up of the actions of people who might never meet each other, who might die before they see their mission completed.

The most poignent moment of the series for me was at the end of the prison break, when Andor turns to the fellow prisoner who helped him free all the men trapped with them. The prison itself is surrounded by water on all sides. The only way to make it to freedom is to jump and swim miles to land. Andor looks back at his friend and comrade as if to say, you first.

“I can’t swim,” he replies. Andor is pushed off the ledge and his comrade fades from view. That story is over now—it’s Andor’s role to carry that memory with him.

By the time that Lyse Hext has matured into role as Leader, she is walking through a battlefield musing about the “price” of the freedom they now enjoy. I do not know that she would die for it, as we all know Cassian Andor does. I don’t think Stormblood really understands that freedom is something you die for.

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I have a little tiny bit of housekeeping and then I’ll let you go.

Firstly, I wanted to make this newsletter more regular, but I think the combination of ADHD and depression makes self managing a task like this a little too arduous for me. I am returning to the schedule of “whenever I feel like it.” If I have a big feature coming out I’ll definitely link it in here, so at the very least this won’t go fallow. Blogs like the one above will probably also go here, I am not sure that anyone would have paid me for an ice cold take about Final Fantasy XIV.

Secondly, a few of you have pledged money to this newsletter, which is so flattering. Thank you. I have not turned on payments for this newsletter because of the above timing and scheduling issues. I don’t want to ask for money for anything that I’m not producing consistently. That said, if I get enough feedback that y’all want a paid newsletter, I will think of how to do that in a way that works with my schedule and mental health needs.

All the best my loves,

Gita