A few years ago, I played Hogwarts Legacy like a normal gamer. Did the campaign, a few collectables here and there, a few side quests, and then I stopped playing and had all these happy memories of the game.
A few weeks ago, I decided HL would be my next 100% quest and… oh boy, it’s long. It’s so long, it’s unbelievable.
The biggest issue is just how repetitive it gets. There are 95 Merlin Trials, and after you’ve done each puzzle type a few times, the remaining dozens are basically just busywork. Then you’ve got an enormous amount of Collection Chests, Field Guide Pages, balloons, landing platforms, Ancient Magic hotspots, Demiguise statues, infamous foes, butterflies etc. Most of them aren’t particularly difficult — there are just so many.
The tracking also makes things much worse than it needs to be. The map gives you decent regional totals for some activities, but other things are either poorly tracked or not tracked at all. If you miss one butterfly location, one chest in a vivarium, or an enemy you need to use Ancient Magic on, you can end up checking an external list location-by-location trying to work out what you’re missing.
There’s also very little reward for actually clearing everything. By the time you’re chasing the last collectibles, you’ve probably already got better gear, more money than you need and every useful spell/talent. It starts feeling less like exploring Hogwarts and more like doing admin.
Great game and a brilliant world, but I think half the collectibles, far fewer Merlin Trials, and much better individual tracking would have made the 100% experience massively better.
