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Hogwarts Legacy is a pretty decent open world action game of sorts, and an absolutely marvellous Harry Potter game. I've played older HP titles, watched the movies and, while I've never been a diehard fan of the franchise, I do like it in general. Therefore, although I enjoy certain musical cues and references, I mainly judge the game on its own merit.
Graphically, it's incredible with some caveats. The game has stunning breath-taking scenery, and spell effects are sharp and satisfying. However, the models and animations can be a bit stiff, and I constantly dropped FPS for some reason. I played on medium even though my PC should be able to handle ultra according to the specs; the game itself set everything to ultra after an auto-detect.
The game also features a day-night cycle, which changes the appearance of the location. For instance the Forbidden Forest at night looks as haunting as it rightfully should.
Moreover, there is also a season cycle with the entire map changing depending on the time of the year. Not only that, but the Hogwarts itself has different decorations for different seasons. Really cool attention to detail.
In terms of sound, it's OK. I enjoyed the female VA for the MC quite a bit, and the rest of the cast are also pretty good. I don't think it reaches the heights of, say, RDR 2, but it's definitely good enough and even excellent at certain points.
The OST is charming, though it might be my nostalgia talking since it utilises certain themes from the movies or older games.
Moving on to the gameplay and the world in general, as I mentioned, it's an open-world game, which means there are hundreds of collectibles, optional secrets, quests, etc. I found them pretty fun, but the sheer number can be a bit too much if you're a completionist. One pet peeve of mine is the level scaling: as you level up, the enemies level up with you. There is a per-area cap, so you will eventually outscale them, but I'm not a fan of this mechanic in general. It did not ruin the game, but I don't think it's particularly necessary either.
The gameplay itself is pretty fun. It mainly consists of attacking the enemies with your basic attacks while weaving in additional spells. Higher level enemies have shields around them which you have to break with a specific "type" of spell and cannot break with regular AAs. The enemies, in their turn, also attack you with basic AAs, which you can block with your shield, or with spells, which you cannot block and have to dodge.
To help you out, there are usable plants and potions, which, in my experience, can completely trivialise an encounter even on the highest difficulty. I actually think it's a plus since paying just a bit of attention to potion-brewing and herbology gives you a huge advantage.
I would not say it's the deepest or most challenging gameplay loop ever, but it's flashy, aesthetically pleasing, and does provide some challenge, at least on the hardest difficulty.
When it comes to the narrative, it's passable. As usual for me, I guess, I did not enjoy the main story as much as the side quests, specifically Sebastian's questline. It was not terrible and had its moment, but it also had some pretty dumb plot points at times.
Before summarising, I'd like to mention certain neat features the game has, which are not crucial, but are very welcome and show stellar work from the devs:
1. You can choose your house (a given, really) and there is actually house-specific dialogue, such as a character bad-mouthing Slytherin and apologising if your MC is in said house. It comes often enough to feel as if your house choice is acknowledged by the game and isn't just a checkbox in a save file.
2. Characters react to you with specific dialogue after their side-quest completion, although it can get a bit repetitive after a while.
3. There is an entire system to decorate your "base" with hundreds of cosmetic items to place, such as chairs, banners, statues, etc. I went for a more utilitarian approach and simply conjured things required to brew potions, but it's still a welcome feature.
4. You can capture beasts to care about them and periodically harvest magical ingredients. In addition, you can breed said beasts and sell the offsprings to get a bit of money.
5. The ingredients from the beasts can be used to upgrade your equipment and weave in special traits, such as "more damage with spell X".
6. An amazing feature: the way your clothes look is decoupled from what you're actually wearing, meaning you don't have to choose between min-maxing the stats or fashion, you can have both.
7. There are hundreds of snippets with HP lore about certain items, locations, people to be found in game.
To conclude, I think Hogwarts Legacy is a wonderful game. It can stand on its own without the franchise appeal, even though it does lose to titles like God of War in that regard. Taking the franchise into account, it's a must-play for any HP fan. For a non-HP fan, it can also be fun, albeit to a lesser extent.