So today I came across people talking about the new Harry Potter game "Hogwarts Legacy" here on Tumblr. I was curious, so I watched a trailer on YouTube. And I have to say, wow, this is really beautiful, it is so incredibly well done! I was really impressed by the graphics and the storytelling, the decision for the time that it was set in and the whole magical world that they've created, that is so talented and amazing! My teenage self would've lost her mind about it in disbelief over what is now possible in computer- and video-games! When I remember the Harry Potter computer game that I played when I was about 13! I really love that old game though, I believe it was the game for the "Chamber of Secrets". :)
Anyways, I won't completely rule out that I'll try playing it once but I'm pretty sure that a lot of dark stuff has found it's way in there too, especially seeing that it was created in our current time of so many levels of insanity. I definitely didn't like the part where a large part of this game apparently is that you have to constantly find out how to battle people and whatnot and set them on fire in mid air and sh** like this. It's just not 2002 anymore and we have to keep that in mind.
But mainly I just know that I left the mainstream Harry Potter train long ago because the commercialization got way too crazy and out of hand. I actually turned away from it when they said they were going to build a theme park. Back in our days the mere thought of it would've been outrageous. J.K. Rowling restricted so much what could and could not be done with the books and the characters, it was common sense that it wouldn't be made a hollow commercial spectacle. And I respected that and most people did. Well, things just moved in that direction and I just didn't interact with this stuff much. After all, the theme park is basically a theme park of the movies, not the magical world of the books. I'm sure that it is beautifully done though.
So concerning this new game, I think it's absolutely impressive and it has a lot of appealing aspects. After I had watched the trailer though, I thought how glad I am that I was able to experience the Harry Potter stories from back when there were only just books being published for the first time. And people went crazy to go read them right in the book shops in the night they were published. And they would dress up and have genuine, light-hearted fun with nothing on their hands but the magical things they talked about and read about. I don't want to see and experience Hogwarts through this game, as beautiful as it might have been made. I saw Hogwarts for the first time through the pages of a book that smelled a certain way and I saw it with my own 12-year-old eyes. There is nothing that will ever come close to this and there is no game, no movie, no theme park, no nothing that I would ever want to exchange for that. Ever. That is not even a possible comparison, these things are not the same.
So while I'm amazed at how this game has been made, I want my own world. I have noticed how all the cool products that we can buy nowadays are really amazing but it doesn't come close to the first time reading the books alone in my room for days without barely eating and going outside at all. And it doesn't even touch the feet of me wearing a big kerchief over my back as a cloak and wandering through the garden with the stick in my hand that was my magical wand. If I really want to feel more in the magical world that I knew, I don't have to get closer to the graphics of a computer game, I have to get closer to who I was when I was 12 years old. And create it myself.