Remember the scene in the Harry Potter books and movies where Harry enters a fortified camp, draws his wand, and slams a barrel of explosives into a group of illegal poachers, barbecuing all five within blast range in an instant? I don't remember it either. So I was a little shocked by the wizard's thirst for blood in The Hogwarts Legacy.

Note: There are minor spoilers for Hogwarts Legacy below.

Seriously, I am an exceptionally die-hard 15-year-old. Depending on who you ask, Harry Potter himself has only committed murder once or twice in his entire life at Hogwarts. He has taken half a dozen lives on his way to Potions class. My nearly triple-digit body count is not entirely the fault of my character (Wizard Boy Spelsalot), but neither is it his fault.

In fact, most of the time it's them or me. Poachers, giant spiders, mafia wizards, rebel goblins, and every other living thing in the wizarding world seems to wish my mid-adolescent wizard dead. It's natural to fight back, and it's a lot of fun withering bolts of magic back and forth like I'm in a rainbow-colored active warzone, but I never thought every new spell I learned would be just another way to kill someone. I just mastered a particularly nasty spell, Confringo. This spell is basically a fireball and hits so hard that everything I've blown up with it so far has ended up in a pile of ashes. Apparently it doesn't punish you for using it, but it is an unforgivable curse (opens in new tab).

At first I thought the enemy would simply be knocked out or teleport away to safety, but there is nothing ambiguous about it. A knocked out enemy becomes nothing or a lifeless ragdoll until it despawns.

The most brutal feat in my arsenal, by far, is the ultimate finisher with Ancient Magic, which can only be performed by a special Hogwarts Legacy hero. Using this technique consumes the Ancient Magic meter and usually kills the target with a single blow. At times it opens the sky to summon lightning; at other times it slams the body hard into the ground, killing it until it dies; sometimes it shrinks a giant spider to a tiny size and floats it under its feet before stomping on it.

How much E-rated fun (brewing potions, racing broomsticks, organizing furniture) have we had at Hogwarts Legacy? We know why violence is fun in games. There's clarity in erasing pieces from the board, and the shock and physicality of throwing spells into the woods makes more sense when you're fighting something truly dangerous. If you sneak up behind the enemy, you can take them down with Petrificus Totalus, but you're unlikely to clear the camp before the battle begins. If I were to follow Harry's pacifist path and cast the disarming spell "Expelliarmus" and the stun spell "Stupefy" 36 times in a row over eight films, I doubt the rhythmic dueling of the Hogwarts Legacy would be as pleasing.

It would be a good time to clarify what kind of open-world game Hogwarts Legacy is, once I've played my first 16 hours: it's like The Witcher 3 or Red Dead Redemption 2, with conversation, crafting, puzzle solving, treasure hunting, horseback riding (broom flying) and much more. There is also quite a bit of combat, although not as much as I expected. At least half of the main quests I've checked out so far have had little or no combat, but there is more carnage as the story progresses. One consolation: Hogwarts itself proved to be a fortress. Only a few times did I have to resort to violence on campus, and those were all rehearsed duels with the students. All bets are not messed up until you are outside the school gates.

In the days of the movies, Hogwarts seemed a disastrously unsafe place for children, but now that goblins and trolls patrol the grounds, one wonders how these children survived the 19th century.