Hogwarts Legacy’s spells aren’t minced at all and how a sequel tackles its own will seemingly be a huge obstacle. In fact, with so many spells of unique varieties that can be equipped on four different spell loadouts, they are either useful or superfluous with players able to prioritize which spells they enjoy casting and which they find the most applicable in moment-to-moment gameplay. Unfortunately, this leads to some spells being objectively better than others inHogwarts Legacy, purely from an accessibility and efficiency standpoint, and Accio is its biggest offender.
Hogwarts Legacy’s Accio is a Multipurpose Spell Eclipsing All Others
Just like how Expelliarmus is overpowered for how it disarms foes and renders them vulnerable—with disarmed weapons capable of being flung back at goblins or Pensieve knights for an absurd amount of damage—Accio is similarly overpowered in its own faculties. Despite its label as apurple Force spell inHogwarts Legacy, Acciois an all-purpose tool with the following capabilities:
Each of these functions may seem harmless on the surface level. That said, being remarkably convenient, Accio affects other spells’ functionality in the same breath.
For example, not only is Accio’s use in combat a natural way to continue a midair juggle combo, but enemies are constantly and inadvertently ducking behind players’ line of sight, which causes combos to fail and spells or thrown objects to whiff.
Accio is essential as it draws enemies near so that subsequent casts actually hit players’ intended target. Enemies will often wade into the way of a locked-on target and take the full brunt of a spell. Then, if the struck enemy happens to have a Protego bubble shield with a color that doesn’t match the spell color players had cast, that spell will be wasted.
Therefore, it’s never more efficient to have Flipendo, Depulso, or Descendo equipped instead of Accio unless players have specific dueling feats to accomplish, such as burying a spider’s head into the ground or flipping a club into a troll’s face. These feats are great as they remove monotony and encourage players to experiment with spell combinations, and yet with only four spell wheels available and Accio being as overpowered as it is there is rarely a moment where Accio will be substituted permanently.
Moreover, once players have learned Wingardium Leviosa,an Accio cast will automatically turn into a Wingardium Leviosa cast, allowing players to move the object around freely without ever needing to slot Wingardium Leviosa.
Accio is used broadly for moving set pieces around anyhow but begs the question of whether Wingardium Leviosa was a worthwhile or meaningful spell forHogwarts Legacyto add at all when Levioso could’ve sufficed. It is choices like these that guaranteeHogwarts Legacy’s sequelcan afford to pare down its spell catalog, and when doing so it will hopefully not imbue any spell with so much versatility that it eclipses others. Otherwise, the spell catalog will bloat with spells that are hardly ever equipped.
The same can be said forConjuration spells inHogwarts Legacy, too, and how they can easily fill a spell loadout and hoard that space away from combat spells that are wielded far more often. In particular, though, Accio’s convenience is outweighed by how niche it makes most other spells and there are two ways a sequel could reflect on that constructively: it either takes functionality away from Accio so spells like Wingardium Leviosa can be substantial, or it trims its list of spells so that each one is indispensable.
