Hogwarts Legacy is a game that remains deeply upsetting to many for its anti-semitic references and deep ties to the openly anti-trans JK Rowling. With the numerous issues both technical and otherwise mounting, it’s difficult for a lot of people to play in good conscience. Which leaves the question: What about those who want to play a game set in a school, something that retains the framework of going to classes, exploring a campus, and interacting with students and teachers if they don’t want to engage in all that? Luckily, there are numerous games that give you all the fun of school days in video games, with none of the looming stigma.
Academagia: The Making of Mages
Developer: Black Chicken Studios
Platform: PC
If you wanted to play a game set in a school of magic, look no further. Academagia is the definitive magic school RPG. That seems like a bold claim to make of an indie text adventure that came out a decade ago, but Academagia more than lives up to it. You play as a student in a far-off fantasy world who gains a letter to the prestigious Academagia, a famed school where mages and other powerful people learn their trade. Through your school days, you’ll befriend other students, join cliques and societies, compete in a variety of academy-held challenges, and go on adventures. Beneath its simple interface lies a complex and incredibly deep world where it’s possible to do everything from becoming a sky pirate to bonding with your familiar. While the interface might be daunting, don’t let option paralysis scare you— there’s a lovely and deep game full of wonder and mystery here.
Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Developer: Intelligent Systems
Platform: Switch
Three Houses casts you as Byleth, a stoic but incredibly gifted tactician appointed as headteacher at Garreg Mach Monastery, a military academy for elite students. Over the course of several years, you will watch over your students, grow your relationships with the students and your fellow faculty, and take on a variety of missions for the Monastery, everything from subduing local bandits to competing against rival houses of students in mock battles.
The centerpiece of the game is Garreg Mach Monastery, a sprawling multileveled campus where you drink tea, pet the local dogs and cats, and forge relationships with your students, all while managing your monthly schedule until the chapter-ending battle. It’s a fascinating location with about as many owls as certain other magic schools, but Three Houses shines when it lets you get deeply involved with the lives of your fellow students and teachers, learning about their favorite foods, returning lost items, and deepening your friendships. While the story may be a sometimes bleak dark fantasy tale about war, power, and mass destruction, the hub level at Garreg Mach and the time-management of your day-to-day life help you care about the people caught up in the massive war and why they’re fighting.
Marvel’s Midnight Suns
Developer: Firaxis
Platforms: PC, PS5, PS4, XBOX One, XBOX Series X/S, Switch
A superhero training academy might not be exactly set in a school, but Midnight Suns definitely keeps the flavor. Apart from its numerous comparisons to Fire Emblem: Three Houses, the idea of hanging out at a mysterious building with a ton of history, ghosts, and occult secrets is definitely similar to Hogwarts. There are even cliques, extracurriculars, drama between the Abbey’s denizens, and various disciplines you need to spend time on.
The best aspect of Midnight Suns is that its limited open world has a ton of personality and charm— you have a pet, you can hang out with friends, knock back the family-friendly equivalent of beer with Wolverine, and go exploring in the creepy local woods. While the meat of the game (a hybrid of turn-based tactical combat and deckbuilding) is excellent, Firaxis made sure the Abbey and its bickering cast felt like a home away from home. It’s full of all the wonder and heart that any good magic academy would have.
Bully
Developer: Rockstar Games
Platforms: PC, XBOX 360, PS2, Nintendo Wii, Android, iOS
Bully might not take place at a magic school, but Rockstar’s open-world adventure codified the modern open-world game set in a school. Dialing down their trademark offensive humor to PG-13 levels (make no mistake, this game is still kind of dated), Bully takes place at Bullworth Academy, a place of uncaring adults, juvenile sadism, and iron-fisted cliques. When new transfer student Jimmy Hopkins is dumped at Bullworth by his parents, he’s swept up in a mission to rule the school by any means necessary.
While the humor and graphics might be dated, the sheer density of what you’re allowed to do at Bullworth is dizzying in a way modern games are still catching up to. You can zip around the town, start fights with cliques, join clubs, attend classes, or just cause havoc to your heart’s content. Not only that, the story of Jimmy’s rise, fall, and rise is tightly written. There’s an incredibly hateful villain and a plot that sees you giving the social darwinists of Bullworth a strong kick in the teeth.
Persona 4 Golden
Developer: Atlus
Platforms: PSVita, PC, Nintendo Switch, XBOX One, XBOX Series X/S
Persona defined the “RPGs set in a school” genre, with the modern entries (P3 and onward) splitting your time between life as an average high schooler, and life as a dungeon-crawling demon-slayer. Persona 4 Golden is the definitive edition of Persona‘s formula, with its suburban mystery and more subdued tone a sweet spot between the slow-paced dark fantasy of Persona 3 and the splashy, trashy anime-as-all-get-out Persona 5. The game casts you as the new transfer student in the small town of Inaba, sent to live with your uncle and cousin. In short order, you’re swept up into a mystery involving an urban legend surrounding TVs on rainy nights, a serial-murder case, and a shrine run by a fox. It’s weird, it’s wonderful when it gets going, and it’s neither as bleak as its predecessor or as edgy as the following installment, making it the perfect balance between school-life sim and dungeon-crawling JRPG.
Serin Fate
Developer: Verthegen
Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch
Not quite a school, per se, but Serin Fate‘s Mage’s Guild does kind of fit the same bill, with its central hub serving as a place where your chosen witch learns a variety of skills, including combat, alchemy, casting spells, and training familiars. You have to balance this learning with restoring the world, since the Fate Stone holding back the darkness and monsters shattered into pieces. The result is a sometimes clunky but overall fun retro-style roleplaying game with charming pixel graphics. It strikes an interesting balance between crafting, combat, spellcasting, and monsters. It’s also got a robust spellcasting system, so if you want something to replace a certain other magic school game, this one is worth a look.
Magical Starsign
Developer: Brownie Brown
Platform: Nintendo DS
Six friends are enrolled at Will O’Wisp Academy, a school for elemental magic. When their teacher leaves to fight space pirates and vanishes, the six of them band together with spaceships they find in the Academy on an interplanetary adventure to rescue her. This leads you on a whirlwind tour of a galaxy where everything is named after food and half the structures and items are made out of gummi. To describe Magical Starsign as “offbeat” would be to state the obvious, as the game lives and breathes on its weird mix of bright, colorful family-friendly visuals and silly characters. As weird as the game is, its quirkiness makes it all the more unique, and the emotional moments hit much, much harder. It offers a cockeyed take on both science fiction and fantasy in a school setting. It’s also a JRPG experience geared more towards beginners, perfect for those who want to enjoy a good story without being bogged down in mechanics
Hatoful Boyfriend
Developer: PigeoNation, inc/Mediatonic
Platforms: PC, PS4, iOS, PSVita, Android
In this cult-favorite dating sim, you are a sophomore student at the prestigious St. PigeoNation’s academy. Over the school year, you romance your classmates, uncover shadowy conspiracies, work at a café, and dodge shadowy government agents. Oh, right, and you’re the only human student at a prestigious academy for birds. This is the premise of Hatoful Boyfriend, an unusual dating sim set in a post-apocalyptic world where birds take the place of absent humans, and the few humans left are primitive cave-dwellers watched uneasily by the birds’ shadow government. Despite (or rather because of) the wild premise, Hatoful Boyfriend is a complex, twisted, and often heartfelt story of an outsider in a community trying her hardest to find romance, set in a school where literal life-or-death stakes loom over the everyday lives of the students.
Black Closet
Developer: Hanako Games
Platforms: PC, iOS
An ambitious cross between a yuri (girls’ love) visual novel, a school mystery story, and a secret police simulator, Black Closet casts you as the head of the Student Council at a prestigious all-girl school. As the Student Council President, your job isn’t just to govern the students. It’s also to insulate the school from misdemeanor and scandal by imprisoning, interrogating, and even torturing your fellow students. While all of this is going on, you have to uncover a traitor among the Student Council members, dodge teachers with their own agendas, and stay alive and unexpelled until the end of your time at Saint Claudine’s. It’s a strange premise, but the novel and underexplored idea of a conspiracy game set in a school and the ambitious mix of black-bag jobs and visual novel social interactions work to deliver a memorable and suspenseful horror experience.
The Caligula Effect: Overdose
Developer: Aquiria
Platforms: PC, PS4, PSVita, Nintendo Switch
For unknown reasons, you wake up as a high school student trapped in a mysterious city ruled over by the godlike Ostinato Musicians. You and your fellow students are hunted by shadowy creatures, manifest weapons based on your repressed desires, and discover you’re being kept in a simulated world. Together, you and several other students form the “Going-Home Club,” a group dedicated to breaking everyone’s consciousness out of the simulated world and returning to your real bodies. Caligula Effect also boasts a rather unique system where you have to befriend other students and gain their trust to help break them out of the simulation, getting them to tell you their secrets in exchange for boosts and moving further up the social web. It’s a bizarre game, but if you can roll with its weirdness, there’s a fascinatingly dense JRPG for you to explore.
For more games that you should play instead of Hogwarts Legacy, check out our list here. For a list of games with a focus on alchemy, the current hot trend among magic games, try the 9 Best Alchemy Games That Let You Brew Potions
Published: Feb 15, 2023 10:39 am