The start is pretty straight forward. Character creation is not very in-depth. You give them a name, pick a gender, pick a voice (can pick between two and change the pitch of the voice, but from what I've heard you shouldn't do that, because it makes them sound weird at times) and of course you can adjust their looks. But again nothing too complex and you can get through that very quickly. It's basically different head/face-shapes, skin-tone, hair-style/colour, eyebrows (style and colour) and you can have certain scars in the face. It's at most a few minutes, if you don't want to go through and look at every single face-shape and hair-style. Not many options to tinker with. After that the game starts and it's all just gameplay with many cut-scenes. Your house will be picked after you do the first tutorial bit and arrive at Hogwarts and it's basically just a short dialogue with the sorting hat who puts you in a house depending on your answers to two questions (but you can manually change your choice, if your unhappy with that). You can also connect your account on the platform you're playing on (like Steam, if you're on PC) with yiour Harry Potter Fan Club account or whatever it's called, and then you can do a longer questionaire on the Fan Club page to get a House chosen for you. You can also have it pick a wand for you that you'll then be given in the game when you first visit Olivander's. Plus you get some other cosmetic items. It's all optional, but you get some free stuff.