Right, that’s that finished then, at least the main quest. One thing to note, the quest that appears to be the ending isn’t quite, I’d suggest doing the one you get just after, as that gives you proper black screen roll credits. No spoilers.
I enjoyed the story quite a bit, I think it had a lot of good elements such as the characters, although it lacks the narrative clarity of the first game. Odin is a suitably cool antagonist and casting the Norse gods as a sort of Sopranos style family is a clever idea that I was fully onboard for.
It’s a linear game overall, despite some open sections, and I clocked in at 36 hours to see the end credits, which is a pretty reasonable time. I enjoyed the linearity and having a curated narrative experience, which is sadly rare in gaming these days. I did think the game seemed a bit fluffed out at times, a lot of sections ran longer than they really needed and I felt there was always a push to draw things out as long as they could.
The combat I found very frustrating. It still feels good in the moment to moment sense, but overall seemed to be just weirdly tuned. The timings you needed to deflect and parry were so severe, and the way things are tied to the quite slow character animations made things needlessly frustrating a lot of the times. I just felt it was sometimes impossible to pull off the moves the game was asking me to do and as a result when I died I always felt that it was more the game’s fault than mine. I did improve at the combat as it went on but overall it never got to the point where it was fully fluid.
Also the difficulty level I think hurt the game a lot in other ways. Firstly, you are playing as a god and in my view you should be made to feel godlike, but the brittleness of Kratos meant he always seemed a bit delicate. You had to be on the defensive all the time. Yeah, the finishers and stuff are cool, and downing some world sized enemy is spectacular, but I rarely felt godlike. Again I feel like this is Dark Souls style combat square pegged into a round hole where it doesn’t quite fit the theme of the game.
Also an issue was that the combat was much harder as you went off the beaten path. So basically it’s a game that punishes you for exploration, which I found incredibly infuriating. Unless you reached the point where the enemies were a level or so below you it was just an exercise in pure frustration a lot of the time. Towards the end I would just not bother with side content as I new it was going to be too hard for me to pull off. As someone who enjoyed exploration and side quests this was quite depressing.
Then there’s the chattiness, which others have highlighted. It’s a game like Horizon Forbidden West where there is almost constant talking. The characters whitter on endlessly and comment on everything and honestly it just drives me up the wall. I don’t know at what point it was decided that playing a game should be like going on a long car journey with a toddler. In fairness it never gets quite as bad as when Aloy was literally talking over herself but there were so many times I found myself shouting “shut up” at the other characters. Also their proclivity of trying to solve the puzzles for you can just absolutely do one. They need a slider to control how chatty the characters are like you can do with the mechanic in the F1 game.
I did enjoy Ragnarök overall, the story is really interesting and the characters often brilliant (even the head strong and precocious Atreus started to grow on me by the end), but the combat was just such a slog at times, and like other big recent first party Sony titles everything feels just a bit overdeveloped.