Late to the Party: God of War: Ragnarok

God of War: Ragnarok (hereafter Ragnarok) is too much game for its story. 

I finished Ragnarok's story while sick at home-too much energy to watch TV, not enough energy to go toil at the day job-and when the credits rolled, I walked Kratos down a path, through a set of doors and out onto a vista of Midgard. 

Where the game helpfully informed me that I had anywhere from 1/3 to 1/4 of the game yet to play! Good lord. Can you imagine saying you're done with something and there still being that much left to do?

I feel like this is a way to drill into the core problem of Ragnarok. Because it's just so stuffed with things! Quests! Checklists! (Have YOU kicked enough dark elves to get gold?) Systems!

It got exhausting for me. Keeping up with every weapon-which has a pommel of some kind, and which one might give me a percentage increase and decrease in various stats, every shield, which also had attachments, every piece of armor-one for your arms, chest and waist- and an enchantment belt that can have up to 10 different enhancements slotted in. 

I want to punch Thor in the face. Why does it need this much stuff??? 

So I never quite got the hang of combat: again, a place where there were so many different moves and powers with cooldowns to use-I was two-thirds the way through when I discovered that there was an extra move I hadn't been utilizing, that also had a cooldown-but extra move!

Nothing seemed to flow into one another-one move set leading to another, so that a deliberate choice of moves would flow into another, and another which lead to me feeling like I was doing great. And I am not saying that system isn't there, just that I never found it!  

Instead, I was brute forcing my way through things, one eye on my cooldowns, swapping weapons as quickly as I could to use the next power and stall until I could get my next powerup going. It wasn't as though the weapons flowed into one another though-at least, not in a way I could put together. Again: all these systems creating confusion rather than coherency. 

So why did I keep at it?

The story is quite good. 

And the thing is: I would've played this game if it just had the last God of War's system (I even beat all the Valkyries in the last game, because I was having so much fun) and just the one added weapon (the new weapon is a story acquisition so I don't begrudge it). I liked these characters and I wanted to see what happened. They didn't need to add in so much buuuuuut I think they didn't feel they could charge $60 for a new game if they didn't.

The game itself is polished enough that I didn't hate playing it but it DID feel overwhelming-an inverse relationship to its rather straightforward narrative. 

I just wish the gameplay loop was as hooky.