This review contains spoilers
Endless Summer: Complete the Epilogue (21.2% of players)
After playing through the game, I was expecting the completion rate to be much lower. The writing never pushed me to continue with the story, with inexplicable events happening - both externally and internally - to the interesting characters of the van der Linde gang. It's hard to get invested in the story when great characters will get killed off without warning or fanfare, and Dutch's personality (or everyone's opinion of Dutch) can judderingly shift partway through.
Western Stranger: Complete 10 Stranger mission strands (11.3% of players)
This was probably the biggest mistake I made playing the game. Whilst the mainline story missions can be repetitive and obnoxiously long, they're still capable of bombast or experimentalism. The side quests much less so. Most of them rely on Arthur bumping in to exaggerated personalities, and the sense of humour falls flat and strips away the cohesiveness of the world. Funny side content can work: Yakuza handles them deftly, but Kiryu is a much better comedic foil than Arthur Morgan, who mostly comes off as uninterested and incurious in whatever other people are up to.
Redemption: Complete 'Red Dead Redemption' (24.4% of players)
I enjoyed the conclusion to Arthur's story (much more than the superfluous epilogue). Rockstar somehow managed to portray the struggle of the Native American Wapiti tribe somewhat compassionately, avoiding too much orientalism or oversimplification, providing them with agency instead. This, and Arthur's final mission are all well done. The natural world Rockstar creates is graphically and stylistically beautiful, even if what you get to do within it is largely tiresome.
Global achievement stats taken from Steam as of 2022-09-24
After playing through the game, I was expecting the completion rate to be much lower. The writing never pushed me to continue with the story, with inexplicable events happening - both externally and internally - to the interesting characters of the van der Linde gang. It's hard to get invested in the story when great characters will get killed off without warning or fanfare, and Dutch's personality (or everyone's opinion of Dutch) can judderingly shift partway through.
Western Stranger: Complete 10 Stranger mission strands (11.3% of players)
This was probably the biggest mistake I made playing the game. Whilst the mainline story missions can be repetitive and obnoxiously long, they're still capable of bombast or experimentalism. The side quests much less so. Most of them rely on Arthur bumping in to exaggerated personalities, and the sense of humour falls flat and strips away the cohesiveness of the world. Funny side content can work: Yakuza handles them deftly, but Kiryu is a much better comedic foil than Arthur Morgan, who mostly comes off as uninterested and incurious in whatever other people are up to.
Redemption: Complete 'Red Dead Redemption' (24.4% of players)
I enjoyed the conclusion to Arthur's story (much more than the superfluous epilogue). Rockstar somehow managed to portray the struggle of the Native American Wapiti tribe somewhat compassionately, avoiding too much orientalism or oversimplification, providing them with agency instead. This, and Arthur's final mission are all well done. The natural world Rockstar creates is graphically and stylistically beautiful, even if what you get to do within it is largely tiresome.
Global achievement stats taken from Steam as of 2022-09-24