It only took me eight months and eighty hours, but I finally did it. I finished the main story for Red Dead Redemption 2, and it was quite the ride. While my brother did it in only fifty-eight hours, he missed many of the side stories. Honestly after looking around, to get most out of the narrative you need to invest at least seventy hours. Which is crazy to think about. My only problem with this is that a lot of the middle feels like they are stretching it out. It is not filler per say, but we all know what is going to happen, and they force you to play through every beat of it. An editor should have gotten out the red pen.
In this day of people wanting games to last forever, I can see why they left everything in, but I didn’t do any of the hunting, fishing or gathering quests. Just ones with a story, and I know I missed a couple of those too. It is a shame that a lot of people will feel some fatigue or just never make it through to the conclusion. Had the story been forty hours with all the extras, I think this game would have been even better, and people would have been given the time to explore a bit more. The way it is now just feels indulgent. Like giving people a whole cake instead of just a slice, and then giving them a smaller cake at the end for dessert. It’s a lot of cake, and most people will probably not have the stomach for it.
If you can make it to the end, it is rewarding, and it dumps you off in a great place before the start of the first Red Dead Redemption. It then lets you roam around and do whatever you want in the game world. Even see all the locations from the first game, but that is up to you. Again, it is a little indulgent to add areas to the game map you don’t even need to visit in the campaign or its epilog, but go for it if you want to. For all of you that haven’t gotten there yet. Maybe get some coffee, but keep pecking away at that cake. You will be happy once you finish it, and the little cake at the end too.