From what I’ve seen on the wiki, there are 57 mission, 35 of which are in some way related to hunting Bill Williamson, who’s presented as character who’s dumber than a pile of bricks (then what does that make John?). Moving at the pace that Russia does in Ukraine, the game has you chasing this prick for around 60% of it’s playtime, only to kill him in the most anti-climactic way possible, in a place that doesn’t even feel natural for him to be found in. To add insult to injury, the guy Bill barely ever even appears during all of this, and since at some point you are not only chasing him but also Escuella, I half expected at the end that the game would tell me that the princess is in another castle, in South Africa where Elon Musk’s great-grandfather is helping them evade the wrath of Uncle Sam. John’s stupidity doesn’t help anything either, where for some reason the game makes you help out both sides of the civil war instead of simply letting you make a choice which side you will support. It’s especially stupid that in the penultimate mission working for the government, it’s directly implied that De Santa sent you and Espinoza to your deaths, yet John decides to trust him at the end anyway (whilst also not even mentioning the whole 20k pesos he promised you whatsoever) and to the surprise of no-one, gets betrayed. The death of Luisa too, is rather a tragicomedy.

Then after the whole Mexico chapter, we get back to America, to take on the omnipresent figure of Dutch. Yet despite him being the Godfather of you original enterprise, it only takes a measly 7 missions to take him out. The character of Dutch himself and his aspirations aren’t even clarified or presented all that well, where Arthur just kind of says “The guy went mad and started killing people”, but from the fact that Native Americans are joining his gang, it’s clear (and said by Dutch as well) that it’s much more complicated than that. And whilst he has a somewhat befitting send-off, the heavy lifting of actually building his character is left for RDR2.

But the most ridiculous part of all this is that the epilogue of the game, where you do everything you already did with Bonnie McFarlane, gets dragged to 9 mission, so longer than the Dutch saga in it’s entirety lmao. They seriously could have condensed the 9 mission into like 3 or 4, and the Uncle missions don’t really do anything for the narrative either.

Apart from that it also suffers from certain characters like West Dickens, Seth and Irish being way too weird, and rather (as people on the internet already observed) more fitting as relegated to stranger missions, rather than being actual characters necessary for the development of the main plot.