If you played the first hour of Red Dead 2, that's the story for the entire game, repeated over and over. RDR2 has characters, but it definitely does not have a story, at least not a good or interesting one. There's more story in the side quests and side characters than the actual main story.
Yeah pretty much this is how I look at it but with more of a "good character, most obvious story possible" view. Arthur was great, a lot of the side people you meet are interesting, but what story there is plays out exactly as you expect.
Still, I loved the game and spend like 100 hours on it and don't regret any of it. The side story with the young widow in the northeastern part of the map and the friendship Arthur has with the Civil War vet are my two favorite side stories.
I mean this is what stories in this type of settings are.
You don't watch Assassination of Jesse James expecting the twists and turns of a spy movie, it's mostly about character development.
In RDR2 doubly so, because it's a 40 hours open world game, where you're asked to "inhabit" the character to the point of performing small tasks, with the objective of immersing you into the world.
Honestly if someone were to go in expecting a breezy 12 hours action romp with big convoluted plot, they'd be a special kind of moron.
The pace of 2 was even better built than 1, in my opinion, which got kind of tragic in the halfway point.
The only real problem i have with it, is a bit of repetitiveness with the Dutch back and forth (memed to hell, but it's not even that bad, in the context of an open world game) and the shooting controls, which are R* standard, that is to say: Dog shit.
