No matter what the designers of Ragnarok intended, its many systems of character building are not interesting.
We always return to that quote from Sid Meier: a game is a series of interesting choices. I'd rather define depth or perhaps an RPG as that. Games can be about other types of fun than having interesting decisions, and not all games need depth. Some people like monotonous clicking, being scared, competing in virtues of luck or reflexes. Perhaps merely experiencing various feelings (some that might preclude others).
I'll just stick to depth. That kinda mashes RPG and its subgenres together with Strategy and its subgenres. I don't mind that. It's just one aspect of each, and extracting it into another genre, like action, just grants us a design or analysis tool.
God of War Ragnarok has many aspects it's trying to achieve success with. I love the combat, I don't love the amount of trivial content. The graphics are incredible, while the story is amateurish at best and the work of a bunch of people who can't accept the words "no, this is just bad storytelling" at worst. Yet it's the systems that ought to provide depth, that I object to. The game is collapsing under the weight of mechanically indifferent little upgrades, while playing as a skill and reflex based action beast. Armor sets, magical modifiers, slowly unlocked extra moves, tiny stat changes, and sidekicks with THEIR skill trees. Stop it!
You are building a character. Narratively he is Kratos, retired god of war. Mechanically he is somewhat moldable. But what has been implemented is death by tweaking a thousand little knobs: change armor sets, change jewels, upgrade them.... It's ridiculous, because it's serving two masters: the basic stat growth (primarily increase either attack or defense) is simply used keep you from dealing with certain enemies prematurely (this was a bigger problem in GoW18), while the more complex modification game, is supposed to make Kratos into various types of gameplay styles (unarmed, speed based, luck based, debuffs, etc). It's a mess, because at its core, God of War Ragnarok is fun combat, simple to interact with, but with a lot to learn in its execution.
What should they do about it? Well, two approaches at the same time: less is more, and focus on interest.
The former is about cutting the "stats growth for stat growth's sake" mentality. If you are fighting a viking zombie with axe level 1, it's helping no one that you can get an axe upper to fight a blue viking zombie with axe level 2. Fortunately, that just means less work for the developers.
The latter is a bigger problem. The complex web of equipmemt and upgrades need to be combined into the actual direct fun choices. Classes, jobs, roles, archetypes... whatever. "Hi kratos, you killed the wyrm that eats Yggdrasil. This unlocks the Vanaheim job. They are a spellcaster class. It plays remarkably differently from the Midgard role." There. If you wanna add equipment beyond this, just go back to Sid's quote and ask yourself if you can add a whole category of items that presents interesting choices.
In this regard, it's kinda funny to compare Ragnarok to Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope. Tactics games, whether of the Xcom variety or the Final Fantasy Tactics variety, tend to be pretty complex in both direct gameplay, or the character building aspect.
Yet Sparks of Hope simplifies it in a clever way: all characters are pretty much the same, but clearly asks you to utilise them differently. Mario is a mid-ranged dual wielding gunslinger. Rabbid Mario is a melee type that hits a wide area. Their upgrades immediately affords you to expand or change how you play. It tells you that even a genre that is normally about the joys of complexity, can also be enjoyed for its simplicity, as long as the choices are combined into comprehensible results, and as long as experimentation is encouraged (because you want the player to try different styles, so that you don't make 6 different styles but 85 percent of players only try style 1).
I adore Sparks because of this: the character you are building is the entire team of each battle. If you alter the team, you are making an interesting choice. While Final Fantasy Tactics has you choosing between the primary and secondary abilities of different jobs at the same time, Sparks shows that simply going "your team is only 2-3 characters from a selection of 8" is just as good. RPGs can be good as "RPG lites", so yes, an action game like Ragnarok can also be a good RPG, if the lite elements are comprehensible, manageable and playful.
So the solution to fixing Ragnarok's boring meta systems and adding interesting choices, is to make simpler, yet more interesting options for the player. To me, it seems the designers knew what builds they wanted the players to move towards. Those are the simpler yet more interesting options. At this point, I really want to ask them if this is the game they wanted? This type of action game where you experiment with different builds? Perhaps the system I'm suggesting isn't granular enough. In that case, it might be more difficult to achieve comprehensible simplicity with depth. The other question I want to ask, hinges on whether the granularity of my suggestion is enough. In that case... Would they like the player to switch jobs mid-combat? This exact system was tried in another... I'm not gonna say which franchise, what company... Fantasy. And what country, we know I can't say what company. I can't SAY that... It was Final Fantasy XVI.
And for all its many, many flaws, it had the shape of a good, interesting, comprehensible, playful system for building your little computer man in an action rpg.
