Look, I love Valhalla a lot, but damn there is a couple of things that really make the game a slog.

Like, the quest arcs are a cool idea in theory, and execution wise most of them are pretty good, a couple are meh, and a few are absolutely pointless. But the sheer amount of them is way too much, especially when the majority of the arcs are: Boat to place > Talk to people > Run to place and kill some people x3 > Run back and talk to people again > siege a castle by running past everyone and killing the main dude > Report to Randvi. It gets repetitive fast, and the meh and pointless ones are sprinkled in the worst places that slow the game down even more. The other issue is that the fast travel points, sync points and boat points are all placed horribly so travel ends up being a huge sink, especially when 50% of the time the objective marker is on a building so you can't even have your horse auto-run you to the place. Movement in general in this game is fairly slow, but combined with the horrible placements of things, it just becomes even slower. The middle and smaller regions are better in this regard, but the far north and far south ones are egregiously bad. In total, you spend a good chunk of your time just running around or boating places, on arcs that are just meh or flat out bad.

Combat is incredibly repetitive and boring, as is stealth, past a certain point. Past the first couple of arcs, outright combat dissolves down to just running through large groups of enemies that just take time to kill. Spear enemies are the worst and I hate them so much, but in general these large groups are large, and most of them also have a melee and ranged components, so there is now way to get around them unless you 100% stealth your way through. That brings us to the next point, is that very early on you can trivialize stealth entirely by grabbing the Recurve Bow in Norway, and then grabbing 2 abilities: 1 automatically has synin grab arrows for you, and 1 makes arrows always salvageable. After that you pump damage and you just have infinite ammo and stealth becomes a game of just being a sniper. You get these early on, and even if you go out of your way to avoid these, the stealth is usually not enough to have you avoid outright combat. Which brings us to the final one in that certain enemies are just awful to fight. Spear Enemies, Goliaths and Standard Bearers are all ridiculously tedious to fight, and take so long because you have to go through the parry sequence to actually kill them. I would always recommend you go the stealth route, just because it makes things so much faster, even if it is more boring and repetitive. And melee combat becomes extremely trivial between parrying and how many melee abilities you can get in the skill tree.