My partner and I recently did a playthrough with me at the controls and her making all the decisions, even play style. The third act of the base game fell pretty flat for both of us, and some of the forced decisions were very annoying.

We immediately played the DLC and thought it was great, and the collectables/shrines were different enough it felt fresh. The story wasn't much to write home about, but the visuals were great. It was nice to have a new biome without it being one that doesn't exist in Tsuahima (looking at you, snow).

I loved GoT, agree it got repetitive, but it was also one of the first games I bothered to get all the collectibles in.

I couldn’t get into the DLC but maybe I should try again.

I think so but I also feel that the arena/duel can feature a bit more variety of high level enemies that uses different weapon types. I really miss when some of the duel that the enemy use things that are not blade and wish they could be extended more even onto say archer based boss, or ninja style boss, etc. (I guess the legends/raid type of boss may have more variety but I don't really like that rng loot drop grinding part so I skipped the whole thing. )

For me it was the opposite. Loved the base game, heavily disliked the DLC. The entire poison and hallucinations felt widely out of place, and it got in the way of exploring. The constant need to use the adaptive triggers was annoying and added nothing. But most importantly, the story about Jin and his father did not grab me at all. The uncle one was much better done, imo.

In the end, I ended up skipping it.

I liked the monkey boss fight and its armour, though.

Good to hear that the DLC is different and better, I too finished GoT this last year and by the end I was so worn out by the game that I had zero desire to keep going into the DLC.

While it has good parts for sure, I think GoT is massively overrated by many. I keep hearing people say it's one of the best games they've ever played and I just can't see it. It's a solid open world collect-a-thon with a fairly satisfying combat system but it's way too long for what it offers and wears out its welcome pretty fast, especially since the quest design is so bland and repetitive. Almost all side stories are just "talk to person, go somewhere and kill enemies, return", and main stories overuse walk-and-talk way too much.

The story is pretty mediocre and the consistently dour and overly serious tone makes the game a true slog once the novelty wears off. Kenji alone is not enough to balance it out.

The bossfight duels are cool though and good fun, often with really cool settings and gorgeous visuals, like floating lanterns in shallow water. I wish there were more of them, and that they were repeatable at will.