Yeah you basically said that for me. So many RPGs involve just increasing some numbers for your character but the enemies also increase proportionally and in the end nothing actually changes, its just there for the sake of it because the game lacks more meaningful progression. The only thing that happens gameplay wise is you're locked out of higher level areas for a while and lower level areas become super easy and pointless.
These aren't too big of a problem when the game is otherwise designed well, but in cases like AC Odyssey its just awful. The main quest jumps in level requirements which basically just means you have to grind to make your number higher before you can carry on doing what you want to do. If the grind is fun it can be okay but for ACO it wasn't, it got so repetitive so quickly and side quests were pretty boring.
A totally unrelated thing is games and their need to escalate to ridiculous levels. Japanese games are the worst for this with the biggest offender being FF7 Remake most recently. I was loving the (mostly) grounded character driven first 75% of the game, it was so charming and beautiful and made me care about the world. But then towards the end it just went full on anime with ridiculous escalation of scale and boss fights for no other reason than to make a big bombastic ending. It was totally jarring and ruined the flow of the game, it came out of nowhere with basically no build up. Characters took a total back seat to the big whacky action on the screen. Astral Chain did something similar last year too as another example.
These aren't too big of a problem when the game is otherwise designed well, but in cases like AC Odyssey its just awful. The main quest jumps in level requirements which basically just means you have to grind to make your number higher before you can carry on doing what you want to do. If the grind is fun it can be okay but for ACO it wasn't, it got so repetitive so quickly and side quests were pretty boring.
A totally unrelated thing is games and their need to escalate to ridiculous levels. Japanese games are the worst for this with the biggest offender being FF7 Remake most recently. I was loving the (mostly) grounded character driven first 75% of the game, it was so charming and beautiful and made me care about the world. But then towards the end it just went full on anime with ridiculous escalation of scale and boss fights for no other reason than to make a big bombastic ending. It was totally jarring and ruined the flow of the game, it came out of nowhere with basically no build up. Characters took a total back seat to the big whacky action on the screen. Astral Chain did something similar last year too as another example.