I think this a bit unfair. Most RPGs is in some way about stats and character building from scrub to power house. This applies pretty broadly across all RPGs with maybe a few exceptions.
Souls, Dogma, Original Sin, Bloodborne etc all have pretty reliable tricks and methods to trivialise the difficulty. Sometimes the combat is still fun when you're over powered and sometimes earning that power is what makes the game fun.
I don't really agree. Or at least, I don't see those games becoming trivial anywhere near as quickly as most mainstream RPGs do, even though there will always be "better than" choices in terms of making the game easier on a first or second playthrough. What I'm talking about is where game balance in general is just completely out of whack.
In a proper RPG (or a game in general where you grab skills and new gear), things should feel
somewhat overwhelming at the start, and steadily decline as you level up and acquire new skills and gear, but it should eventually taper off; not fall way behind in the power curve/creep like it does in too many games. I'm not talking about grinding either. That's usually a player's choice, and aside from some random "ultimate" bosses, almost never required. You shouldn't feel like you're
grossly overpowered simply by doing more than following the main quest without any distractions.
The combat is good in Horizon because the game gives you a lot of tools to take enemies down with. You can lay tripwires as traps, use bombs, tie enemies down, slow them down with ice, knock parts of their armour off to expose weak points, knock their own weapons off to use against them, trick them into fighting each other, as well as having about 6+ different types of arrow to use against enemies with specific weaknesses and having a few different melee attacks for when things get up close and personal. I hope they build on the melee side of things in the sequel, but on the whole I think the combat is excellent and one of the game's best aspects.
Then there's the moment you realize that
over half of the enemies in the game are extremely susceptible to fire, and a triple volley from a Hunter Bow with 3x 30% (or higher) fire mods completely wrecks them. Then of course, there's the always broken stealth mechanic that lets you one-shot most normal enemies, and for everything else? Frost and Tearblast arrows or a triple shot of Hard Point. You have all kinds of options in the game, but most of them become completely irrelevant slightly over the halfway mark aside from "just because I can" type stuff, not because it's actually all that efficient.
Witcher 3 if you've got the skills for it.
Such a badass.