At any rate...

The story I like in terms of thematic, but I don't think it was able to really reach a good balance between threat/urgency and otherwise more 'lighthearted' moments, which is where the base story for Shadowbringers really hit the nail on the head. For the most part, I attribute this to the simple fact that Endwalker was crunched into a single expansion, and Shadowbringers didn't really give an appropriate build-up for this. I think it was sort of obvious that the initial build-up was done with 2 expansions in mind. Had they had the proper build-up, it could have been better

The portrait system is great, though I do want to see it expanded upon, as per https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...ishment-Plates

I like IS, but it does need some more ongoing updates, which I hope they'll continue to do. It's different strokes for different folks. I personally do prefer it over exploratory content, seeing as they've been doing exploratory in some fashion since 2015, so a break from this is appreciated. Granted, I would have liked to see the relics be more diversified than just tomes - But in the same vein, this is nice motivation to work on hunts.