I just read through the thread now that I've finished the expansion and spent a couple of days digesting it, so I think I'm probably caught up on reactions so far.

Overall my score for Endwalker is a little complicated: to me, it surpasses Shadowbringers, but that's because I've been deeply immersed in the story and setting of FFXIV, and Endwalker is a huge parade of all our connections coming together, including all the sidequests that seem like one-and-done at first, but now have extra meaning and context.

However, I can see someone who basically just does MSQ and little else feeling less happy with Endwalker, because they don't have those scenes where sidequest characters turn up and acknowledge you, and so it may seem a little emptier. Shadowbringers is, I think, a more self-contained story, with more instantly impactful scenes. Endwalker really needs the background of everything that went on before to bring out the emotional highs.

I do have a rather common criticism regarding the pacing, though: the return to Labyrinthos at 87-89 is rather terrible, which I think can be blamed on one particular aspect. It's not the busywork or the much-maligned Sage's Council quest, which I actually didn't mind in itself, since there were several similar filler quests in previous expansions. Rather, I think the biggest offender is the background music: it changes from the (personally decent) Labyrinthos theme to a small looping portion of the Endwalker Footfalls theme, specifically the Torn From The Heavens part. As in, a fifty-second portion, looping over and over again, for the hours you're in the zone doing the MSQ. The choice is even more bizarre when the looping part ends just before the female vocal part of the "Higher" section, so the tension of expectation never gets released.

Fifty seconds at a time, for hours on end, looping nonstop. It's a glaring mistake on the part of the music direction.

My other criticism is probably much more subjective, and has to do with what we see in Zone 5:

It is very obvious that almost every Ancient, except for I think Emet-Selch, uses the Elezen rigging. I was immediately dragged out of immersion when I first saw Hythlodaeus and went "by the Twelve what happened to your NECK".