A lot of these comments here touch upon my main criticisms for the story, so I'm glad I'm not alone in that regard. I personally still rank shb as my favorite expansion story, as far as x.0 stories go. 5.1, 5.2, and 5.4 were pretty trash let's be honest... but I can't make that sort of comparison yet because we're only at 6.0. So for now I say that 5.0 was better than 6.0. If we include patch quests in the discussion then I think hw might actually be the strongest, because of how consistently deep and emotional it was and how well it handled the stakes of the war. That's the greatest weakness of this expansion, the stakes. This was by far the highest stakes of any expansion, and I don't think they were equipped to handle it properly coming out of 5.0. Yoship said they were planning to end the story in 7.0 but the story turned in such a way that it ended way sooner than that... and you can really tell. Like someone in here said earlier, it had the same issue as sb where it was trying to wrap up too many plotlines in a single story. Of course they did handle it a lot better, but you could still feel that it was rushed, despite also somehow managing to have filler.

Ishikawa is a great writer, don't get me wrong, but she excels primarily in writing character interactions. We got a lot of good moments between the characters, and it was because of how she wrote them beginning in 5.0 that she made the scions worth caring for to begin with. But it's because she focuses on that first, and then next on juicing as much as she can out of one zone, that we manage to get a mixture of great and meh moments. Take Garlemald for example, Quintus' suicide was raw as hell and Jullus' catharsis made me really like him, but when I see the forest for the trees it felt really rushed and like our activities there, and on the moon, had very little bearing on the story. Hell, Anima was portrayed as some big threat before the expansion dropped, and I know they wanted to be like "gotcha, the actual trials are these EVEN BIGGER THREATS!" But then I wonder, why build up hype if that's all they'll turn out to be? Not to mention how, rather than making us feel strong, it made HydZod look like pushovers instead. Eldest and most powerful of primals... sure buddy.