In my opinion even his other works weren’t really good.
Werlyt only functions because it was already established that Gaius actually cares about the conquered zones and is not a battle hungry maniac.
Even in ARR his men loved him.
The whole kids sacrificing themself is stupid. The whole battles are unnecessary in itself.
We could have went against evil dude together in secret.
I like Allie but her actions with the robot were dumb.
The dancer quests is too short to fail and also has a bit of happiness wibe (our dance helps the hearts of the people). That’s not bad in small doses like there but not an entire expansion.
The bard quest ist alright at best and meh at worst.
Pandaemonium is quite good (not for me personally) but also extremely short and some things don’t make any sense for me.
Extremely dangerous creatures the ancients lock away instead of erasing like they do with far, far more innocent creations.
We also already knew much about Themis and a bit about Lahabrea so he didn’t really invent new things. He just took the established Ancient stuff, made a short story with (for me) predictable plot and a really flat antagonist (also for me).
I think in some of them he also was only guest writer?
The only reason most of his stories worked is more because they are too short to break down or have already established characters he can use.
Maybe there is editor meddling, maybe the supervisor slept. Both should be held responsible for this but Hiroi really doesn’t seem to be a particularly good writer himself.
Now let’s look at ARR because that was also a beginning and is normally used as an example of old and bad writings.
Quite a number of things was from 1.0 so it had a bit of groundwork already like the city states and some characters.
It had caves with old enslaved giants wanting revenge,
a haunted manor with gruesome transformations,
a foreign army short of conquering the continent,
an isolated city state we only heard intriguing tales the entire time,
Beast tribes summoning gods and factions inside them that went against them,
the scions more or less fighting a losing battle and being more and more involved in politics,
political machinations every way and even used as weapons against us,
our base being found by the enemy and our allies slaughtered, some of them being from 1.0 even.
It’s laughable how different the takes of these stories is.
The only problem ARR had was it’s extremely slowpaced questing and narrative.
Even if they wanted lower stakes or a more uplifting tone. They clearly failed in that regard and overdid it by multiple magnitudes.