Late to the party here, I decided to wait until the e-book came out, consequently, I only finished reading the grand finale yesterday!

After some harsh reviews by some here, e.g, Larry, I was expecting the worst, but I actually found the conclusion to be quite entertaining and satisfying.

The pace was very quick, the action scenes came thick and fast and the narrative really hooked me in (for once, it was a page-turner that made me want to keep reading) and the plotting seamlessly integrated the huge cast of characters and artifacts to produce a logical and original outcome to the Last Battle.

I liked the complex depiction of the Last Battle on 4-different fronts that involved most of the nations/characters and artifacts that had previously been introduced used in key roles, for exmaple, the Windfinders using the Bowl of Winds to tussle with the Dark One for control of great storm. Even Bela the horse played a key role!

There were plenty of surpises, the Dark One finally being revealed to be an elemental force of nature neccessary for free will, rather than an evil being. An interesting philosophical angle for sure. There were repeated sneak-attacks and betrayals by the forsaken, some of which were very well done, especially Lanfear's final attempted evil play!

Yes, the final pages with Rand (him switching bodies with Moridin and riding off into the sunset in the final scene) was rather weak and dare I say it campy, but that is just the final scene, the real 'ending' is the whole book, and overall, it was pretty good.

I actually enjoyed the final 3 books with the joint authorship of Jordan/Sanderson more than the ones written by Jordan alone.

Whilst books 1-3 of the WoT series were quite enjoyable, the series definitely lost it's way from books 4-11. Jordan veered off into self-indulgent writing, turing from high-fantasy to fantasy soap-opera. Flaws were increasingly glaring, especially the awfully irriting female characters, reams of tedious descriptions, and unwieldly directionless sub-plots that dragged on and on. Each book was worse than the last, with the series surely reaching its nadir with the utterly woeful 'Crossroads of Twilight'.

Brandon succeeded in restoring narrative drive and toning down the irritating aspects of Jordan's writing, the last 3 books are actually pretty good!

Unfortunately, I do agree with Larry to some extent, the fact that the series has been dragged out for such a long time and Jordan made such a mess of the middle books, has really stripped a lot of the emotional power from the finale, I just found it hard to care about what happened to the characters at times. It did feel a bit like 'paint-by-numbers', with the sense-of-wonder and reader engagement a lot less than what it should have been had the series been completed in the half time and with half the length (as it should have been).

At the end of the day, there's a reason why the series sold 50 million copies: that reason is that its world building on a humongous scale, something never done before. The series isn't my favourite , but the fist 3 books of WoT are decent high fantasy. In my view, the series was nearly ruined by books 4-11, books I found hard to read, although I still found them entertaining enough to keep reading. In my opinion Brandon saved the day, and the last 3 books (12-14) are also decent high-fantasy, finishing strongly to warp-up the series in a decent way.