The Force Awakens might have some emotional stakes, but that\'s pretty much all it has. They made a planet sized superweapon feel boring and the destruction of a planet uneventful (and it\'s still even unclear to me whether that was the Capital that got blown up). And it failed to achieve all that whilst simultaneously being incredibly unambitious and unoriginal.
Rogue One tells an actual story (something The Force Awakens doesn\'t do) and it expands the Star Wars universe. I\'d love to see more about Jedha, I can\'t even name a single Force Awakens planet (except \'not-Tatooine\'). It is lacking in the characters and it doesn\'t connect with the emotional arcs, but it _does_ connect with the emotional arcs of the wider story and universe. You really feel the terror of those rebels at the end and the anxiety over the plans and them giving up absolutely everything to get through to it.
I guess if I was being balanced, both films do exactly what they needed to do. The Force Awakens plays up the nostalgia, and produces a solid unspectacular film to prove that Star Wars is viable again and it fills it with a cast of really good characters who can then centrepoint the next main series films (although it flunks the worldbuilding for the new universe. You\'d be forgiven for thinking the Empire was still in charge and the Republic were rebels its so bad).
Rogue One shows that new Star Wars universe can be expanded and that we can have films that open up the possibilities, telling self-contained complete stories without going back to the same bucket of tone and tropes.
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Not terrible buuuuuuuut...
So something that was talked about all over the place in the promotion for this was to make it like The Empire Strikes Back. Dark, gritty, even bleak at times. And though the movie certainly hits that note, it lacks an emotional, personal weight you need to really make something match what happened in Empire.
The Force Awakens captured that tone far better; in spite of the scale of the conflict and the threat of the latest Superweapon, that movie was still squarely about new characters Finn, Rey, and Kylo Ren.
With RO however, we're introduced to a whole slew of new characters and though they're all solid enough, I'd say that only Imperial defector Bohdi Rook and repurposed Imperial droid K-S 2 O really felt like they grew or had meaningful arcs.
If it had been just the story of how the Death Star plans were stolen, it could've worked better. Similarly, if they'd done something similar to Force Awakens and treat that purely as backdrop for a personal story of revenge or redemption or something for leading lady Jyn Erso, that would've worked better too.
But instead we're ultimately left with a decent Star Wars movie. Was it ambitious? Maybe. But it would've been so much more, if it hadn't tried to be so much.