Don't get me wrong, it's one of the best songs on the album, but there's just something about it that I can't quite put my finger on that suggests it's really trying hard to be the Hallowed or Rime of the album, and perhaps even surpass it.
It could be your own expectation that the longest song on a Maiden album
should compare to those epics. In most cases the comparision is reasonable: look at the list of longest songs before this album. Phantom, Hallowed, TTAL, Rime, ATG, 7th Son, SotC, Clansman, Dream, Dance ... that's damn close to a greatest hits list. The last time we had a longest song that wasn't a great song? Mother Russia. The Harris epic is a tradition, right?
So when the album delivers a Harris epic, we as fans want to place that burden there. "This is gonna be the awesome album centerpiece, right?" And most of the time, that assumption has paid off.
AMOLAD is a case where the epic didn't deliver in the same way. Why do we say "Steve tried and failed?" He didn't fail, of course. He just didn't meet your expectations.
I say this as someone who was also disappointed with FTGGOG ... until I stopped
expecting FTGGOG to be the next Hallowed. When I let my expectations go, when I took the album as it is rather than as a comparison to my fantasy, I suddenly found that FTGGOG was no longer substandard.