It only feels a bit lackluster cause Ivalice extends beyond one game and has a huge timeline. Even if their was great political reform in XII it wouldn't change the fact that the Great Cataclysm is going to knock the whole planet back to the stone age. Then again, Ivalice was always designed to be a reflection of our real world and since its very unlikely we'll ever see a happy ending we have to settle for what victories we can get.

VII follows this same problem, its hard to take the Meteor Crisis as truly threatening when you learn the planet get saved from certain doom two times before the events of VII or that it will be saved from "certain doom" again another two times after Meteorfall. In the course of a decade, the planet was nearly destroyed five times total with only a few years apart from each other. Even Spira almost breaks out into civil war and then nearly gets wiped out by an ancient weapon of the past piloted by a pissed off ghost. This is sorta the reason why I don't like the idea of sequels, prequels, and spin-offs cause they kinda suck the excitement and momentum out of the games that are their source materials.

Before the X-2 was announced, I always justified the title Final Fantasy because we were watching the last great epics in these individual worlds. The last heroic and fantastic story that we the players were allowed to witness and play a part of.