I may bring myself a massive amount of criticism here, but I don't think Final Fantasy has ever been groundbreaking for storyline. I think this one was par for the series. Final Fantasy plots tend to be pretty basic stuff overall. Rag tag team of adventurers team up to save the world from some evil bugger. For me, what makes Final Fantasy stories great is all the dialogue/scenes you get along the way, and the feels. I got 'em both in spades in this game so I'm good. I feel people have very rose-tinted glasses when they look back at the much older games in the series, story-wise. I can name at least half a dozen games in the series that I felt had worse plots than this one, including VIII which is one of my all-time fave games.

Also, urgh, I'm glad the conflict didn't go on longer. I played the game at a slower pace than most people (70 hours played) and the tension in that particular chapter was insane. I also felt it did last a bit longer - some of the snarky comments were still around afterwards, not sure if that was intentional by SE.

EDIT: Also, watching Ignis stumble over a couple of times and get picked up by Prompto while we were just moving around was heartbreaking. He also walked in the wrong direction for a few moments sometimes and Prompto would run back to him to correct his walking direction. Feels.