Boring story and irritating/unlikable characters kill any sort of enjoyment I might have experienced.
The only thing I can reliably expect from them these days are irritating one-dimensional characters, ugly character design and bad stories. They've delivered that predictably over the last 5 or so years.
Maybe characters like Van are popular in Japan. I don't know. They seem to like some pretty different things. Personally, I can't buy into the whole drag-queen fancy boy look of guys like Tidus, Van or Rush Sykes (lol). I spend the majority of the game hoping an airship lands on them.
At any rate, I'll give a brief review of why I didn't like FFXII.
First, the story was about as cliché and uncreative as they come. Evil empires, freedom fights, princesses etc all the usual is there.
The battle system was like a dumbed down and slower version of KoToR and fared poorly in comparison.
The side quests and busy work were very reminiscent of MMORPG grinding and without a good battle system they became very tiresome.
This is the first FF game that I've played that I haven't at least played all the way through. I haven't liked several of them, but this was by far the worst and I'm unlikely to put the disc in again. 20 hours of my life were wasted and I didn't really enjoy any of it.