Summed up my thoughts pretty well, actually. I just outright disagree with a lot of the assessments being made. Where you see clichés, I see what you call archetypes. Where you see shallow development, I see deep development. I would personally find someone going from one extreme to the other to be annoying - something you associated with Hope, and on him I'll agree. I feel that, despite him being by far the best "wussy character" I've seen in the FF series nearer the start, that at the end he was annoying when he suddenly decided to be all "Hi, I'm that kid who everyone will say is the future President, I make lots of speeches and whatnot". That to me is too much development, and too typical. I prefer the more subtle developments that we see in Vanille. I don't feel she gets too little development. I feel she got it just right. Sure, she goes back to being what she was like at the start - but only in personality traits. To have her be a completely different person would be to betray reality - reality to me says that when a person grows up in a way that she did with regards to running away from everything and hiding everything through to being an open and more courageous person, she doesn't need to change her personality while she's at it. I've grown up a lot over the years and have learned a lot of lessons but I don't think that means I need to be a completely different personality. I can still laugh despite having downtimes, etc. This is good development, this is realistic (unlike Hope). I feel the others have similarly good development going for them (again, exception being Hope from chapter 11 onwards).

But oh well. You see things very differently to me. I'm not sure why that is but everyone will always have an opinion. I will say though that while you point out that there are a few threads criticising characters in the forums, that happens for every game, regardless of how good it is. What I noticed though, particularly after recently finishing the game and therefore being more able to actively discuss it, is that people were constantly posting about how well done the characters were, which is not something I remember happening for X or XII when I was at a similar stage of actively posting in those forums. I feel that people really enjoyed these characters. Sure, something like 50% will dislike them, as is standard - but those that did like them seemed to think it was a significantly better job than most previously liked sets of characters before this game. During my time posting in the forum I guess I felt that it was the most commonly praised area of the game. What area did you feel was praised more?