I can only agree: the character development and the music are superb.

My only criticism of the character development would be that maybe they front-loaded it a bit too much: the characters had been so fully developed by the time they reached Gran Pulse that they didn't really change or grow in any substantive way afterward.

Considering how central the character development had been up to that point, with so much emotional growth and various tensions between the characters which were realistically played out and resolved, I was left feeling that the rest of the game was a bit of an emotional anti-climax.

The music, of course, is magnificent. 'The Promise', in particular, is a wonderfully evocative track, melancholy yet somehow hopeful.