Once I accepted the "Hero" thing as a dumb jock stereotype/parody thing, Snow quickly became endearing to me.

I really like Vanille, but I couldn't stand Hope and actually hoped (heh) he would turn when he almost did near the end of the game, so we'd have to fight him, and it would hit home that the characters are fallable. But it never happened so oh well.

I still say FFXIII is for me the most interesting of the combats I've played in the mainline FF series because it's the only one that was capped so that I couldn't simply level up a bit more and steamroll everything. Most games in the FF series I have managed to win by just holding X to win, while in FFXIII you have to paradigm shift and then hold X to win. I think I would find the other games a lot more interesting if they also did level capping per area. I'm guessing you push ahead faster than I do because otherwise you'd probably see the enemies in other games as just cannon fodder too.