Personally, I enjoyed FFXII immensely. It's a fantastic experience with a rich and inviting world, and the character customization and party set-up was done very well.

Also, kudos to the localization team that worked on this game! Zargs touched on this in his post, but I feel like I should say something as well, because when I played through it, everything that was stated in the game (it's lore and the way that the characters interacted) felt so natural.

Finally, expanding on what Loaf was talking about how characters aren't supposed to just represent themselves: I think Vaan was a great character to segue the player-to-world interaction. He's pretty much a kid that didn't know anything at first, but grew as the game went on. Isn't that what players do too? We don't know much of anything about the world when we are first introduced into the game, so following a character in pretty much the same shoes is a way to get accustomed to everything. I enjoyed the rest of the playable cast as well, but I felt that I needed to expand on Vaan because I feel his character gets a lot of undue hate...

Well, I don't really want to close this post by saying the things that pretty much everyone else has already said, but I feel that it truly does boil down to a game just not being your cup o' tea.