I'm playing this game myself, the characters were meant to look funky. Its like the NES & SNES days when early RPG characters looked small and chunky (no rhyme intended). To me, FF IX and a lot of cutesy stuff in it and I like cutesy (I got a soft spot for that).
Yeah, that. It seems odd that you can not like these characters as much as older ones due to their cartoonish physiques when the reason they look like that is entirely to serve as a 3D representation of the character models of older games.