Might as well use a new post for this.
2) He's boring. Well gosh, not every MC can be a Chosen One, soldier trained from a young age, dark knight, genetic experiment/hybrid, star athlete, or a womanizing thief, and being any of those things would not have worked for the kind of story FF12 was going for. Unfortunate, but Vaan had to be a nobody special to fit into Ivalice's atmosphere.
The problem here is that you listed several different things that made those people awesome main characters. He didn't have to be any of those, he could have been something else and still be awesome. Look at Hope in FFXIII, he was just an annoying kid for the first half of the game, and then he developed into a pretty decent character who I honestly loved having in my party (I didn't actually use him to fight, but I liked his interactions with the others). This never happened with Vaan. The game started and he was just there, Balthier was the cool guy in the party. The game progressed and you find out Ashe is the one who really matters, and she's an incredibly strong character to boot.
Vaan is just... there. It's not the fact that he wasn't anyone special, it's that he never says or does anything to make him likable, and in my opinion just him being there to drive the story makes the game worse. I really liked FFXII, and I honestly feel that if the plot were modified to remove Vaan and Penelo, leaving more time to develop the rest of the cast... it would be one of my favourites in the series.
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