But these stupid characters have only been introduced in the later FF games. Which the characters were made to be more US friendly. In the older games, on the SNES and NES, the characters were more traditional RPG characters. Mind you in FF6 there was no real main character, well maybe Terra because the whole story revolved around her, sorta. In terms of gameplay/enjoyment, it stopped for me midway through FFIX (Is that 9?).
Thank god Monolith left Squaresoft and joined namco, who knows how they would have effed up the Xenogears/saga series.