Well, not having played the game, from looking at him, one guess of mine would be that he's a character who was mainly designed to appeal to the Japanese audience. He's got all the characteristics of the view of an "attractive" Japanese male today: light-colored swooshy hair, baby face, serious yet innocent expression, gazing eyes, thin as a twig. It goes without saying that what will appeal to one culture may be completely unappealing to another, and it is no surprise to me at all that this character, from that alone, bombed in the West. Just like every similarly designed character from FF after Cloud Strife in 7. Cloud's design was new to Western gamers, and interesting in that regard. After Cloud, though, the standard for male characters who are obviously male in Asia but androgynous-looking in the West was set, and male JRPG protagonists have had to try to recover from that view ever since.
I'm not gonna comment on his personality, as I need to play the game to do that. But yeah, he doesn't look to me like the kind of character I would enjoy playing.
EDIT: As for the game, my first hypothesis is one word: Yahtzee. It seems that lately people are starting to take ZP seriously as a game review. And it was panned by a lot of other critics too, so there's that. But I have not played the game, nor will I ever probably play it, so I'm just spouting off uninformed opinion here. Move along.