What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?

[CrownySuccubus]

There's a huge gap between pretty male protagonists (Aymeric, Estinien, Elidibus) who lean more towards the Amano style heroes and...whatever it is G'raha and Thancred are supposed to be. Overly animated catboys or colorless blobs of indistinguishable features. In my eyes, they are too different from each other to fit the same category. There's no otherwordly or beautiful look to them, they just look dated and off putting.

"Blobs of indistinguishable features" is certainly how you can describe pretty much every FF main character prior to PS1 hardware. If it weren't for Amano's artwork, or some sort of accessory, you'd have no way of telling Bartz apart from Fighter. Hell, even with Amano's art, Firion from FFII has the same face as the original WOL, Cecil, Edge, Bartz, Locke, and Zidane.

But again, we're talking about your personal preferences here, which don't apply across the overall playerbase. What design is more intriguing to who is purely based on personal or mass appeal.

The pretty boys of older titles also were just nowhere near as annoying. Bartz and Locke were funny (I vaguely to this day remember some argument that Bartz had with Ghido the turtle and Locke saying something about the price is right), Cecil going from Dark Knight to Paladin was one of the coolest things I'd ever seen in a video game when I first played FFIV, and so on.

This really has nothing to do with their designs and, again, comes down to what you personally find appealing, which still varies by mileage.

Overall, the earlier titles just did a better job characterizing the male protagonists. Their looks were varied, but their personalities weren't as bad or stagnant as the current state of the cast.

Agree to disagree. Like I said, no matter if you were talking about Amano's character designs or character sprites, there was definitely a sameness to most of the old protagonists that forced the older games to rely on gaudy accessories and/or different hair colors to make them seem different. Likewise, I don't think I need to keep repeating the whole thing about personal preferences regarding personality.