Agreed, compared to what the game offers, it's really not something that important, the game has a magical world with unique setting, amazing art, beautiful landscapes and impressive atmosphere, with promising combat system against well designed enemies, interesting story and world building, and last but not least, the game deliver a world that calling the players to explore and discover what it's has to offer
The characters seems to be designed by many different talents, Tetsuya Nomura is one of them, so you can see a lot of well designed characters depending on who designed them, actually recently we've got more pictures for characters we've never seen before, and I love how well designed many of these characters are, examples:
I love the diversity in characters design, because they were designed by many different talents from outside the studio, so I liked both the characters and the blades (which they looks like humans) designs a lot more than the characters design in the first game, also as we can notice, the characters and the blades designed based on different cultures which is something cool, the first character/blade from the two pics above is more likely based on European cultures, while the second based on Chinese culture if I am not mistaken
Anyway I see nothing wrong with the characters design, as it's the opposite actually, because they look great !