Honestly I didn't think the story was that great. The ending was meh, and even the side stories were alright. The characters themselves though, as someone said, were very fleshed out, and that was awesome as you could replay the game over and over and get to know dozzens of interesting characters.
The gameplay is really cool, because it's a fresh breath of air compared to the next deviation of turnbased/ATB battle system.
My criticism was that certain parts and more specificly, scenes should have been more dramatic and darker.
... and that's pretty much it.
The positive was that Valkyria Chronicles was able to retain the J-part of it's name, but not get lost in the huge sea of JRPGs, by making a huge number of unique and fleshed out characters, a unique battle system that feels both active and passive, and overall a good story.
If you want spoilers, here's my negatives for the story:
The fucking pig, I hate the fucking pig. I don't know how it sounds on the English dub, but I hated it on the Japanese audio "Buhi?!!!!" Faldio's death was a WTF for me. Combined with the awkward animation, he seemed like an attention whore. When I say they should make some parts darker, if they're going to make Faldio so burdened with guilt and shame to make him commit suicide, they should have made his action even more controversial and dark. They could have made his sucide more necessary (like the Flame of Valkyria (?) was still going to go through in a incomplete state, so somebody had to get him into the core of the ship). The Darcians (sp?) racism thing was a bit cliche and too obvious (I thought it was wierd that the one definitively Japanese name was given to Isara. And the Darcians were hated for an atrocity that was actually fabricated in history books. [Note: I'm a Nikkei-jin and I feel like there's undued hate against Japanese and that there's a lot of unnecessary conflicts brought up, so don't group me with liberals like Norimitsu Onishi])
Other than those few things though, it was nice to see the majority of the story unfold, and how some of the characters changed and grew, especially Rosie.
