Well, some spoilers ahead...
To be perfectly honest, my Japanese isn't my strongest suit, but I personally found the concept of either turning into a crystal sculpture or a zombie forever a little silly. Also in the beginning of Chapter 4 the party seems to split up a pretty arbitrary reason, and you're stuck with teams of 2 for a while. It sort of boils down to "I'm tired" "We don't have time for this" "I'm tired"
The characters are well-done though, from what I can tell so far. I especially like Sazh, Lightning and Fang. Snow's not bad. Hope's kind of annoying. Vanille reminds me of Selphie or Rikku. I guess there's nothing really wrong with the story so far. But I could relate with what was happening in Final Fantasy X freakishly well (it came out just as my parents split and I moved from Hawaii to Las Vegas, so everything from being really annoyed at your dad to the theme of water everywhere to being in a strange new area), so the story's not resonating exceptionally well with me.... yet.
But I can't really make an honest comment about the story since I'm not done with the game, but aside from that it seemed to be pretty typical Final Fantasy, with a small group of rebels running from a corrupt government, etc.
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