Nojima is god, he wrote the story for the best game in existence!

Surely you're talking about X-2.

...

I'm kidding, don't hurt me !

I kind of have to agree with you guys when you say the game didn't connect too well with the players.

I'm trying to put my finger on it, but so far what I think is the main reason, compared to the older Final Fantasy games, is that in XIII, you basically spend like a week with the characters (story-wise).  The premise of the story never really changes throughout the game.  You start, and the goal is to take down the Fal-Cie.  You end the game and guess what you just did?

No real plot-twists.  Nothing shocking like Kefka killing the emperor Ghestal in VI, or making the world fall into ruins, or Sephiroth succeeding in invoking meteor in VII, among the most famous examples.

In XIII, everything including the storyline is fast paced.  The problem with that, for an RPG with so many characters, is that since the story doesn't last that long, the characters don't go through that much either (party characters, or villains, or any other NPCs).  The connection I make with characters is usually tied with how they handle their way through the obstacles that get in the way.  How they react to situations, exposing their limitations, flaws, or other qualities.  In FF XIII, there are a very limited amount of such situations, making it really difficult to relate to them.  In fact, most of the time, the obstacles they go through has for only result that they have to flee and keep running away... ¬_¬

And then you have the fact that the characters basically have next to none of their pasts presented to the player.  And what little we know about it is only made available through log entries that are souless and sterile.  If they had made those in full animated form, as flashbacks or  even better, playable (like they used to do in their games, i.e. Terra as a baby in the Esper world) we would have connected a whole lot more with the characters. 

I understand those flashy CGI sequences cost a lot... But if they are detrimental to the end result, to what could possibly be, then screw them and make the damn thing in real-time graphics like most other games do.  Heck, players are usually more impressed by top quality real-time cut-scenes (like most of the ones in God of War 3 and Metal Gear Solid 4, for example) than they are by CGIs. 

In the end, to summarise, I think the story was somewhat good, with good ideas, but was ultimately very poorly delivered.

I enjoyed the game quite a lot anyway.  Because of its addictive battle system and graphics more than anything else.