The Final Fantasy series is no stranger to emotional developments throughout its long run, but after watching the International trailer for this latest installment, I have to say that I'm pretty pumped for what might come out of it.  Despite the relatively lackluster English voice acting, the very personal situations in which all of the characters were found seemed incredibly genuine.  It seems even more striking when contrasted against the "bigger picture" orientation of XII which, while I enjoyed it, made the many of the characters seem just a little too far removed from the cause they had been fighting for. 
 
And I'm all for emotions in games.  "Fear" is the only one of these to have ever been perfected in gaming, and I honestly imagine that it's due to the male domination of the medium.  The average male youth doesn't want to spill tears over the loss of a game character, or feel the incredible emotional pain delivered for -- in the case of the topic title -- being a  I'Cie, the unwilling plague of Cocoon.  But why wouldn't we want to feel the impact that being in a situation such as that could cause?    
 
Personally, I'm not like that.  I welcome emotions, especially through entertainment.  If something can make me angry, or sad, or even cause me to tear up (something no video game has yet managed), then it's done its job.  It's for this reason that I hope that Final Fantasy XIII delivers on its emotional premise. 
 
And that's my challenge to Square Enix: make me cry.  Force me to love this characters, to sympathize with their incredibly unfortunate situations, and in the case that things get worse than they already look to be in that recent trailer, make me feel their pain.  Stretch the limits of storytelling as much as you have the splendor of visualization.  Make me feel what they feel.

I think you're going to enjoy the story. It's very much about the characters rather than everything around them, and they do a masterful job of building believable and meaningful relationships between individual characters. I think what really takes it to the next level is the animations, mainly the facial ones. FMV's are of course as good as ever, but the in-engine cutscenes are so amazingly detailed that I at times had to ask myself if this was pre-rendered or not. As an example; I'm not nearly fluent in Japanese, yet I never felt like I was missing out on the emotional moments.  
 
Now whether you actually like the characters, the story and the script all comes on top of that, but it's all built on a foundation that's stronger than ever. 

...this story is bad.  It's one of the worst ones and once the big plot twist comes to light in Chapter 10/11, you will laugh.  
 
The only way the story can be redeemed is if Square had all this planned out and Agito and Versus take place before the events of FF13 like everyone is rumoring on Japanese forums.
 

The story is by no means great, but to be honest, its not that much worse than any other FF. 
 
The relations the characters build between them are pretty cool thou. I think that will be my longest lasting memory of ff13.