Every one got that?

Well the story so far is rather convoluted even by JRPG standards. The game doesn’t seem to even have a single protagonist since it jumps around from person to person so much.

The gist of it is that an artificial hollow world was created by a race of beings and is now populated by humans. If one of these being come in contact with a human they put a brand on them that makes them their slave and they are given 1 command. If they don't fulfill the command they turn into a twisted zombie monster, if they do fulfill the command they turn into a crystal version of themselves, so it's lose lose either way. To make things worse, the person is not told what the command is, they are just given a vague vision and have to figure it out before the time runs out.

Aside from this, the local authorities have labeled these being as total enemies to humanity, and any one who comes in contact with one of them is labeled a traitor. So a short time before the story starts one of these beings is found sleeping near a small town, and when the government hears about this they round up the whole population and plan to ship them off world. Meanwhile one girl named Serah some how came in contact with the being and was branded, and she tells her sister Lightning and fiance Snow.

So when the game starts everything is going to hell when the population of the town decide they don't want to be shipped off world and rebel mid-transport. Lightning takes down one ship from the inside and escapes with Sazh, some guy with two guns and a chocobo chick in his afro. Meanwhile Snow leads a bunch of people on a ground assault against the military, but many under his lead die, including a mother who was fighting to save her son Hope. Then the massive structure that the being was sleeping in shows up and apparently Serah is inside of it.

Lightning and Sazh flies a construction craft to the thing and Snow steals a flying bike to get to it. Hope wants to confront Snow on the death of his mother and with the encouragement of his insanely cheerful friend Vanille they take another bike and follow him. They all manage to meet up at the same time as finding Serah, who tells them that saving their world was her command and asks them to carry it out. When they agree she then turns into a big crystal. The whole group then go and confront the being to get it to change her back to normal, while the military is blasting the place to bits. They win the fight against it but are then sucked into a weird void where they are branded and see a vision of a giant monster destroying everything.

The being explodes in a huge energy blast as the structure falls into a sea, turning all the water into crystal instantly. The party wakes up in this strange landscape and find they can now do magic, which means I can also level them up in an odd circular grid system. So they set off to figure out what to do next.