I'd like to add a warning if you're trying to play an NTSC copy not dumped by yourself:
Apparently the american copy has a badly made dump and it's prone to fail in several ways, the most typical one is freezing up in the intro cutscene when starting the story mode. I only mention this because it seems to be also one of the most common dumps of this game.
First, of course, check what the above posts mention. If everything is correct, it may just be the game's image file.