I liked him very much. especially the relationship between him and Rinoa, and how he acts in front of her. Every single time he is quiet and starts thinking she just find it very amusing and always starts to tease him.

Yes, Squall's character was executed very well. And, really, that's what it's all about; the execution. He had believable faults, was sufficiently developed, and was generally portrayed as an overall human character that the target audience could relate to easily enough. What I like about him is that he was, for all intents and purposes, just a normal person who basically had the weight of the entire world heaved onto his shoulders. You could tell that he was overwhelmed by what everyone expected him to do. He just didn't think of himself as this incredible hero that everyone should look to for help.

True, he was a bit of a jerk in the beginning, but he had every right to be. I'd like to see you remain optimistic after being orphaned at a young age, losing the one person you genuinely cared for, then being shipped off to a military academy that teaches you how to brutally slaughter whatever you come across through the use of highly destructive magical spells. Squall had a lot on his plate by the end of Disc 1 alone and handled himself like a real person would have. Unlike most stereotypical heroes, he didn't automatically rise to the occasion and persevere against all odds with the greatest of ease. He faced realistic trials and reacted to them in a believable way.

One gripe I had with Squall, though, was that he and Rinoa took center stage after Disc 1. Ordinarily, that would be fine. After all, they are the real main characters. However, my problem there is that, during Disc 2 and beyond, the other characters got literally no development. They were cast into supporting roles whose sole purpose in life was to help Squall and Rinoa develop. The entire plot in an RPG should never revolve completely around two characters.

Squall was awesome, I liked how we could see what he was thinking which helped explain why he behaved the way he did, I also like the use of contrast between him and the other characters such as Zell and well everyone really, Squalls character was out of place amongst the rest of the main characters and thats what made him stand out so I guess thats why I liked Squall he's actually one of my fav characters from the FF series

PLUS his gunblade is the coolest weapon ever lol

Squall, is one hot character.

But, besides looks, I utterly despised him. After Cloud, dealing with another cold, impersonal, sarcastic jerk for a main character wasn't something I enjoyed.

There is really one main reason why I dislike Squall, and that's this:
He turns into this cold, lone wolf of a man...because: "My big sister left me when I was four years old, so now I hate the world!" Lame. Really, really lame. Sure, you can say it's because he was an orphan-turned soldier, but so was everyone else in Garden, and they weren't like him.

I loved him in my party though, no doubt there, but I just thought he was a brown-haired version of Cloud without any real reason for his personality flaws. I'm not a big Cloud fan either, but he at least had a plethora of reasons for being as detached as he was.

In all fairness, we really don't know whether or not everyone else in the Garden had any psychological issues because Squall is the only one who actually gets any focus throughout the entire game. >_> We know Seifer has problems, though, but his are just different. Rather than becoming antisocial, he became overly competitive and stubborn to the point where he was willing to betray his friends and be manipulated by an evil sorceress in order to achieve his "romantic dream." As for Zell, he was quite obviously adopted, seeing as how he has a foster mother in Balamb. He couldn't have had it incredibly rough, and it shows. However ADHD-ish he may act, he's at least stable mentally speaking.

Besides, I think it was fairly obvious that Squall was at least a bit closer to Ellone than the others were. Not to mention you can attribute it to him having a different personality than the others did. When she left without any given explaination, Squall was left to assume that she had abandoned him. Now, it's been scientifically proven that growing up without a mother-figure is one of the leading causes for psychological problems. Regardless of how the other main characters turned out, Squall had it rough. Maybe he didn't wake up to find that everyone he knew any loved was slaughtered by his childhood hero (read: Cloud Strife), but he didn't exactly have an emotionally stable childhood, himself.

Nevermind the fact that he's a teenager. He's not in what you might call an emotionally sound period of his life. Added to that is the fact that everyone seems to have all these great expectations for him. What if he fails? What if he turns out to not be anything special? Not to mention he's made the leader of an entire military base not even halfway through the game. Here you have an emotionally scarred teenager who is not only sent into combat on a regular basis, but also is expected to rally the troops/set an example for them. Besides, people angst about trivial, pointless things in real life. I do it, my friends do it, and I'm willing to bet that all of you have done it at one point or another. You have to remember that nobody is perfect.

Very good points, and well said, but I see it this way:
I play 'Final Fantasy' games as an escape, not to be reminded of realistic issues in my own home. He may have been great in a novel or a book, where realistic character depth is expected, but in a fantastical voyage in a video game? No thanks. This is why, I think of him as a watered-down Cloud. His issues are realistic, Cloud's are extreme and something you'd expect from a video game, not in a soap opera.

And, you may not have seen everyone's thoughts, but you can tell who was a nut and who wasn't. All of the others still had friends, still had companions, and all of them [Minus Zell] had no family. Squall just closed himself off from everyone, because he lost one person. It's a very realistic issue, but again, I'm not playing a game for a high school soap opera. =/

Squall was very well-developed, but I'm entitled to my opinion just like anyone else, and he's just not my type of character. If I'm playing as an emotastic jerk, I want him to have the worst family history of all time [enter: Cloud.] xD