My beef with saying you should focus on Squalls interactions with people, his interactions are the same across the board. It's always his distancing from people, in every case. Focusing on just that aspect of the story, you only see one side of squalls personality. For that matter, even in the grander scheme of things, you always see that side of his personality. Squall, and the rest of the cast, is painted as as extremely one-sided characters. No matter how good the premise of a character driven plot it won't be good if the characters driving it are no good.