Since what I was saying was completely misunderstood, I'll elaborate.

I have a game.
The game's premise is a death camp.
Instead of focusing on the horrific experiments and daily murders, we instead focus on the angst-ridden lives of a teenager who falls in love for no reason.

That's my problem with Final Fantasy VIII. They give us what is essentially a very grim setting - a school where young orphans are brought together to learn to kill for a living while receiving no emotional support so they grow up totally smurfed in the head - and they present it like some sort of spiffy teenage fantasy.

"Yeah! I wish my high school was as kewl as Garden!" is the message they want o convey.

That.
Is.
Retarded.

You can almost imagine some poor enterprising Japanese writer coming to a meeting with his eyes full of dreams and hopes about a story where the school is a hellhole run by incompetent jerks who have horribly traumatized all the chilren they have taken in.
Then the director slapped him across the face and told him to stop being so ambitious. Final Fantasy VII was such a megahit that there was no time for proper writing or thinking whatsoever. They had to get this game out NOW. Just take his basic idea of a military school and turn it into a shallow wet dream.