This Troper always thought that Squall and Rinoa's romance was hamfisted and awkward (even for a couple of needy teens.) The very end, however, with Squall smiling for the first time was brilliant. Meanwhile, Laguna, who has been treated as comic relief through the whole game, gets a flashback at Raine's grave, reminiscing about the night he proposed to her. It was so marvelously subtle and sad it always gets This Troper right here.
Hamfisted or not, This Troper found it so touching that the love between Laguna and Julia, though never meant to be, was carried on in a very sweet way through their children.
Previous to any of that, when the party visits the bombed-out ruins of Trabia Garden, wandering by the Garden's makeshift graveyard at the right time allows Squall (and therefore the player) to eavesdrop on Selphie as she talks to the graves of her friends killed during the bombing. That Selphie is ordinarily a hyperactive Genki Girl makes it particularly rough.
At the same graveyard, there's a scene with a jacket on one of the tombstones... and a SeeD talking about how his girlfriend used to wear his jacket when they were together during cold nights...
For this troper it was the scenes in space, with Rinoa looking up at Squall's ring and her mother's, and realizing that there was nothing left that she could do to save herself.
There's also the scene where Laguna discovers the in-story significance of the aforementioned "Eyes on Me" - that it was the song Julia told him at the hotel that he'd inspired her to write, and that she'd released it and dedicated it to him when she believed he'd been killed in the war.
Speaking of that space section, there's the end of it with Squall and Rinoa in the cockpit of the Ragnarok. Let's recount the sequence, shall we? After contacting ground control and setting a course back, artificial gravity is turned off and Rinoa ultimately lands in Squall's lap. We then get confirmation that she's a sorceress. Her breakdown (as well as Squall's, sorta, but mostly from the scenes at the beginning of the section) while Eyes On Me is playing can be utterly heartbreaking.
Rinoa: "Just a little longer... I don't wanna go back..."
Laguna in the flashback at the beginning of the second disc, admitting to Kiros that he's afraid of leaving Winhill and losing Raine and Ellone, and crying out, "Please let it be this room when I wake up! Please let me be in this puny bed when I wake up!" Especially once you know that his fears come to pass before very long.
This troper's heart broke a little during the scene that takes place when Squall and co. go to talk to Cid in the infirmary:
Squall: Please tell me about Sorceress Edea. I heard she's your wife.
Cid: You're quite right... She had been a sorceress since childhood. I married her, knowing that. We were happy. We worked together, the two of us. We were very happy.
