YOU TAKE THAT BACK
I was reading In defence of X-2 and actually it’s…far better designed and planned than I’d given it credit for. Admittedly you have to imagine Rikku doesn’t exist, and REALLY like dresses and terrible fanservicey minigames. And, uh, ignore a hell of a lot of other things. Especially monkeys.

It doesnt help that chapter 1 is Big Pink Girl’s Pink Girly Day Out and chapter 2 is Awkward, Pointless Fetchquest Crapfest, and there’s only 5 chapters.

but still! It gave me hope for FF13-2 because there’s much less chance of dresses and naked massage games, and more chance of improvements. The best bit is that due to them recycling the environments, when you go to Guadosalam in the first game there was a banquet. When you return in X-2 (bear in mind the Guado have been wiped out and the remainder forced into hiding and Guadosalam is now taken over by idiots) several years later, THE FOOD IS STILL THERE.
Perhaps it’s just a really lovely plastic display.

I liked the guado bit hahahaha, real nice I didn’t notice it though.
I actually played X-2 before X, due to the store not having one. Wasn’t half as clusterf’d as I’d thought. But it still didn’t add up much to the whole Tidus thing. Where does he come from anyway? Is he real there or is he still just a figment of something? And how did Yuna’s dad become acquainted with them? That falls in my theory that they were real at some point, but my mind hurts when I think too much about it.

I was trying to remember but couldn’t, so I googled. Tidus’s dad, and Tidus “came to Spira from a magically-summoned replica of Zanarkand, created from the memories of those who lived in the original and maintained by Yu Yevon, the Summoner who was Zanarkand’s leader one thousand years prior to the events of Final Fantasy X”

In other words, WOO MAGIC.
Then while Yuna’s dad was the summoner, his guardians were Auron and Jecht. Yuna’s dad died and Jecht became Sin, and Dead-Auron is around because WOO MAGIC

To be honest it just didn’t need the magically summoned city aspect, nor did Auron especially need to be dead – that just made it overly-complicated and weird. Also Tidus returning is WOO MAGIC, though the game is written to make it quite possible that he’s not really there (which is of course the only sensible way to play it.)