SPOILERS I'm not finishing FFX2 but I have questions

[Ac1dVenus]

So back in the PlayStation 2 days I loved FFX. To me it was old school turn based FF but with updated graphics.
I tried FFX-2 but the cheese turned me off.
Anyway after completing the FFX remaster a couple of times since I thought I'd give X2 another go and because I wanted to see how the story panned out.
I rushed through the game which was a mistake, managed to kill the Magus sisters at lvl 35 but I've struggled against Anima but I'm eager to move on to the next game.

So... Does Shuyin have anything to do with Tidus, do we get a dream reunion? Or is this one of those where the game would finish leaving you with more questions than answers leaving it up to you to decide what you think? Yuna became a sphere hunter to find this answer but I got the feeling it was going to end in disappointment for her.

 

[Dionysos]

There will be others who know the game more intimately than me. I only rushed through the game once without realising that I should have been doing various side missions in order to actually see huge chunks of the story. I wasn't a fan of the way they arranged the mission system and I just went for the main missions and paid for it later.

However, I do believe that there are multiple endings depending on how you answered a question at one part of a game, how many quests you complete, spheres you obtain, etc. I'll put what little I know in spoiler tags but if you really want to know then I believe the 'true' or 'good' ending does indeed see Tidus restored to existence on Spira and into Yuna's arms.
Shuyin was an historical Zanarkandian with strong resemblance to Tidus, and it is implied (or maybe stated explicitly somewhere) that the Fayth took some inspiration from Shuyin when they dreamed up Tidus to help populate Dream Zanarkand.

I think there are still many questions left unanswered, but some of the core ones which you are asking about do reach some sort of a conclusion. Again, it depends on the ending you get.

Hopefully someone else might fill in the gaps and explain if I have missed anything.

 

[Linnaete]

They've never been clear as to reasons why Shuyin supposedly bears such a strong resemblance to Tidus. We know Shuyin was a resident of the real Zanarkand from a millennium prior to the events of FFX, and I've always been under the assumption that Dream Zanarkand just carried on in its place for another peaceful thousand years, with the dream residents going on with their lives blissfully unaware of the peculiar nature of their collective existence.

I can only presume that while Dream Zanarkand (right down to the residents) was originally created in the image of the original, but this still doesn't explain why Tidus, a guy born a millennium after Shuyin, looks so much like his vengeful phantom doppelganger. Maybe the Fayth's imagination stretched only so far - maybe they could only come up with a finite set of human faces so just shrugged and settled on dreaming up a Shuyin lookalike. That would have been a shock to Jecht and his wife, especially if their kid son suddenly looked nothing like them.

 

[blakstang98]

Yuna starts her journey as a sphere hunter because of the sphere Rikku found that had a prisoner that looked and sounded just like Tidus. So the simple answer is, yes, Yuna ends up disappointed in the end. Why? Because it was Shuyin, and not Tidus. And at the end of the day, Tidus is still someone that existed a thousand years ago who only came the Spira 2 years before as a dream of the fayth, then disappeared when the fayth stopped dreaming.

So Shuyin and TIdus were not related in the slightest. They both came from Zanarkand, maybe even were alive at the same time but never knew each other. Tidus passed at some point and became a dream in the modern world. Shuyin is an unsent whose emotions kept him in the modern world. Oddly enough though, he was like a ghost instead of a fully materialized unsent that looked like a living, breathing human, like Auron and Maester Mika. And these ghost-like events happen in various side missions like the Crimson Squad spheres. He had a powerful emotion to keep him from going to the Farplane, and instead was looking to destroy Spira. And he was achieving this by possessing living people and controlling them to get Vegnagun to do just that. And all of this is basically so he can save Lenne. And Lenne is basically attached to the Songstress dressphere, and why when Yuna equips it, she is overcome with emotion and breaks into song/dance from time to time. And like Auron said about Maester Jyscal Guado, they died an unclean death, and why they weren't properly sent and had the emotion. It was just intensified to the nth degree. He's not fully a ghost though because you fight him at the very end. And Yuna "brings" Lenne to him by equipping the dressphere and getting Lenne to break free of the sphere so they can finally ride off into the sunset.

Yuna does achieve happiness in the way of getting 2 unsent lovers back together after a thousand years apart. And she squashes a major threat to Spira in the process. And as Dionysos mentioned, there are multiple levels of endings, based on the percentage of the game you complete and such. For the best ending, a fayth appears at some point and offers to do Yuna a solid and let her see Tidus again. The fayth dreams and gets Tidus to materialize again and they spend time together again and go back to Zanarkand (the ruins) again and talk. So in that scenario, she does actually get to see Tidus again, so most happy ending for Yuna. The fayth being to dream again and it's appearance and such is very unexplained and is kind of odd. It's a nice little element and makes you feel good after the sad way it ended for Yuna in the first game, but doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

But as what's been said, blazing through the game doing main missions and skipping the side quests (and there are a lot of them) punishes you in the long run. Yeah, the game does get cheesy at times, but in typical Final Fantasy fashion, the side quests add another element to the game that makes it more fun. And the way they designed this game, it was to be less linear and let you do side exploring very early in the game. These side explorations have effects in future chapters, mostly so in the specific areas you went to. It's easy to just go right to the hot spot, but there is so much more going to the non-hot places. It's necessary for max completion, getting more, cool dresspheres and obviously for bulking up reasons. Sure, some things you do suck and are annoying, but you get a better feel for the overall story and state of Spira if you explore everywhere. It's probably too late to convince you to restart and do more exploring early on, but if you do someday, it's worth it, in my opinion.

 

[Ac1dVenus]

Thank you everyone for all your in depth replies it's really appreciated you took the time out to write them.

I'm not the type to skip stories/cut scenes and I usually go the wrong way on purpose in final fantasy games to try find everything I can. I did all the side quests on FFX and all the weapon upgrades. I feel I need to explain I did that just so you know it's rare I skip so much. But dresspheres aside it's not my favourite battle system and sometimes was just frustrating for me.