I like how everyone's arguing about "distractions" like their attention span is shorter than that of a gerbil.
Anyone who argue that either X or XIII offered an adequate amount of exploration are delusional. FFX's "side-quests" mostly involved:
a) Things you pick up as you play through the game
or
b) Return to an old location and, hey, new monster! Let's kill it!
Granted, that's MUCH more than XIII can offer, but saying X wasn't linear is pretty much wrong.
And both the Calm Lands and Gran Pulse were obscenely annoying to traverse, and both the missions from XIII and the monster arena from X were pretty pointless and lazy ways to extend the playtime of the "has-to-do-absolutely-everything" type of player.
