There is so much text in that game oh my god.
I have to confess I hadn't really explored much of the Japanese script site I linked to, because as mentioned a lot of it is covering game mechanics in excruciating detail, and I have no context for or interest in much of it.
With your post here, I checked out some of the links that aren't directly part of the MSQ dialogue, such as the link labelled "Rumours Chapter 1", and the sound I made upon being faced with
walls of kanji text may have an eerie resemblance to a death rattle.
I can't be certain that it is, but at the very least Google Ngram shows no use of the word until the 1980s, and Wikipedia has as its earliest appearance a line from a 1950 fantasy novel, so it seems likely. Notably "sellsword" displays a particular feature called the English exocentric compound; there are compound words that reverse the traditional noun+verb order typical to English. For instance, you would say a traffic light, not a light-traffic; yet there's a set number of words that were brought in by Norman contact and which remain in English which reverse this relationship: pickpocket, cutthroat, killjoy, turncoat.
It's pretty fascinating, even as a layman with minimal knowledge about linguistics. The example I was shown was "swashbuckler", as opposed to "buckle-swashers".
Is this the first instance of making direct reference to Garland, or at least a skewed version of his name? Either way, it becomes much more common from here on out.
Difficult to say. Garland is ガーランド, and Gariland is ガリランド. The initial long "Gaa" (which gets correctly transliterated as "Gar") becomes standard-length "Gari", so it really is just a difference of one kana, but I have no idea if this is a deliberate reference, because there are only so many syllables and katakana to represent them, and FFT (and Final Fantasy in general) is full of fantasy names. There's a decent to high chance it's all a coincidence.
The objectively correct decision, that storyline sucked. Probably the worst of all the ARs story-wise (only contender is the Nier ones but really did anyone care about their story?)
For an anecdotal comparison, I'm the sort of player who dives deep into the lore of settings, and FFXIV is one such setting where I consume as much lore as I can, including whatever incidental dialogue from inconsequential NPCs might give even a fraction of a percent of insight into the world.
I got through the Return To Ivalice raids, reading every line carefully, despite being indifferent at best to the Ivalice setting. I haven't gone through the Bozja content yet, mainly because it's another iteration of the FFXI/Everquest formula of "grind critters in the overworld until level up", but I'm planning to do so, again despite my antipathy towards both Ivalice and the gameplay style of Bozja/Eureka.
I
completely tapped out with the Nier raids. Some time during the dialogue and cutscenes at the second raid (Puppet's Bunker), I realized I was putting myself through something I didn't care about
at all just in case there was a tiny speck of relevance to the rest of FFXIV's setting. So I skipped through the dialogue and cutscenes, and just skimmed through summaries other people wrote up. And as far as I can tell, I missed nothing of importance or relevance.
Thus, the Ivalice raids in FFXIV are not the worst storyline in FFXIV, because the Nier raids exist.
