[Spoilers, kind of] Characters who are completely different between JP/ENG

[TheMax1087]

This is a massive overstatement, and nothing they have ever said would point to the English localization team having even remotely an equal part...

Koji is literally both the English localization lead and the co-lead world and lore developer. I think that's nearly as equal as you can have. As for saying that nothing they've said indicates it, here's a quote from a dualshockers article from before arr even released

One of the things that they do is instead of making things solely Japanese and then ask us to translate those, they’ll talk with the localization team and collaborate with us to get more western ideas in the game itself. This comes down to things like monster names, monster attacks, place names, item names… these are all conceived by myself and the other members of the English team and we work directly with the world lore planners to come up with these, and then help them translate them back into Japanese.

We make sure that there are stories connected with these as well, so it’s not just random names. There’s a reason why something is called an “Angry Gobbue” — the Gobbue’s angry for a reason. NPCs as well are actually a collaboration between all of the localization team members. For example, the hyur and miqo’te names for NPCs are all done by the English team, the Elzen names are all conceived by the French team, the Lalafell names come from the Japanese team, and the Roegadyn names are a joint effort between the German and English teams and so, again, you have all these aspects of the game that are being created by not just the Japanese side, but also by the localization side as well.

And then, again, a lot of the quests, when we do our translations, we will some times add things — Japanese can be a very vague language — a lot of important information is either cut completely or it’s implied heavily. It can be kind of confusing for western players and readers, so we’ll go in and tweak things to make it a little easier to understand and a little bit clearer. A lot of times the Japanese team will then go back and look at the English translations or the French translations and get ideas on how they can change the Japanese text in turn.

So a lot of stuff that we’ve done actually influenced the Japanese side as well. It’s going back and forth and there’s a lot of communication between us and the team. One of the greatest benefits of working on this project is being able to sit right next to the development team, so any time we have a question or any time they have a question, you just really stand up and walk for five seconds, and right there we’re able to have open communication and work together. I think it really makes the game that much better.