Existential crisis here

[Iscah]

Like I said earlier, the game files mostly show the Garleans as being elezens with a custom head. Eula/Nael and Maxima don't even have custom faces and instead have legit wildwood heads with a third eye and hyur ears. Gaius, Solus, and Nero are considered to be elezen according to the game files, but they have completely custom heads. Zenos and Varris are the only completely custom Garleans that have their own body.

Maxima has a custom face, as far as I can tell. Elezen don't look like he does.

It's possible that it's a "borrowed" face model from another race rather than made from scratch, but I can't recognise it.

Yeah, it was more the "Nael is an elezen with a third-eye, so Garleans can be all the races just with a third-eye" implication that I was questioning. Garleans in general appear to be very tall, hence using elezen animations; I don't think that implies Nael was an elezen, nor that any others are.

Pureblood Garleans appear to pretty much entirely resemble Hyur, albeit with a much greater average height and with the echolocation-y third eye. (There are exceptions; I believe that Jenomis cen Lexentale and our beloved friend Cid use Hyur bodies and animation rigs, even though both are purebloods and have the third eye.)

There are two elements to this.

At a world-building concept level, Garleans are a distinct Hyur-like race with the third eye.

At a game level, because there is no "Garlean NPC model", they appropriate both Hyur and Elezen models equally when building Garlean characters.

Garleans don't use Elezen animations because they're tall; they're tall because Elezen models were used to build the characters. It's just the head (including the ears) that is custom, and the standard Garlean armour is built to hide the lanky Elezen proportions. Compare Nero or Maxima's apparent build wearing their heavy armour to later in civilian clothes that are more directly Elezen-proportioned, just with some modification around the neck to hide where they merge.

I did a comparison a while back between Nero and my Elezen character wearing the same coat. You can see the coat model has been altered slightly to fit him.