This frequency of English localization issues is unacceptable

[Lauront]

Do you genuinely think there's no oversight on the localization, and that the localization team is actually able to just write whatever they like and change things as much as they like without it being looked at, especially given there are vastly more English speaking players than there are any other offered language?

Unless they are performing comparisons between versions, as is the case here, what difference would that make, pray tell? How would they even know? The same even goes for the lead writers in a different sense - if they are not fluent in the target language, and are reliant to some degree on what the localisers are telling them is the case ("yes it lands better this way in English"), how would they even really know that the differences are causing either (subtle) omissions or tonal/characterisation differences? So the question is, what does this oversight even amount to?

They convey the exact same message in your examples....

EN
Yet I daresay Fandaniel still wanders the aetherial sea. As do ancients who gave rise to Zodiark, setting in motion so many cataclysmic events...
If there is a justice or morality at work that governs our fates, I do not know it. Nor do I think any man ever will.

Near as I can tell, the translation of this dialog is:

JP
On the other hand, the souls of Fandaniel and the the souls of the ancients who made up Zodiark he hijacked have drifted to the sea of stars.
I'm not trying to argue about whether it's good or bad. I'm just trying to argue the facts.

The bolded is not the same, particularly due to this: "setting in motion so many cataclysmic events...". In fact, the subsequent phrase does not even read the same way with the insertion of that phrase. The intention here appears to be to set up a contrast between the two (Fandaniel the hijacker vs the ancients who tried to save their world through Zodiark) but it's phrased very awkwardly (whether by intention or not) and instead seems to be blaming them for said "cataclysmic events", when really, they preceded Zodiark. If you want to pretend it's the same, go ahead, but it really isn't.

It does seem the English localization team takes more creative liberty than the French / German localizations with the argument that "localization is not literal translation, and the importance is to attune the content to what fits local tastes."
As one who is fluent in Japanese and English, I always just play in Japanese text / voice acting because the issue is beyond simple "tuning of content" and clearly seems to be influenced by erroneous interpretation by the localization team.
I have done some localization in the past, but it is clear there doesn't seem to be any effort to correlate information between the different localizations -- we may as well call these different games. Different plot, different spell names, silly equipment names, etc.

It's a shame, because Ishikawa seems to think they are the same but it's clearly not the case, to varying degrees of subtlety.