Interesting Detail About Grani

[Cleretic]

With how prone XIV is to reusing models without attaching any context to it I feel disinclined to assume anything unless it's explicitly stated or hinted at in-game.

In a lot of cases I'd agree (I do love the occasional bouts of reused-skeleton-spotting), but this one's weirdly specific. They very deliberately used Grani over any other mount in the game, the mount that was explicitly tied to 'his' expansion. And it's not even that it really fits him all that closely as far as visuals go in that cutscene; it's significantly more ornate and colorful than he is, it would've fit him better to have something like the megalotragus or black pegasus. I don't know exactly why they picked Grani, but I bet there was an actual reason.

What I'd want to see to really start figuring that out, though, is a more direct translation of the Japanese description. Not that I think the English translation is meaningless or anything, but it's been prone to getting a bit wild with mount and minion descriptions before, albeit mostly for jokes, so if you really want to build up Grani as important it'd be good to see what the original text was saying to be a bit more certain.

[SentioftheHoukai]

In a lot of cases I'd agree (I do love the occasional bouts of reused-skeleton-spotting), but this one's weirdly specific. They very deliberately used Grani over any other mount in the game, the mount that was explicitly tied to 'his' expansion. And it's not even that it really fits him all that closely as far as visuals go in that cutscene; it's significantly more ornate and colorful than he is, it would've fit him better to have something like the megalotragus or black pegasus. I don't know exactly why they picked Grani, but I bet there was an actual reason.

What I'd want to see to really start figuring that out, though, is a more direct translation of the Japanese description. Not that I think the English translation is meaningless or anything, but it's been prone to getting a bit wild with mount and minion descriptions before, albeit mostly for jokes, so if you really want to build up Grani as important it'd be good to see what the original text was saying to be a bit more certain.

Funny, I recall Emet-Selch being significantly colorful in his Hades forme (a.k.a. his true self according to the Hermes transformation dialogue/explanation we bore witness to in Elpis) so I'd argue Grani fits his chosen color palette perfectly. A minor nitpick, to be sure but I personally felt it bore stating.