2024 Rising's absurdly specific backstory pull

[Cleretic]

So once I had this pointed out to me I couldn't get it out of my head, so I want to share it here where people might not be aware of it:

In 1.0, retainers weren't player-created; there was a pool of them, with about five NPCs for each clan-gender-home city combo. There's a still-extant list of those retainers' names, although it's hard to confirm its accuracy, and they've been reused for a bunch of NPCs in the live game--although again, with it being hard to confirm info from 1.0, it's hard to tell if it's a reused name or supposed to actually be the same person. That list is here, put alongside where that NPC (or at least that NPC's name) is now. It's a few expansions old, so it marks a few names as 'missing' that have turned up, but even that does show the devs were mining this list for a while, albeit often for characters that couldn't possibly be those retainers; a few prominent names include Ejika Tsujinka, Gegeruju who now owns Costa Del Sol, M'naago from the Stormblood MSQ, all of Edda's ill-fated party...

And Ayoyo, from this year's Rising quests.

And unlike the uncertainties or 'there's no way they intended that' with a lot of the others in that list, this one's definitely the intention: in one of the post-quest conversations you can have, the head chef of the Bismarck tells you that Ayoyo was, in fact, a retainer for someone who got hit with the Warrior of Light memory-wipe disappearance.

I actually suspect there are more of those retainer NPCs in the event quest, too; I can't review the quest right now because nobody's logged its dialog or recorded most of it, but I do remember that Swozblaet, who's also in that list, was one of the people we talked to!