For FFXIV, I came up with the name Wilan solely based on phonetics.
My old nick was in english, but most of my friends (I'm from Italy) used to spell it wrong, and everytime it hurted my ears D: So when I put together Wilan I tried to make a name that sounded more or less the same in every language I knew of (check for italian, english, spanish, japanese, not completely sure about german and french) while still sounding nice enough.

As for the surname, Serulia, it does have some kind of meaning, as it comes from Cerulean, like the shade of blue's name, being blue my favourite color.


My chocobo instead is called Tilaridz, which is a slight variation of Tilarids, an old runic incision on an ancient spearhead, one of the earliest discoveries of futhark runes. The incision is speculated to be the name of the spear itself (among other hypothesis), meaning "the one which goes straight to the goal". Since my original plan of calling my chocobo Aria (Air in italian) was screwed up when I found out it was a male, I had to think of another name quickly, and Tilaridz sounded very appropriate for a Chocobo.