The Gridanians speak of a calamity. The land is slow to heal, and their troubles weigh heavy on them. And yet they took me in.
The humble beginnings of our adventure in XIV are, IMO, more striking once you know more of the story (which, at least for me, happened like a full year after I started playing, because up until then I just made zero effort to absorb anything, but gosh when I finally caught on, it got into me good). The early game tells us that things were awful; as we delve into the game and its lore, we learn both how they got to be so awful and come to feel how awful they really were; if we return to the early game, we now have a better grasp of the scale of the horror. [*] Once you have a bit more of the weight of how desperately badly things had gone, the effect in the early (early) game of all the NPCs still talking as if the Calamity had just happened feels not just more ~believable~ but also more terrible.
All of which then contextualizes how kind everyone is to us. For Éliane, I leaned really heavily into the whole canonical amnesia thing (her chosen surname when she needed to sign up for the adventurer's guild was Mnemosyne), and coming into all the early game with this mindset of someone who is at least a little confused and completely resourceless was nearly overwhelming with how supportive the NPCs are.
In light of that, a lot of my reflection on this run so far (I just finished SB the other day, so I have all of 4.2 onwards still to go) has been about how the WoL's continual canonical choice to keep stepping up when someone needs to step up is...a beautiful reflection, back to all the people of Eorzea, of the love and care they gave to us.
(It is extra especially overwhelming when Éliane learns what it means that she is Garlean.)
There's a lot in ShB and EW that people point to as overt expressions of love and concern for the WoL and, in a sense, the player ourself. But it has been really neat to also see it there from the beginning. (Which ties into one of my Central FFXIV Opinions, which is that a lot of the beautiful success of EW is how solidly in-line it is, thematically, with the emotional and moral experiences throughout the game leading up to it.)
What are other things that more context/foreknowledge has really changed for you, if you've replayed (or gone in knowing about something in advance)?
[*] Disclaimer: all of this commentary is about how a Watsonian, or in-universe, perspective has impacted my experience as a player. I'm not trying to guess at the devs' intentions or methods.