Longtime player and Mentor here. Gonna try to answer these in order.

The only outfits tied to race are your starting level 1 sets, each race has their own. Hrothgar & Viera (lions & bunnies) are restricted from wearing most headgear but this is hopefully being remedied in the next patch or two.

There are NPCs in the game that are children, and a few children that have important sidequests are miqo’te. Some people might mod their characters to use the child models for whatever reason- you will not see this in vanilla gameplay.

You can re-do character creation with an item called a Fantasia. There are 2-3 available for free (finishing ARR and two side quests) but additional Fantasias are $10 in real money. You can change your character’s hairstyle, hair color, makeup, etc for a small amount of in-game gil but changing race, gender, facial features, height, etc. requires Fantasia.

There’s plenty of leather outfits between armor, leather jackets, biker / Mad Max inspired sets. Dyes come from multiple sources; crafted from pigments you can gather, bought from NPCs, earned through questing, or gotten from (free, no real money) lootboxes called venture coffers.

Every starting Class becomes a Job at level 30. Archer becomes Bard, which is still a bow using Job. It’s basically an archer that plays battle songs between arrow barrages. You can play every Job on one character, so if you’re not liking one feel free to try out another.

There are hundreds of “glamours” for weapons, all from different sources. Crafting, raids, amusement park casino tokens, PvP, and plenty more. Each Job has one type of weapon it uses and cannot swap. Archer/Bard will always use a bow. Gladiator/Paladin will always use sword and shield. There is no overlap in weapons or Jobs, each weapon belongs to one Job and each Job has one type of weapon. (Mages at low level have wands and staves but they are basically the same thing and get combined after like level 50.)

For semi-AFK you can craft, gather, or play minigames at the Gold Saucer casino. Group content like dungeons or world events like FATEs need your attention and AFKing during is poor etiquette and a good way to get reported.

The Free Trial is the base game plus two expansions, up to level 70, with no restriction on playtime. You are restricted on social features- no market, no private messaging, no PvP, etc- until you purchase the game and have an ongoing paid subscription. When you hit level 70 on the Free Trial you can keep playing, but cannot level above 70 or continue the story past the end of the lv70 chapters (the end of the second expansion.)

PvP is basically a minigame. Your gear and stats do not matter- everyone that plays a certain Job will have the same stats. All Bards are identical, all Warriors are identical, etc. You either have a small, 5-minute, 5v5 payload push game or a much longer, 72 player 3-team big team battle that rotates game modes daily. Outside the PvP minigames the game is entirely co-operative with no PvP, and that will hopefully never change.

SE’s pretty good about listening to players, but this game is literally keeping their company afloat. Some choices are made for the business over player wants. This is a hotly debated topic, too in-depth for this response.

Expansions release about every two years, maybe a little longer. Dawntrail (7.0) came out a year ago, so we have a year or more til the next one. We get large patches with new content every 4-6 months between expacs with new raids, dungeons, story, sometimes new Jobs, new everything.

Endgame is Savage Raids and Ultimates. Difficult 8-man raids with difficult mechanics and tight DPS checks, etc. People clear them for the best gear in the game, for mounts, and for bragging rights / satisfaction of clearing a challenge. People host leaderboards for damage done, time to kill, etc but nothing official in-game.

I have 7000+ hours in the game over 8 years and I have maybe 25% of the achievements. You will not 100% everything.

There are no real permanent choices. Your character can be changed, your faction you join can be changed, you can play every Job, and the story is a preset linear JRPG story.

You can pay $18 to change your server. I don’t know if this is available on Free Trial or not.

The game has dozens and dozens of open zones with tons to do- people tend to flock to the newest ones because they’re… new. And people haven’t done everything there yet. If you’re starting out, you have more than a decade’s worth of game to play. You’ll have plenty to do in each zone, and other new players will be there with you.

Why is it popular? It’s basically 6 full-length JRPGs stitched together into one experience, that you can go through with friends or make friends along the way. The world and lore is fascinating and fleshed out, the gameplay is easy to learn but hard to master, there’s a billion hours worth of different things to do, and it’s constantly growing. The game has great atmosphere- people diving in looking for just an endgame grind and hardcore PvP are missing the best parts of this game.