!Thancred!< should have stayed dead in Endwalker, I will die on this hill

It can be played almost entirely single player from the beginning now, and the story is really good after ARR (which is serviceable for setting up the world).

There is also a free trial that goes through Stormblood (the second expansion) so you can try without paying anything

Crowd Control, it comes from video games mostly where people would shorthand things to quickly communicate.

The armor looks like it's Caeda's from Fire Emblem. https://fireemblemwiki.org/wiki/Caeda