Very mixed bag of a game. Gameplay is extremely fun, music is nice for the most part. Characters are fine personally, but compared to say 2/3 the characters' development for a majority of them are locked behind Social Links. Haru, someone who is locked between poor screentime, has a good arc of finding herself that's only wittin the short time of her Social Link, to say Makoto who sort of hijacks the preceding characters voices, and her Social Link doesn't really reflect the games themes in hers as she realizes she wants to be a cop. For a mainstream game, its main fault is being unable to say anything truly radical, and it touts itself as something revolutionary with true change at times which made my eyes roll because the issues prevalent in society continue and aren't truly addressed. Others have already mentioned the sexualization of (let's be honest all of the girls), the somewhat poor taste of slapstick comedy routine that they utilize Ryuji and Morgana with. So while they were fine, I don't feel much towards them compared to SEES. It's more like there's groups within a group that is the Phantom Thieves, and I somewhat enjoy the roadtrip ending more than AkiRen going home. Keeping one of the end bosses the right wing leader of the LDP and getting to beat him up was good though. 3rd semester content that was added to Royal was solid, but you have to go through the middling section of the base game, which starts off strong before it falls off.

Character Spoilers
I'm glad they added a lot of new Akechi stuff, Maruki is a fantastic twist to Joker/AkiRen's character, and I did like Yoshizawa a lot despite her screentime. I think despite the game's less than stellar translation, the English voice acting carried the localization.

While the game itself had a lot of potential that it failed to deliver, I still ultimately liked it a lot. Akechi (and Joker, he has a lot of set personality despite having character controlled texts) has solidified as one of my favourite characters of all time. I have to commend him, if I was Akechi Goro and wanted to destroy the entire government system and capitalism saw my rival and his team being turned into Gacha lure I too would leave and fuck off into the alternative of the unknown.