It's ok I guess. It's worth playing at least for the music and how cool it looks. When it tries to be cute it really is, and when it tries to be creepy it manages, specially towards the end. It also has a shit-ton of content for such a small indie game.
However combat balance is somewhat awkward, story progression is completely disjointed from the actual gameplay sections which are really tedious and boring.
I didn't expect to ever say this for this kind of game, but it kinda drags on too much and overstays its welcome. Like I salid, play it if it looks cool enough to you and have 10 hours to spare.

This is not a review of the content added in Royal, but my impressions of my first playthrough of the game. The only SMT game I've played is P4 Golden, and I think the best and worst parts of the game have a lot to do with what it takes from that game.

My favourite part of P5 is how snappy and easy it feels to play. Traveling through the menu and the battle UI is fast and snappy as fuck with really satisfying animations and sound effects to boot. It is barely noticeable but you can skip through a lot of stuff if you mash buttons, but I didn't even need it since it was already so fast. It has a lot of fast travel options compared to P4, fusing personas is much more streamlined, visual and easy, and being able to recruit them is a godsend and what finally sold me in the persona summoning after I barely did it in 4.

Combat is the same, being basically the same as in previous entries but made more attractive. I personally love that demons are used instead of the terribly boring and samey shadows used in P3 and 4. You're also given a lot of cool tools to use like Baton Pass and negotiations.
However it was a bit frustrating at times, especially in the later part of the game. When the enemies have weaknesses combat is trivialized, and if they have no weaknesses and block ailments you often are at a miss about what to do and then enemies feel too tanky. In both those cases battling feels a bit samey and boring. Even having situations like that, the game maybe felt too easy, especially compared to P4 where you could have a TPK if you lowered your guard even one bit. I apprecciate that there weren't as many bullshit HP sponges as in P4's endgame, but Okumura comes a bit close. Dungeons are also not randomly generated which I think is a big improvement, even they are a bit hit-or-miss in their length and design.

For the daily life part of the game, I generally had a lot of fun and really enjoyed it. I feel like there were way too many different things to do that sadly end up at a very low priority vs confidants. I ended up only going to the temple, fishing and to the gym only for a bit in the 3rd semester. Completing confidants is also a little bit too easy since I felt they were available most of the time, and since it's really easy to complete dungeons in 1 day you have way more free time. This is more evident compared to the same situations in P4. As a side note, I also think that sidequests are way better than Mementos requests, which are pretty uninteresting and not very involving.

There is not much that hasn't been already said about the presentation of the game. The visuals are godlike and elevate the game's personality by a lot, and the soundtrack is incredible too. However, I ended up liking most of the daily life part songs, and either adoring or hating most of the dungeon part ones. Futaba's palace design and theme is incredible and Okumura's ones are probably the worst of the game, with the music being particulary obnoxious. It's funny to me that people freak out about this game's soundtrack so much when, despite having some outstanding tracks, P4's sountrack feels overall superior to 5's to me.

For the story, I don't really think that it takes advantage of its urban setting like something like P4 or TWEWY does, for example. The theme of rebellion and the concept of the Phantom Thieves also only feels to work for the prologue and ending of the game, with the motivation and moral implications of the party's actions for most of the game being very questionable. The story as a whole feels like filler at some point and there's barely any progression for the middle part of the game, with every chapter being just an excuse to introduce a new character, which already happened in P4.
Many of P4's tropes appear in 5 completely copy-pasted, like for example the plot twist ally to villain, and being housed by a serious man that slowly warms up to you and a little sister living with you. These tropes are generally better played out in 4 and fall a little flat here. I'd also like to add that even though anime bullshit / shenanigans are of course common in this game, they are really toned down compared to 4, mainly because Ryuji and Morgana are way better and not as annoying as Yosuke and Teddie were in 4.

Now, for the characters, I ended up liking most of the Confidants. They were however not as interesting as they could be, as most of them involve solving a Mementos request and stealing the heart of some "villain" of the character's plotline, with them figuring out your identity at the end. This hurts the pacing and quality of the stories a lot, making them a lot less organic and needing of an external and faceless enemy in most cases, while it's way more interesting to watch the characters develop just from their interactions with you.

Party members are pretty cool in general and I liked all of them a lot, but their writing is really inconsistent and the story suffers a lot from it. Ryuji is extremely cool and likeable in the Kamoshida arc, with just being a bit of an airhead, and then gets progressively dumber, loud and annoying as more characters join the party. Yusuke is somewhat unlikeable and boring in his arc and then he becomes a really cool (in the metaverse and confidant) and funny (in real life and confidant). Makoto is ok but monopolizes a lot of the dialog and every character is made to be too stupid while around her, which hurt them a lot. Futaba is more or less ok, but her development to overcome her anxiety doesn't really work since she behaves like an extrovert most of time and her abilities as a hacker are unusually overpowered and work as a get out of jail card for the characters too many times. Morgana's arc is good in theory but its execution by making Ryuji more of an asshole than he is, and completely ignoring how Morgana's much more of an asshole most of the time leaves much to be desired. Yusuke, Haru and Ann have very little screentime and are underutilized compared to the rest of the cast after their initial appearances. Yoshizawa is ok I guess.

Akechi is a special case, in the sense that I loved every moment he was on-screen and was generally fun, and I like the idea of him being a twist villain. His dynamic with the protagonist and overall demeanour in the 3rd semester is also cool since he doesn't kiss the ground you walk on like the rest of the group. However, I really don't like how his twist is executed, since it's too fast and there's not much development other than showing him being an edgy psychopath, which doesn't work as well as in P4's case. The cast then seems to feel sorry for him despite of being as much, if not more, evil than all of the other villains. Seems like it's ok killing a couple of people if you're not a "rotten adult" and have a sad backstory to boot.

My last thing to say it's about the game's length, which seems to be a detriment for most of the people on the fence on playing this game. I feared it would drag on for too much but I end up enjoying the game all through and not wanting it to end for a moment after 130 hours. It's true that the game only "seems" too end one too many times and has too many points where every confidant you maxed has to say something or every party member has to reiterate its development in another final (or is it?) scene, but it was overall very fun.

Really good game in general, and it just has to be if it can make me play for that long and not feel bored by it. It saddens me that it could have been so much better especially in the story and characters department but it's still amazing.