Sometimes you just have to disappear for a month and play an Extremely long video game. In summary - I loved Persona 5 Royal and its many many flaws

Let's get the worst out of the way - I do think the game undermines a lot of its own messages/themes by being unable to break away from certain tropes or cheap gags. The first Arc of the game deals with a teacher that uses their position of power to sexually harrass students. However, four different romantic options are adults also in a position of power while the character you control is a minor. The adult characters also acknowledge Joker being underage if you romance them, and some basically have a line of dialogue that's like "welp guess I'm a pedophile now!" which was certainly Something. The other thing is, I myself am an adult and the adult characters are actually pretty great but I couldn't help but feel just kinda skeeved by the whole thing - especially when I don't think the game would lose anything by making our protagonists college students or whatever. I also think it's made worse by Persona's romance options being Very hetero centric and listen before you give me shit for saying that, imagine if the writing team had one extremely unhinged fujoshi on it - that shit would go SO fucking hard, like Joker and Akechi's dynamics are already one of the best parts of this game...... basically it's just a bit silly that a minor dating their teacher was an option before dating your male best friend right? Plus Government Mandated Homophobic/Transphobic Persona Scene would be scrapped

But anyway - P5R is a very long game, split up into multiple gameplay sections. You have preset story moments, the dungeons and the life sim aspects. All of it generally flows pretty well, although I wasn't the biggest fan of Mementos which are minor side quests in a randomly generated dungeon. That was definitely pretty dull at points and could've had the number of floors reduced. In regards to the life sim aspects, I never felt like I didn't have anything to do (besides the last week or so of January where I COULD NOT FUCKING FIND LIKE HALF THE CHARACTERS AAA). I really liked the side stories of characters like Iwai, Yoshida and so on. The palaces/dungeons are....fine? Even though I never needed more than one ingame day to get through them, I still thought a few of them felt a bit too long

I do think Persona's combat has more depth to it than other turn based combat games but still never feels super challenging outside of the Okumura boss fight, which is a huge difficult spike that demands a lot more strategy and planning than any other fight that comes before it. I think the game could've preppred you better for this one - maybe make the difficult increase more gradual instead of a sudden hit to the face

In terms of presentation, it's almost flawless. The soundtrack is great and the stylish UI is literally infamous. The voice acting, character potraits and anime cutscenes get no complaints from me either - it all combines together to make a really expressive experience

Also, I will say - I think the Royal content is what really brought everything together for me, and honestly kinda where a lot of aspects peak. The characters and extra development it brings are just SO damn good, after feeling a bit mixed by the base game's final arc