Well, after over 130 hours of Persona 5 Royal, I've finally beaten it. After all those hours of fighting, exploring, fusing, grinding for confidants, and exploring mementos, the question remains: Was it worth it?

For the price? Yes. For the experience? No. Hate me if you must, but that's how I feel.

While I did like the gameplay, it's mechanics, and [i]most[/i] of its story, there are a few problems I had with it.
[hider=Spoilers ahead]
For starters, the game goes on for [i]way to long.[/i] and a lot of that time is spent doing nothing but waiting around for something to happen. And the DLC certainly didn't help either. It felt like padding on top of padding throughout a lot of the game. It also didn’t help that at the end of these long, drawn out arcs, nothing even happens. Like the school trip. Nothing of note happens there, it just felt like a waste of time to me. We hung out, did absolutely nothing, and then went back home. None of the characters grew, we didn’t get anything cool, we didn't get a chance to raise any of our stats. It was basically an hour long cutscene of nothing happening. Same with Morgana's tantrum. It comes completely out of nowhere, and by the end, it's as if nothing even happened. It introduced possibly the most underwhelming character in Haru, and just made Morgana seem like even more of a whiny crybaby. He shits on Ryuji the whole game, then the second the group finds someone who specializes in navigation, and gets poked fun at like twice, he's suddenly super depressed and irate. Another problem I had found was the fusing. At first, it was cool, but after a while, once you have your team of personas all figured out, it basically becomes useless. I don’t need half of these guys because all my personas do the exact same thing. And that's not including the DLC personas which basically make the game a joke. Half of the third trimester I just remember looking lustfully at Izanagi-no-Okami Picaro just so I could finally get this game over with. 

Also, I don't know about you, but I felt Yoshizawa was practically useless. I get they needed a way to tie in Maruki to the party to make it personal, but I felt like her whole reveal could've been seen from a mile away. And the whole metaverse being brought back felt kinda weird. Don't really know how else they would have done it, but it felt a little forced to me. My opinion on Will Seeds varies from dungeon to dungeon. Some felt like a nice reward for exploring, others felt like you had to jump through a few too hoops to get to. (See the Okumura dungeon) Speaking of, that's another nitpick I have. Some of these dungeons felt like they went on forever just due to annoying gimmicks or weird level design. Either way, maybe if the game was like 40 hours shorter, with a bunch of the padding cut out, it could have been better, but for now I'm giving the game like a 6/10. Decent, but could be better.[/hider] 

As for now, I've started playing Persona 5 Strikers. I'm only about 2 hours in, and so far, the one thing that's really been bugging me is the load times. They're like 20 seconds long. What's up with that? Other than that it's seemed pretty standard persona stuff so far. Maybe that'll change in the future. I do appreciate the Dynasty Warriors gameplay style so far, but we'll see if that changes too.