Started Persona 5 Royal - currently into mid-point of 2nd palace.
The game's mechanics is quite a bit different from the vanilla 5 - especially the flow of battles. For some reason, enemies seem to be quite strong against physical damages - so battles seem to drag out a bit. But on the positive side, you really get to plan each battle to do the "baton touch" and use the guns, but it has made a bit difficult to go into the negotiation phase in certain cases for me - mostly because I am trying to save SP. At first, I was a bit confused because it felt quite a bit different from how I was playing P4G and P5, and actually pretty struggled to finish the 1st palace in 1 day, mostly due to the fact due to SP shortage early on, and felt a bit discouraged how poorly I was performing against even low-level enemies.
But I think I understand the rhythm of the battle now a bit better... and I am having fun doing battles and trying out different tactics (not just finding out their weakness) - but at the same time, it slows down the pace of each battles and makes each palace feeling more dragged out - especially with new expansions and tweaks that were done in the palace. To be fair, though, that's because it's technically my 3rd playthru of the same story/castle as I platinummed the P5 already a couple years back - and albeit new elements and new areas are indeed nice - it's my own motivation. Would have loved to switch my brain with my pre-P5 brain.
And since I'm early the game, honestly the story is making me feel little bored because I know it already. To Atlus' credit, they did add quite a bit of tweaks here and there to add some meat to the story, or how the characters thought of certain incident more in depth - which I appreciate, but not quite enough to really made me feel adventurous all over again. However, to be fair, I don't think such feat is possible unless you re-write the whole thing from the start up... Also musically, while it's still excellent - not sure if I'm digging some of the newer ones like I did the original P5.
My biggest gripe for this game though, is its graphics. I remember P5 being one of the greatest looking game that I played - perhaps because it was one of my first game since my break from gaming for nearly 5-6 years - I was blew away by its UI and art direction. I am, still blown away by how stylishly it's laid out, but it's more about how it graphically performs on my PS5. Maybe because I was just playing nearly 250 hrs of DQ XI s on Game Pass, which gave me a good 60fps performance - perhaps I was expecting 60fps goodness on P5R as well. After all, P5 is a PS3 game... and the actual graphics, not the art style, reminded me of that. Certainly not the feeling I was expecting when I'm playing late PS4 game, to be honest. My eyes are getting used to going back down to 30fps... but I also have issues of its collision detection (like the ledges or laser traps etc) that are a bit too sensitive - as Joker tends to move in "strides".
Also what bothers me is its somewhat narrow FOV, that's also been narrower by the hazy/glitters. I did notice the same on P5, but it didn't bother me as much back then - but I wonder if they actually made it even more pronounced - or perhaps it's because it just feels that way, again, because I was playing DQ XIS - which offers quite clean screen throughout. I just wish that they could tone down that glitter just a bit (even though I know they are there to enhance the feel of "metaverse"), and perhaps widen the FOV, so that my movement doesn't feel inhibited... or at least give me an option to turn off some of the HUD elements which are so big and chunky - or make them smaller. Those takes up quite a bit of real estate in the game screen - especially in the palace - when I'm constantly looking for treasures to loot.
But already logged in already a couple dozen hours into the game, in just few days I've been playing it.
So far my encounter with the new characters have been nothing more than formal introduction - looking forward to playing their stories... as well as the slew of new challenges and things to fill out. (like the thieves den, etc - which I haven't really touched at all..)