LogFAQs > #975993398

The style and flourish of Persona 5 helps an incredibly long game to not start to drag at the extent P3 and P4 can.

It's not my opinion that Persona 4 is any "tighter" than P5. For one thing, basically all of the Shadow character arcs reinforce timid and conservative ideas of how human beings work, and several use LGBT identity as an absurd and extreme appearance that the protagonists are thankful to realize they don't actually feel like. The killer is interesting in how much they resemble today's online misogyny, but they get the spotlight stolen from them by uninteresting gods. The story may be a "slow burn", but as a murder mystery, that burn is underdeveloped and formulaic.

Meanwhile Persona 5 Royal has by far the most interesting character writing of its antagonists in the series. It wisely finally allows a human final boss to breathe and stand on their own without a "I think humans want me to kill them" god breathing down their neck. I think the one thing P4/G has over Royal is that the former is better at spending time to show the main friend group as actually being friends first before investigators.