Spoiler Free

Adding a disclaimer here that I unconsciously compare every game I play's story to Persona 3. To me, Persona 3 was probably one of the greatest and most meaningful games I've ever played, so you'll probably see a lot of comparisons to it throughout this. If you haven't played it, just know that that game is on the top of my games tier list.

Characters:
Ok first off I just want to say this game has a truly amazing cast of characters. Honestly the social link characters from this game are on par, if not better, than FeMC Persona 3 social links. All the playable characters were great, honestly there wasn't a single one I didn't like. I think the game did a really good job of making each of the characters relatable in their own way. The leveling of all characters also helped with this. (In this game, each of your team members levels regardless of who is in your party at the time which makes each character a viable team member at any point in the game). What I mean by that is, you never really forget about any of the characters because you're always trying to optimize a team for whatever dungeon you're in. In Persona 4 for example, I went into the game knowing that I was going to use Yukiko, Teddie, and Kanji as my main team and basically never considered the options for anyone else. This lead me to forget about characters such as Yosuke, and put them on the back burner per se. Of course, Yosuke was brought up again in the plot, but he became a very forgettable character for me because I saw him and used him in the beginning, but never really after that. This is just an example, but it happened for me for a lot of the characters in Persona 4. Unless you were really focusing on a character, it was pretty easy to forget they existed. In Persona 5, I used the team members who you get at the very beginning even at the very end. This was a super tiny detail, but just hearing their catchphrases when they went to attack reminded me "Oh yeah, I love this dude."
As a side note, the main characters is hot. In fact, all of the characters are incredibly well designed.

Gameplay:
The gameplay is pretty typical of a standard Persona game. The demon negotiation from Persona 2 was brought back, but imo it's much easier in Persona 5 than in Persona 2. It makes it quite easy to complete the compendium as opposed to having to go collect Arcana cards. The game is starving for SP items, a little like Persona 4, but worse. I had a lot of trouble with running out of SP in the beginning of the game, but eventually you can find yourself some items to make it a bit easier. In this game, everyone has a gun, whereas in past games the gun would be an attack item for certain playable characters. The gun is interesting, so I'll save that for when you play. The map felt really big, but after finishing the game and thinking about it, it probably wasn't much larger than 4's map. I think that the map is probably one of the best parts of the game, though. It made my experience much more immersive than in past games.

UI:
This isn't really a section I needed to include but wow the UI is so stylish and awesome!! I love it. Huge improvement from 3 and 4.

Other:
Don't play the minigames. They suck.
I also thought the music was super lackluster. The songs didn't have much variety in beats, and though the vocals were good, every song kind of felt about the same to me. Most disappointing part of the game for me.

Story:
Of course it's kind of hard to go into my main thoughts on the game without including any story spoilers, but I will say it was a very solid game overall. If you can and if you feel the same way about Persona 3, I would try not to compare it to Persona 3 as much as possible. I won't say too much, but you're not going to ever get an SMT ending out of Persona again, most likely. I think that Persona 5 did a really good job on fixing the flaws that Persona 4 had.

TLDR:
The game is most definitely not flawless, but if you found yourself dissatisfied with Persona 3's gameplay and/or Persona 4's story then I think you will find yourself very satisfied with this game. I wouldn't recommend it as a game to start the series with, I still would recommend P3P or P4 to start with. I think that if you play those first, you will appreciate Persona 5, and the series as a whole much more. However, I would definitely add this game to your list of games you need to play, no matter what.