Best Atlus game yet. Easy 8.5/10 from me and an enthusiastic recommendation.
It doesn't hit the stratospheric highs of Persona 5 Royal, but it has a much higher average. Metaphor rarely feels like it's being padded or you're slogging through social sim stuff like Persona 5 often does, and combat in Metaphor is *dramatically* better than in Persona 5 and, for the most part, SMT 5 as well. The game's narrative uses "utopia" as its keyword, and it also involves "anxiety" as well.
All party members and major NPCs are pretty well fleshed out, and unlike the Persona games, your omnipresent navigator NPC isn't an annoying sex pest and is instead a pretty well designed character in her own right. Gallica is appreciated, rather than grudgingly tolerated.
Metaphor doesn't use the dyad fusion gimmick of the other megaten games, instead opting for "archetypes," which are essentially just Final Fantasy jobs with a different name. All characters can perform all jobs (although you need to spend a currency to unlock them), but each character has specific stat growths that mean they'll be better-served performing some tasks rather than others.
Affinities are simplified in Metaphor, having only the four classical elements plus light and dark, along with the three physical damage types; no Nuke or anything like that, and no weaknesses or resistances to afflictions. You can instead get resistances or immunities from equipment. Each job has its own set of affinities, often improving as you progress down that job's lineage path from basic to elite, and the Masked Dancer line also inherits affinities based on the mask accessory equipped.
Unlike other megaten games, the protagonist being KO'd isn't game over, and Light and Dark skills no longer have an inherent OHKO property. Specific Light and Dark typed skills possess OHKO potential, such as the Thief line's Dark-typed Assassinate skill, but your basic Hama and Mudo skills don't.
It still has its fair share of balance and design issues. Casually, Metaphor is probably the best-balanced megaten game I've played, but if you stumble across or learn about "the meta," it might be the worst-balanced. The game uses the typical SMT Press Turn system, and misses cost an additional turn while criticals reward an additional one. Since missing and critting are generally left to blind RNG, this results in combats often being very RNG-heavy, and makes evasion/crit dramatically more valuable than raw ATK/DEF per-point. Certain skills, abilities, and items are obscenely overpowered when combined and you'll find even the hardest bosses to be pushovers if you learn about these combinations or just stumble across them organically.
These reasons and more are why the game is "merely" an 8.5 instead of 9 or higher. Atlus has been around long enough, and there has been enough activity in the turn-based RPG and JRPG space that I don't think these flaws are really justifiable anymore. Some balance issues are acceptable but the ones in Metaphor are really, really bad and dramatically alter perceived difficulty if the player becomes aware of them. Some job lines like Mage and Brawler are also drastically weaker than other comparable lines, especially since they are plot-limited in progression whereas the other job lines (which are also just generally stronger!) are limited only by your social stats and how often you want to invest time in that particular social link.
All that said, Metaphor does also introduce some very nice QoL changes from P5 and SMT5, and overall the quality of Metaphor has me cautiously optimistic about Persona 6. Granted, P6 is a different team, but I'm assuming that the different Atlus teams *do* communicate with each other and share ideas.
