I was concerned about that. Here's where I'm personally torn... I got P5 launch steelbook near launch years ago. I opened it, ready to play it. Life happened and it went in a backlog of games. Now that P5R is out, I skipped it because I don't double dip on games I own, especially since I had already opened my original copy. I'd probably buy P5R if I didn't open mine, leaving my first copy in my sealed games pile.
What is so drastic in the QOL department, not including any DLC/expansions?
As noted, you aren't forced to go to sleep nearly as much and waste time that could be used in the evenings for more useful things like ranking up confidants, or doing an activity like darts, pool, or going to a jazz club to boost up stats. (there's other activities, but darts, pool, and jazz club aren't even available to do in regular version).
In Royal, you're actually able to go out and do things at night after visiting a palace or mementos and aren't forced to sleep so long as you when you've ranked up one confidant with an ability to give you a massage.
In the original, once you used up gun ammo in a palace, you're out until you return and come back another day, which made guns pretty useless. In Royal, they reload after every battle.
Baton pass is available immediately, which allows when you hit an enemy's weakness to pass the next turn to a party member who can hit another enemy's weakness and so on, while boosting up the damage, and eventually after passing through enough party members, lets skills to be used without costing any SP. Baton pass makes the battles flow a lot quicker and easier.
Mementos, which is an dungeon area with randomly generated floors used to have the most godawful music and was the most bland-looking area. In Royal the music and look change up every 6 levels or so, and there's more useful items to gain from going there, so I didn't avoid it like the plague like I did in the original.
There's other improvements, but by far, these were the ones that I appreciated the most.
That’s the consensus I keep reading. Am I correct in that it also reduces grinding in the game as well?
I played on normal difficulty and there was absolutely no need to grind. There is one specific boss with a boss midway through Royal I had trouble with, and thought maybe I was underl-eveled, since I'd got impatient and avoided a lot of regular enemies at that point to get to the boss, but it turns out the solution was changing the difficulty to merciless (counter-intuitive, I know). After that the boss was simple. I actually forgot to change the difficulty setting back and didn't have much of any trouble I can recall playing the rest of the game.
