Damn.... so.. I guess I need to play Persona 5?
I played the original Person on the PSX, but .. wondering if you can explain why Persona 5 would be better than say, FFVII or FFX? I'm legit interested to see why you'd argue it's the best RPG ever?
It's interesting that you brought up Final Fantasy 7 and 10, which happen to be two of my favorite games ever. I'm confident that if you liked those games, you will love Persona 5. I don't know if it's the best RPG ever relative to its time, and maybe its recency bias, but I struggle to think of a better RPG I've played. It's not perfect ,but it does so many things well.
Let's start with art style. It looks like an anime that is brought to life. The cutscenes are anime clips and the in game graphics could be described as extremely stylized cell shading. But the art style also permeates every menu screen, the combat menus, and even the world itself. Then there is the story. It's essentially an inception-style plotline with a dose of Deathnote. It deals with extremely serious issues like sexual abuse, exploitation, suicide, etc. that I personally have never seen addressed in a video game. And then there are the characters - while the protagonist is essentially silent, the people around him are engaging and compelling. On the one hand, these characters fill in the basic tropes you would expect from any anime, but they have interesting stories and the more time you spend with them the more you will get to like them. For a JRPG, the localization into English is surprisingly well done, albeit with small hiccups here and there. It also isn't afraid to be totally whacky and out there (it literally has a main character that I'd best describe as a talking cat that doesn't know its gender and believes it is a human), which separates it from some of the western games that take themselves too seriously. It has that charm unique to the best JRPGs like Chrono Trigger and the FF series. The soundtrack is amazing too; it's almost like a jazz version of a classic FF soundtrack.
The best way to describe the gameplay is that it is essentially all about time management and deciding what you want to do. Your character is a student who has to balance all the normal parts of life (tests, friends, jobs, baseball, etc) with accomplishing certain missions which involve you and your crew breaking into someone's mind/heart and stealing something to change them. With certain exceptions, you can spend your time however you like as long as you complete certain required missions complete by a given deadline. The brilliance of this is that everything you choose to do you do helps you in some way on those missions. Want to watch a movie with character X? That's totally fine...and you get character dialogue plus various benefits for doing this depending on the movie you watch. So instead of the endless grinding of a FF game, you can just spend more time with the characters you are interested in. However, since the entire game lasts a set amount of time in terms of days in the game, you have to just be smart about how to use best use your time.
The combat itself is turn-based, but still feels fast and different from FF games. The combat is essentially built around chaining actions together to get enemies in a situation where you can bribe them, finish them off, or get them to join you. They also have these things called personas (some weird mix of aeons/GF's/etc from FF and pokemon) that you can collect, combine, and give abilities to. It's impossible to explain here but the game makes use of many interlocking systems (in fact the first twelve or so hours of the game is basically just a giant tutorial) that synergize beautifully together. If you are the type that enjoys grinding there is a way to constantly train as well, but it isn't necessary, at least where I am in the game. I'm someone that no longer enjoys turn based combat in games, but it's actually not bad here at all.
tl;dr - If you like JRPGs, you will like Persona 5.