Hetare King

This whole thing of ridding the civil service of expertise and leaning on external consultants instead was done under the guise of cutting costs, but in practice they’re more expensive and do a worse job. Not only because they’re incentivised to do the least amount of work possible for the most amount of pay possible, but also because quite often they’re little more than the government’s sock puppets. They get paid to tell the government what it wants to hear, and then the government can say (and technically meet some legal requirements) that they’re listening to the experts.

This is not unique to NYC or the US, but it’s good that someone in the public eye is trying to do something about it. May it inspire others.

Early Persona 5 is pretty rich in set pieces as it slowly introduces its many systems, but it does open up quite a lot after a while. It’s a content-rich 100+ hour long game, it kind of has to. It still has a lot of cutscenes even after that, but they’re mostly of the gamey yapping portraits kind, with cinematic cutscenes and anime FMVs left for climactic moments.

Persona 3 and 4 are similar in style, though not quite as cinematic, and you get to the meat of the games faster.

Persona 1 and 2 are completely different beasts, and what you dislike about Persona 5 so far will have no bearing on whether you’ll like those. The most modern versions are on PSP, however.

As for other JRPGs on Switch, from the same developer there’s Shin Megami Tensei V and the remaster of III. Even though they’re also from Atlus, they very much go in the opposite direction of Persona and are very stoic games where it’s mostly just you, the environment and the systems, and cutscenes are far and between.

Someone else mentioned the Trails games and I’ll second that. Like the Persona, they’re very story-rich, but not as budget-rich as Persona 5, which puts constraints on how that story is told. Also, if you like action RPGs, from the same developer (Falcom) there’s the Ys games. Ys: The Oath in Felghana is pretty much the pinnacle of the genre and is pretty short, so it’s a good snack between bigger games.

The big one is going to be once it stops being subsidised and people have to start paying the actual cost.

There’s an adorable manga called Yuzu-chan wa Harinezumi ga Sasatteru about a girl with a hedgehog attached to her body (most of the time her head) by its quills, who is trying to become her pet.

Completely unrelated to this, but I was reminded of it. Anyway, the lesson here is: people can get used to anything, for better or worse. Though she did go to the doctor once to complain about her head hurting all the time for some reason.