The friends of Ringo Ishikawa

released on May 17, 2018

A highschool gang leader Ringo Ishikawa trying to live through his last autumn before graduation. With his best friends.


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Ringo Ishikawa does not deserve any friends

Picked up this game when it came out on a whim, and it took me around three and a half years to stop getting filtered by the mechanics - But when I did I found something truly special. The mechanics are still kinda ass but their obfuscation and how you have to make your own little schedules and keep track of stuff work wonders for immersion, and definitely strengthen the idea of how you spend your time the game goes for.

Play it if you want something poignant and unique. It'll take a bit of getting used to, but it's worth it long term.

Es increíble como un juego que estuve a punto de quitar a los 15 minutos de empezarlo me haya podido acabar gustando tanto.

Con apariencia de beat'em up, motivo por el que lo compré (spoiler: no tiene apenas nada de ese género) se esconde un ensayo sobre la vida desde el punto de vista de su desarrollador, yeo. Un juego en el que puedes hacer muchas cosas que tienen un impacto en el prota, Ringo, pero no en el jugador, y cuyo fuerte es el avance en las relaciones del propio Ringo y sus amigos, chavales de 16-17 años que por algún motivo tienen conversaciones filosóficas que parecerían ultra maduras hasta para personas en su treintena (el guion y los diálogos son una cosa maravillosa, hasta el punto de querer repetir las mismas actividades una y otra vez simplemente por ver qué charla nueva te vas a encontrar). Con una jugabilidad que no es nada del otro mundo, y a la vez bastante críptica, los diferentes eventos con cinemáticas que vas viendo, van en ascenso, y culminan en un final muy existencialista y potentísimo y que para mí justifica el tiempo invertido, no es para todo el mundo, es un hit or miss de manual, pero como primera experiencia en una obra de este tipo solo puedo decir que es un sobresaliente de los pies a la cabeza. Ah, y las referencias a libros y películas, así como la banda sonora, son exquisitas, me he quedado con ganas de jugar las otras dos propuestas de yeo, algo que haré pronto seguramente.

Top tier track: Prehistory theme

Picked it up because I thought it’d be just a fun beat ‘em up. This shit broke me Beautiful game if not a little slow.

Time is slipping away. You have made decisions that have you behind the 8 ball and with both your youth and the school closing in, what will you do? This game challenges you to bristle at every missed connection, every missed moment and what remaining opportunities are for you. I lost time to this game and I mean that. I invested time but this game often has you just watching your character progress, doing the menial task, it makes you think about how you use your own time. Your own time as a gamer is fleeting and the reflective nature of this game gets you to ponder what’s going on in your own life.
It does that through true emergent gameplay . The mechanics are barely told to you, progress is unclear. You need to read around to find the school schedule. You need to study the movement of your peer group. You need to create routines. There is no map, so you have to deepen your own relationship with the area to really feel like you are understanding. You can invest in books or a tv. You can invest in boxing or judo. You can skip classes to pick up a job or study . The thing is that how you get to these choices or how they occur feel idiosyncratic. You have to do things in certain ways to get these to happen. You have to happen upon chance encounters, this is a real world.
They take this into the brawling segments . There is a moment that I realized that I had a truce with a gang only because I never thought to fight them before. I hadn’t realized that starting a fight with them would cause a ruckus. There was a threat , a warning, a whole new story cutscene days later in my play after I started a random fight with them . This occurred strictly because I accidentally started a fight somewhere I never did before. It made me realize interactions were so subtle to convey connections. The gang members used to light my lighter . I didn’t think of that but it makes sense that they were peers, even if the game wouldn't tell you that explicitly.
That is how the stories unfold. You never know when the intermissions show up and derail your schedule. It feels like real human development. You lose dialogue options because of certain events, days later people ask about what happens. You feel heartened by what’s happening in your friends life. The moment I got into Kens house after the big incident that got him to stop boxing made me erupt in excitement. I made decisions in gameplay that were unneeded strictly because I was moved emotionally or wanted to see how things progressed. The Yuna conversations were the reason I invested so much in literature.
This game tells you nothing though. And a lot is waiting and watching time pass. The cryptic nature is a boon a weakness. It can feel like marvelous emergent design but sometimes a game that doesn’t want you to do anything . It’s thoroughly refreshing and accentuates wonderful writing with a poignant ending. I came for a brawler and mechanically it’s solid enough with options that open up based on your choices but this is a life sim , and if you want to see freedom in design and trusting that you can save the end of high school as a troubled gang leader? This will teach you about design and time. (Look up something very briefly, like 5 minutes for some basic mechanics, just to set sail and never look up anything again, it is vague enough that I must say that).