Great little 2.5D platformer. Gives me a lot of NiGHTS vibes which is a pretty high compliment. I thought that with only 12 levels they wouldn't take advantage of all the interesting things you can do with klonoas weird enemy grabbing moveset, but they actually got quite a lot of mileage out of it. The plot is also like bizarrely serious and can get actually somber at times??? This games wild, I still need to get around to playing the rest of the series and probably even give this another play. Klonoa has so much charm you can't help but like the series.

Playing The friends of Ringo Ishikawa is an extremely strange experience. It's a game that obviously is made with a small team, and even less money. Yet despite that, the ambitions of this game are extreme. It tries to do so many different things with it systems.
I think the thing Ringo Ishikawa does most of all is make the players want to root for this game. At least, I wanted to root for this game. Tackling a life sim genre is extremely difficult, and while pared down, it still holds itself together in such a way that one can applaud.
Some of the best moments in Ringo Ishikawa happen when nobody is talking. It happens when Ringo studies until midnight, and the player decides that Ringo wants to go out on his balcony to have a cigarette. It doesn't do anything to the gameplay to do this. No stats go up. Nothing changes. It just feels like the natural thing to do at that moment. When on the balcony, a fight breaks down between rival gangs below. Sure, you could join them to get some experience. Or you could just keep smoking the cigarette for awhile until one side wins. That's what The friends of Ringo Ishikawa is all about.

Feel like I’m slightly ill-equipped to really talk about this, given that Shinobi non Grata owes so much to Ninja Spirit, but I’m a mark for ninja games and boss rushes, what can I say?

Think the biggest issue here is that it’s frontloaded with its most compelling ideas: Stage 2 has a cool gimmick where you’re managing enemies on three different levels, with the ground floor being especially hazardous thanks to endlessly respawning enemies. Navigating through the densely-packed environments is a lot of fun, and had me cycling between weapons to find the best balance between crowd control and single-target damage, but later stages rely a lot on “assault” sections, where you’ll need to kill a certain number of enemies to progress. These have really conservative quotas, and so actually end up being much more manageable, tepid encounters than the chaos of the early levels- and the same could be said for the trajectory of the boss fights as well.

Fights in the first half of the game tend to be more dynamic, such as a centipede that can alternate between a number of different screen-covering attacks that force you to consider your positioning, while the fights latter half have more rigid, predictable phases- the final boss in particular feels surprisingly simplistic, cycling between a few telegraphed attacks that are far less organic to weave between and compelling to plan around. My gut reaction upon completing my initial playthrough was to say it’s “too short,” but that’s maybe incorrect; more that it’s incomplete.

Part of that is the scenario design (an extra phase on that final fight would go a long way!), but more surprising is the lack of any extra difficulties or modes upon your first clear of the game. I can admire the spartan charm of it, and it’s sort of reassuring that the appeal that’s kept me coming back is mostly intrinsic, but it seems like a title that could benefit a great deal from pushing its mechanics a little farther.

Much of the distinction between weapons can go mostly unnoticed when playing through it normally, but if you were considering the ammo economy and your limited health more frequently, those unique qualities might become that much more apparent- weighing the coverage of your shurikens against the defensive utility of chain-and-sickle, while conserving enough meter for the upcoming boss. Not entirely absent as-is, as mentioned above, but surprisingly infrequent. (An arcade mode with continues and/or a hard mode that limited your health and ammo seems like the obvious additions here, and would likely add the needed pressure to make the game really shine.)

I have my reservations with this, but it’s got enough of a pulse that even some of the early bosses still throw me off- even multiple runs into the game- and it’s been seriously tempting to return to it in the hopes of getting a 1CC. Maybe not an unambiguous classic (yet), but hopefully this gets the extra support it needs to round out the experience.

I put 5 star because I love this game to bits and it's truly a masterpiece among ARPGs, but it has its flaws, namely:

- At times, gank fights, bullet hells, and some really questionable boss design that feel absolutely terrible to play through.
- Some dungeons are way longer than they should and the second third of the game feels padded as a result (Cloudius to Mikheil is a slog that could understandably make you feel like dropping the game, and that's also where the bosses are terrible).
-Some levels of the post-game super-dungeon are equally a slog and feel really cheap, and it's a shame (read why later in this review)! Also you can't choose levels individually, you have to go through the whole thing in order and that takes hours.
- Annoying handling of titles and having to have a specific character on display for some sidequests. Just stupid.
- Some town music can get really annoying.
- Random encounters. Not only that, but the rate's too high, and as much as I love the gameplay, there are too many fights. It's especially annoying if you're in the middle of a puzzle in a dungeon.

If you are willing to go past these flaws, here's what you will find:

- Incredible action gameplay.
- Some really, really great boss fights.
- Smart yet simple mechanics like Swordian Devices and Rerise, accessible everywhere, making preparation a breeze and a pleasure.
- Mostly great music.
- Some pretty neat core ideas and concepts for the story, even if the narration isn't groundbreaking.
- The character interactions, as always in Tales games!
- Amazing battle graphics and some of the best-looking mystic artes in the series EVEN TODAY.
- My favorite thing in this game: the handling of difficulty modes. Difficulty modes here are the best crafted I've seen in any game. Each difficulty mode feels unique, and higher difficulty not only empowers enemies: it also empowers YOUR PARTY. Yes, you heard! And yet, the game will still feel more difficult on a higher difficulty. It just gives you the tools you need to get over it. The higher the difficulty, the higher your critical hit rate, blast gauge rate, weak spot damage, and experience earned through combos. To put it shortly: the game will constantly reward you for being good at it, and will always compensate for any high risk you're willing to take, so long as you can overcome the challenge. And the challenge, you're free to take it whenever you want, as you can change the difficulty in-game without restrictions. In this game, no stupid experience multiplier like in other Tales games making the challenge of higher difficulties trivial in NG+. You want to reach level 200? Get those combos to work, and challenge the optional dungeon, where regular enemies give A LOT of XP. Honestly though, you might not even need to get to level 200 to overcome most of the toughest fights the game has to offer; that's the magic of this game. In most cases, if you understand how everything works and prepare your party carefully, you will be able to win most bosses while even being underleveled, especially toward the end of the game. The way the devs chose not to include an experience multiplier for NG+ in this game, instead providing options to modify core gameplay elements for a fresh new run, shows just how much care went into crafting those difficulty modes and balancing out all the gameplay elements, and in that regard, no game has done better since. It's simply amazing. If you're curious about how the gameplay works and how each difficulty mode differs from the others and you like numbers, go take a look at the Tales of Destiny Character FAC by Aileron on Gamefaqs. It's sobering.
- The post-game dungeon, despite what I said earlier, is truly incredibly well-designed, as it makes full use of the excellent gameplay elements I just mentioned, and richly, RICHLY rewards you for taking a gamble and winning! It also pushes you to become more familiar with characters that are not Stahn or Leon from a gameplay perspective.

If you're a Tales fan and you haven't played that one yet, please, you have to. There's an english patch for it now!
If you're not a Tales fan but you love action, give it a try. It's not always a fair game, but it sure is charming, challenging and extremely well-tuned. Trust me, I finished it 5 times!