The School Bell Rings: A Brief Critique of The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa
Ringo Ishikawa immediately feels like a familiar face.
He’s a pastiche of the Japanese delinquent tropes you see in anything from Akira to Kamen Rider: Fourze. He leads a gang of teenage hoodlums, making him what you might call a Banchō in Japan.
His life is a series of aimless fights. He’s failing out of school. He bucks authority at every turn. He’s a tough guy, wandering the streets with a lit cigarette and fists clenched in his pockets.
But the ways in which you recognize Ringo run deeper than this surface-level list of cliches. In the twilight of his school days, Ringo finds his gang falling apart and his future uncertain. The development of his existential crisis forms the plot of the game.
Even if you’re unfamiliar with the portrait of the Japanese schoolyard delinquent, you’ll recognize Ringo’s struggle with adolescence and, if you’re like me, you’ll see something of yourself in his vulnerability.
The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa tells this story through a marriage of sharp writing and compelling system-based mechanics. You can go to class, hit the gym, chat with schoolmates, or whittle away the days fighting other roaming teen gangs in the streets. Sometimes, as you’re walking to school or headed to the cafe, a story beat or cut-scene will trigger at what seems like random. Ringo’s life, his personal progress, is always waiting to ambush you around a street corner.
It’s easy to trace the game’s lineage back to River City Ransom, not only in the charming novelty of the little actions you can take, but also in the surprising complexity of its combat system. Despite this depth, combat never feels like The Thing To Be Doing.
Staring at the sunset while you lean off the edge of your balcony is arguably more satisfying than pounding random faces in a street fight. Ringo Ishikawa’s obsessive affection for mundanity is both its greatest strength and greatest barrier to entry. The way it drip-feeds narrative beats will infuriate players who have been classically conditioned to plow through game worlds that bend to their timing and will.
But that frustration is deliberate. It is the thing that Ringo Ishikawa is trying to say about adolescence and anger. Growing up is synonymous with letting go.
At first, it’ll feel like Ringo Ishikawa is just a charming collection of various systems and mechanics thrown together without much of a consideration for tutorialization, or an elegance in how those systems interact. But, if you’re like me, the charm of Ringo’s presentation — its penchant for melancholy, its music, its look and feel — will keep you digging deeper and deeper.
And as you dig deeper, what you’ll find in this open-ended, world’s-your-oyster design is an intense, inescapable craving for rigidity and regularity.
You’ll set Ringo’s bedtime, and you’ll wake up and study your subjects, and you’ll buy lunch, and you’ll hit the gym, and at some point you’ll take a step back and realize that, when confronted with the possibility of anything, you fell into the comfort of routine action, and maybe you’ll wonder why you did that, and then someone, be it Ringo or one of his friends, will say something that sounds an awful lot like that realization you’ve just internalized. And if you’re like me, it might fire some synapses in your brain that remind you why you love games.
All these systems in Ringo Ishikawa fit together like clockwork, but you’d never know. Like Ringo himself, the game’s not much for talking. It obfuscates its systems and deliberately hides triggers behind pedestrian menus and verbs. Want Ringo to read a book? Go for it. Nothing will change — at least not visibly.
During class, you can wiggle the analog stick to have Ringo shift around in his chair, or you can hold down the A button to have him dutifully take notes. All this does is change the animation that plays — or so I thought, until I realized my knowledge was filling up slower if I wiggled, and faster if I took notes.
Or maybe it wasn’t, and that’s party to some other confounding mechanic or skill check. Either way, you can be sure I held down that A button during all my classes from then on out.
If you find anything magical about Shenmue, then Ringo Ishikawa will feel like sorcery. It’s Skyrim without the quests. It’s Death Stranding without the baby. These other games attempt to cultivate a personalized sense of achievement in their stories by piling on content and letting the player hack away at quests and meters and achievements in an attempt to cobble together their own tale of The Chosen Hero.
Ringo Ishikawa, on the other hand, is addition by subtraction.
The story of your Ringo takes its shape from what’s not there. The story is in what you miss, the scenes you overlook because you were too busy punching the bag, the fights you never have because you’re too busy hitting the books, and, most vitally, the friends you neglect as you meander through the waning days of your childhood’s winter. Ringo Ishikawa is jazz. It’s about the game you don’t play.
