Ring Fit Adventure (2019) [Switch]

“A bear, however hard he tries, grows tubby without exercise.”

– A.A. Milne

You’re in a strange world. A glowing circular thing with a face tells you to hold it and sometimes squeeze it and pull it around a bit.

There’s some sort of darkness spreading over the world, makin’ bad stuff, and the glowy ring thing reckons this is the work of an unbelievably hench dragon. Absolute unit.

So what’re you to do? Well, buck up and save the world through the power of exercise, obviously.

Ring Fit Adventure is Nintendo’s latest foray into motion-controlled fitness gaming, but it’s the first to have a plot. I mean, it’s kind of a thin plot, but that’s OK. It works.

As it turns out, I actually think Ring Fit Adventure is rather good.

And I’mma tell you why.

Gameplay: 8/10

You remember Wii Fit, right? Wii Sports? The devastatingly underrated Wii Sports Resort?

If you’re anything like me, you’ll have seen these games as windows to the future. Playing Wii Sports was an epiphany: just look at what this hardware can do! The potential of motion control, of interacting with a game in an intuitive, physical way, felt so huge.

I mean this on two accounts, actually: firstly, there’s the ludological upside to motion-based input, theoretically allowing a much closer relationship between the actions of the player and those of the character. Then you have the sheer physical benefit of a method of exercise that’s interesting, fun, engaging, and doable from your living room. Both are important (for different reasons), and both felt just around the corner when the Wii came onto the scene with the closest thing to proper physical controls in the mainstream, but nothing seemed to have quite got it right.

Ring Fit Adventure is still a bit of a way off what I might have imagined when I was dreaming about the future (give pre-teen me a full-body haptic suit with one-to-one input mapping or give me death), but it feels like a real embrace with possibility, a more fully-realised integration between hardware and game design.

Previous motion-control releases have felt more like prototypical forays into a new land, a brief peek. In Ring Fit Adventure, we get (I think) the first title that feels both like a good game and like a fuller exploration of what it means to exploit motion-based input.

So here’s what ya does: ya puts ya Joy-Con in’t’leg strap, ya straps that on ya leg. Ya puts ya other Joy-Con in’t’Ring-Con, ya holds that in ya hands.

Then ya does what the game darn well tells ya.

Basically, the combination of leg strap and Ring-Con means that Ring Fit Adventure can track (reasonably accurately, too) what you’re doing with one leg and both arms at all times, which means it’s got a pretty good picture of your whole body’s position. As such, it can ask you to do pretty much any bodyweight exercise and know fairly well how goodly you’re doing it. Your movements are mirrored on the screen by your player character, who does as you do (unless you’re cheating by, for example, just shaking one leg rather than jogging), and Ring, your mascot-friend-thing, provides a physical representation of the Ring-Con in-game.

There are a few things you can do in Ring Fit Adventure, including a few Wii Sports-like minigames which require you to get good at doing variations on one basic movement: there’s ‘Squat Goals’, in which you squat down to various depths before releasing to spring up and collect coins; in ‘Robo-Wrecker’ you’ll use your core to twist, driving a big stick thingy through waves of dummies. Then there’s the straight-up sets mode, in which you pick a few exercises or a body part to focus on and just let rip with uninterrupted, unembellished, unimpeachable reps.

The main attraction, though, is absolutely Ring Fit Adventure‘s Ring Fit Adventure mode. Duh.

In the adventure, you’ll progress through levels by running, jumping, rowing, and otherwise moving your body. You want your character to move forward through the level? Then you’re gonna actually have to move. Like, your real body. It’s all on rails, so all you have to do is move and you’ll progress in the right direction – occasionally there’ll be branching paths courtesy of jumps that you might or might not be able to make, and you’ll come across a few obstacles requiring different exercises to break or surmount, but it’s pretty simple to navigate.

While you’re making your merry way through a stage, you’ll come across friendly-looking glowy ball things. Don’t be fooled, though: in the style of Chrono Trigger, these are field/overworld-located indicators of impending battle, and touching them will begin a turn-based brawl.

Battles represent the bulk of the time you’ll spend playing the game, most likely; running between one battle and the next is kinda neat, but the majority of my time in each level tended to be spent fightin’. The way that battles play out will be pretty familiar to anyone who’s played a turn-based RPG: you and your enemies take turns hitting each other.

Where Ring Fit Adventure deviates from your common or garden turn-based RPG is in the fact that you don’t just pick a move and watch your character do the thing. Each of your moves is an actual exercise move that you have to actually execute with your actual body. You’ve got four categories of move: red (arms, chest, shoulders), blue (legs, glutes), yellow (abs, core), and green (yoga poses). Each category will do extra damage to an enemy of the same colour, and each specific move within those categories has its own damage value as well as being either a single- or multi-target attack. (There are also some moves which do no damage and simply restore your health, which are handy too.)

Of course, battles yield rewards in the form of EXP and money; the former gets you all merrily levelled-up, providing better stats and new moves, and the latter can be used to purchase stat-boosting equipment or smoothies. You can also blend your own smoothies from ingredients you’ll find around the world; smoothies restore health or buff the amount of damage a particular category of moves will do, or a whole bunch of other effects ranging from making you run faster on the field to increasing the amount of EXP you get from battles.

Using all your moves, smoothies, and tactics in combination is… well, it’s how ya does fights. And let me tell ya, some of those fights ain’t easy.

Challenge: 9/10

Ring Fit Adventure is tough. It’s harder than I thought it’d be by a long shot. I’m no athlete, but I go to the gym, I walk a few miles several times a week – my body does what I need it to, most of the time.

Meanwhile, my other half Hannah is significantly better-conditioned than me, doing as much exercise as I do and then a bit more and just generally having the ability to work her muscles for much longer without getting fatigued. So… well, we figured this would probably be pretty easy.

I was expecting Ring Fit to involve about as much effort as a Wii Sports session, or perhaps a fairly low-intensity track on Just Dance: I thought I’d maybe get a little bit out of breath.

Oh, no.

Ring Fit will kick your butt.

See, previous motion controls have only really been about motion in the sense of… well, moving. You hold a Wiimote in your hand, and use your arm and wrist to move it from one position to another; Wii Fit progressed to involve a bit of balancing, holding positions, that kind of thing. Ring Fit gets us to proper muscular exertion in the form of the Ring-Con, which provides genuine resistance for pushing and pulling exercises, and it’ll mix up the sort of work you’re doing. There are aerobic activities (quick knee lifts), anaerobic holds (planks), stretching poses, bodyweight calisthenics (squats), and the aforementioned resistance movements. All of this together makes for genuine exertion, which is actually kind of impressive.

You’ll unlock different exercises as you progress, too, and Ring Fit Adventure does a good job of mixing up the kinds of movements it gives you and motivating you to use new ones (by making them more powerful, giving them an advantage over an enemy type, or granting multi-enemy damage).

Fortunately, Ring Fit is also very kind and inclusive. You can adjust the difficulty any time, which affects how many repetitions of each exercise you have to do (and, in some cases, how long you have to spend on each rep). Anyone can make this game right for their own fitness level and work towards their goals.

Speaking of…

Accessibility: 8/10

Ring Fit Adventure goes out of its way to make sure that as many people as possible can play it and have a good time in the process.

Although it’s designed around moving your body, it does make an effort to be configurable to different needs: the first such feature I noticed was silent mode, which basically swaps out any jogging movements for little squats. For those who have neighbours directly underneath them, silent mode is doubtless extremely convenient for preventing noise complaints, and I imagine it might also be quite helpful for those with knee or ankle troubles.

Then there are the Assist Modes, functions which can be toggled on and off any time and which pretty much just mean that if there’s a body part you cannot or would prefer not to move in the way the game usually asks you to then you can just tell it not to ask you to move those bits. I haven’t tried all of these modes but I’ve heard from people who’ve found them helpful that they don’t take anything away from the gameplay, just make it possible to not have to worry about being required to do certain bits. Ring Fit Adventure either does away with problematic movements or swaps them out for something else, so you’re still getting a good workout for the rest of your body.

It’s not perfect, as I understand it – and I hope Nintendo will make an effort to listen to disabled gamers in particular and work out simple functionality tweaks that might make it even more better – but the impression I get is that they’ve worked pretty hard to make it possible for a range of people of different abilities and needs to configure Ring Fit Adventure so that they can enjoy it.

It’s also worth noting that you don’t get punished at all for simply deciding to stop for a bit: there are no downsides to taking a break in the middle of a set, even halfway through beating up your enemies. No time limits, no debuffs, no nothing. You do get slightly better damage for doing a move in ‘great!’ fashion (as opposed to simply ‘good’), but that’s about it and stopping between reps has no impact.

Something else that I thought was quite cool is that Ring Fit Adventure handles user profiles unusually intuitively: given that you’re quite likely to have multiple people wanting to play the game as their own character – so that they can go through the adventure themselves and escalate the challenge at the right pace for them – you can decide which Switch profile to use when starting adventure mode without quitting the game. That’s a really simple thing, but I really appreciated it.

Visuals: 7/10

I really like most of Ring Fit Adventure‘s visual presentation. Everything’s bright and colourful, with characters all possessing strong silhouettes and distinctive features. (The ‘Four Masters’, each of whom is based on one of the four exercise types, are brilliantly just-over-the-top designs.)

Enemies, too, are pretty sweet-looking and easily recognisable. They’re all brightly-coloured either red, green, blue, or yellow, handily giving an indication of which attacks will be super-effective against them (and for those with difficulty recognising colours, there’s also text which explicitly names them as ‘Yellow Thing’, for example). Most enemy types are based on a piece of gym equipment like a kettlebell, yoga mat, dumbbell, or… er… there’s one that’s just a long-legged frog thing. Not sure what that’s supposed to be, if anything.

Then you’ve got the main cast of non-generics: Dragaux, who’s a GIANT JACKED DRAGON and I like him; Ring, who’s… a ring; and the player character, who’s an athletic-lookin’ person with a customisable appearance (to a degree; you can change skin tone and eye colour but not build or features or anything like that). You’ll frequently be seeing the player character under a layer of sweat particles, which is… sort of icky, but I guess kind of effective. Plus their hair glows like FI-YAH when the game thinks you’re doing moves right good, so that’s funky.

No complaints here; it’s nothing groundbreaking, but it all looks nice and clean and always seems to run smoothly.

Audio: 4/10

Yeah, nothing to write home about. The OST isn’t bad, featuring a fairly small selection of fairly long tracks (given that each level or battle can take a while to get through), but there’s not really anything too memorable going on.

My favourite track is the one that plays during cooldowns – when you’re doing your static stretching to bring it all back down a bit after a good session, the chilled vibe of the music really helps. It’s probably the only one I could hum from memory, and it’s super-duper simple so that’s not much of an accomplishment.

On non-musical audio matters, sound effects are OK. You don’t really tend to notice them, to be honest, which isn’t a bad thing. I will say that the use of sound cues to help you recognise when to move to the next part of a movement is often pretty handy, especially for exercises during which you can’t look at the screen for the visual indicator (planks, for example).

And then there’s the voice acting.

There’s not much of it: most NPCs have a couple of grunts or whatever but no voiced lines. Only one character is fully voiced: Ring, the player character’s exercise-companion-cum-magical-trinket. And he’s annoying as heck.

To give credit where credit’s due, I don’t think the acting is terrible. Some of the lines are delivered pretty well, and the actor imbues Ring’s voice with the exact sort of chirpy optimism I’d expect the character to have. Whoever was in charge of programming the cues for Ring’s lines, though, needed a serious editing hand: he does not shut up. Like, during battles he’ll be encouraging you with ‘OK!’ or ‘Great job!’ or ‘Just five more!’, and that’s cool, but… he comes out with something pretty much every single rep, sometimes not even finishing the previous chant of adoration before starting the next one.

It’s just too much, and I think that if Ring Fit Adventure were a normal game I’d almost be tempted to play it on mute. The fact that I’m exercising while Ring incessantly yells at me about how great I am means that I’m more distracted and more able to tolerate him than I’d be if I were sitting using a controller, but it’s a close-run thing sometimes.

Replayability: 7/10

I’ve had Ring Fit Adventure for a couple of months now, playing two or three times a week, and I think I’ve barely scratched the surface. From indications I’ve seen online, I have a lot of levels and worlds still to get through – and, once I’m done with that, there are at least two or three enhanced-replay-type modes allowing you to work through the adventure again.

Then, of course, there’s the content outside the adventure mode, which allows you to play minigames and straight-up exercise sets as much as you’d like for points and/or GAINZ. You also get to play most of the minigames during the adventure, sometimes as optional extras and sometimes by way of appropriating a minigame mechanic and using it for movement instead of whatever the usual goal happens to be.

Basically, I’ve had this game a little while now and I think there is an awful lot for me still to do before I’m even thinking about replaying, but by all accounts there’ll still be stuff for me to do once I’m… well, done.

Uniqueness: 9/10

Ain’t nothin’ like Ring Fit Adventure, for my money. It’s weird in that Nintendo doing a motion-controlled exercise game is nothing new, and neither is a fairly standard turn-based RPG, but the combination of the two feels like this fresh lick of paint that really opens both genres up in a way I didn’t think would work as well as it does. It’s a simple innovation, but I really do think it is an innovation – like I said earlier, it might not do anything new as such, but it feels like the most fully-realised integration to date of all the not-so-new things it puts in its pot and mixes together.

I have to give it points for uniqueness because I can’t think of anything else that presents this kind of gaming experience, and that’s unusual these days. It does so smoothly and confidently, so it doesn’t even feel like some niche experimental thingy but like something that’s both a new concept and fully-formed.

My Personal Grade: 8/10

I think Ring Fit Adventure is right good. Better than Wii Fit, better than Wii Sports, better than Wii Sports Resort, better than Chrono – er, wait.

Nah – I might not consider it in the same category as some of the games I consider artworks, or the best of all time, but I do think it is a very good game. It’s both entertaining and actually useful as a workout, which is a tricky combination to get right. Plus it manages to strike a balance of being good for everyone – young, old, fitness nut, couch potato, everybody can get something out of Ring Fit Adventure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gO6fw0GU-fE

Aggregated Score: 7.5

Though he’s been known by many names across the vast and peculiar landscape of the Internet, every iteration of The Sometimes Vaguely Philosophical Mage has shared an urge to look far too closely at tiny details and extrapolate huge, important-seeming conclusions. He now hosts Philosophiraga, the video games and philosophy podcast, for The Well-Red Mage, and can be found rambling about it and his other creative endeavours on Twitter.

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