Ring Fit Adventure

Like most fantasy adventures, Nintendo’s Ring Fit Adventure puts you in the role of a newly established hero attempting to rid a magical realm of a freshly arisen evil. You venture through various levels, fight nefarious monsters, and earn money and experience along the way to improve your skills. It sounds like a typical role-playing game, but Ring Fit Adventure is far from typical. You don’t explore and battle by using buttons and joysticks: instead, you exercise your way through a lush fantasy landscape. It’s like Wii Fit crossed with Final Fantasy , and it sits alongside Labo as one of Nintendo’s most unexpectedly interesting experiments.
– The Verge

Ring Fit Adventure is available exclusively on the Nintendo Switch for $79.99 USD (includes game, leg strap, and RingCon).

Ring Fit Adventure is my BAG lately. I’ve gained some weight in the last couple of years (~20lbs) that I’d like to lose. I’ve never had much of an exercise routine to speak of, but I used to live in a suburban area with ample sidewalks and access to a school’s track, so I’d take walks and run when I can. My job was also much more active. Where I am now (living and working), I don’t really have the same easy opportunities for fitness. I’m working on improving my diet (whooole separate, though related issue), but I’ve hit a lot of roadblocks with exercise. I live on the side of a busy highway, so it wouldn’t be safe for me to go out and take walks or run, and gym memberships around here are really expensive ($25 to $30 a month). I bought a small spin bike that I keep in my apartment, but it’s hard to motivate myself to get on it.

Enter Ring Fit. I’m a little nerd that loves stats and numbers and graphs and I can be a bit of a completionist in games, so I love the way Ring Fit gameifies exercise. I’ve had multiple sessions where I hit my desired time (I try to do at least 20 minutes every other day), but I keep pushing myself to go a little bit longer because I’m close to leveling up or I have a quest I want to finish. I also love that it helps me work every part of my body; before, I’d mostly do cardio (running), but now I’m doing actual strength training exercises. I didn’t necessarily need Ring Fit to do a lot of these exercises, but the way the game introduces them, tutorializes them, and gives you feedback on your performance is so helpful for someone who has never really learned to exercise.

Patrick Klepek did a really good write-up on why Ring Fit is so great for folks like me who are new to exercise or who have had trouble developing exercise habits.

I’ve been trying to stick to 20-30 minutes of Ring Fit every other day for the last three weeks or so. I haven’t noticed any big changes to my body (it’s still early and I also don’t own a functioning scale), but my calves definitely look a bit more toned. Still need to lose that belly and booty fat.

This is really great to hear! I’ve also never properly learned how to exercise (and it feels super weird asking at this point in my life), so hearing the Ring Fit actually gives you feedback and tutorials makes it a really compelling buy.

Honestly I’ve always admired Nintendo’s efforts to game-ify exercise and health. Wii Sports Resort & the other health games were huge in my house back when it first came out, and having the stats right there helped me and my brothers to make the exercise a fun competition instead of just another thing to do.

This is honestly the biggest argument for it. There’s a huge learning curve to exercising, and it makes it really hard for people like me to get into it. Ring Fit is only so aware of your body, so it’s definitely not perfect, but it will shout out little tips in addition to the tutorializing and generally pushing you to go harder. Like when you’re doing squats, it will remind you to try to keep your knees from passing your toes and to keep your back straight. I’d never done a squat before Ring Fit and I’d have no idea what was and wasn’t proper form without that.

This is also awesome about Ring Fit. Exercise games were a bit of a craze years ago, but I don’t think any really hit a good balance between gamification and fitness before Ring Fit. You can really go hard with Ring Fit. When I finish a session, I’m sore. I never got that from Wii Sports/Wii Fit/whatever else. And the RPG elements are actually good!

I do need to play around more with the social elements of Ring Fit. Like most of Nintendo’s online implementations, it’s kinda janky. I haven’t even been able to open the menus that let you see how your exercise stacks up against your friends. But I think that, if properly fleshed out, Ring Fit can use online elements to sort of mirror the way you and your brother would push each other to exercise. I do also wish it was possible to get a second ring and leg strap without buying the game and then do some kind of local multiplayer in Ring Fit. I’d play a lot with my boyfriend if that was possible.

Announced in today’s Nintendo Direct Mini, a new rhythm game mode is coming to Ring Fit Adventure, featuring music from Super Mario Odyssey, Splatoon 2, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Wii Fit. Also coming are a new jogging mode, and female and multilingual voice options for Ring. All these additions are part of a free update for the game, available today.

This is an awesome update. I fell off Ring Fit for a while, but I’m trying to get back into it (both for general health and because it’s kinda the best way for me to get moving right now with the quarantine). I’m a little wary of the rhythm mode including Breath of the Wild just because it’s not really music I’d consider dancing to, but we’ll see. I’ve gotten so used to Ring having a male voice though that I’m not sure I’d be able to adjust to the female haha.

Awesome that they’re adding language options too. I can imagine that being a game changer for multilingual households.

I just tried out the rhythm modes. They’re pretty good! You can definitely work up a sweat playing them, and I only tried the Novice level. I’m not so sure about the music, though – again, I’m on Novice, so this might improve once I get to the harder difficulties, but it didn’t always feel that my movements correlated to what was happening in the songs. I remember feeling similarly about the low level DDR modes, so I’ll definitely update when I dig deeper.

I’m happy to have the pure jogging modes added too. In the past, it’s been difficult to do any pure cardio for an extended period of time.

One major complaint I have though is that these features are totally separate from the Adventure mode – so I don’t get any exp or coins or smoothie ingredients for completing them. There’s also no good way to stretch in the game before and after your sessions outside of Adventure mode. Finally, and this is a really minor thing, but it doesn’t track your time in these modes! I usually base my workout on the amount of time I want to be moving (different than the time I actually have Ring Fit open, since making smoothies or going through menus doesn’t really count as active time). I guess I can do it manually with the new modes, but it was much easier to track it in-game.