Ring Fit Adventure is probably old news to most people by now. I personally have just started this adventure and have been going at it for a week now. I wanted to share my experience with the game.

I used to be a regular at the gym before Covid hit. I would get an early rise each morning and go in for a workout before heading to class. This would give me a great surplus of energy for the rest of the day.

When Covid hit the gyms also closed. They've been open for periods before closing down again and I've been having trouble keeping up. I've been trying to go for runs but I cant bring myself to do it regularly. I just can't stand it. I go for a lot of walks but they don't give me that solid and good feeling after a good workout. Enter Ring Fit Adventure.

The basics

The basics of Ring Fit Adventure are quite simple. You strap one Joy Con to your leg and the other you fasten into a ring called the Ring Con. The Joy Cons of the Switch have pretty good motion detection and that's what's being utilized here. You move through the world by jogging in place which is registered by the Joy Con on your leg. You perform certain tasks in the world by doing different excercises utilizing both the Ring Con and the leg strap.

You can choose from a set of different game modes. The main focus of the game is the Adventure Mode. The story is quite simple but it's not really the focus of the game. What I like about Adventure Mode is that each stage is different and acts as a new challenge you need to overcome. Different stages will focus on working out different parts of your body. This means that no two workouts will ever be the same in Adventure Mode. You move through different worlds, meet people, go shopping for smoothies and clothes which enhance abilities and increases your stats, and by the end of each world you fight the boss. In between stages you can do mini games and other smaller challenges that focus on different muscle groups for extra rewards. I'm always fond of side content in games so I find that great.

As you run through the world, collecting ingredients for your smoothies, collecting coins, defeating monsters and doing a great range of activities you also collect EXP. This gives you a great sense of progression. By levelling up you increase your attack and defense stats and also unlock new excercises which can be used in combat.

You can also choose to workout with only mini games or by doing focused training on certain muscle groups in the Custom Mode. You can string together a range of excercises to something that suits you. These playlists can be saves as well so you can have a playlist for leg day, one for upper body and so on. Todays run in Adventure Mode was focused mainly on upper body so I went into Custom Mode afterwards to get in some extra leg excercises.

Combat

Combat is where the game really shines in my opinion. As you progress through the world you meet monsters and fight bosses. Combat is done by stringing together, for the most part, strength based excercises. These can range from simple squats, to planking and different press and pull excercises.

As you can see from the image above both enemies and excercises are color coded. Yellow excercises focus on abs and core, blue excercises on legs and lower body, red excercises on upper body like chest and arms. Matching the excercise colors with the colors of the enemies will deal increased damage to them. This means if a level has a lot of red enemies, which was the case with me today, you'll be doing a lot of arm and chest excercises.

Combat can also be enhanced with smoothies. As you run through the world you collect resources which can be squeezed into smoothies. Smoothies increase attack power to excercises matching their color, as well as heal you and some will make you find more resources or make you run faster. Making smoothies require you to press in on the Ring Con to squueze the ingredients. This means that even if you're in the menus and managing your smoothies and other things you're still doing reps that add up.

Stats

I love stats and this game gives you a lot of them. Booting up Adventure Mode you get to see a score card showing your total progress. It'll show you your total time working out, your calories burned and how far you've been running. As you're done you will also be shown a summary of todays workout. This shows you the same stats the earlier score card did. These can also be found later to compare your day to day workouts. The summary of excercises and reps done are my favorite though. It shows you todays numbers as well as your cummulative totals. For someone like me who loves to see numbers go up this is a dream.

One thing to note is that the "Time Excercising" stat tells you only that, and only in adventure mode. Time spent in levels and time spent doing excercise. It doesn't count time in menus and time done doing Custom Mode workouts as far as I'm aware.

Summary

I've been having a blast working out with Ring Fit Adventure. What really makes it shine is the diversity in activities. No two workouts needs to be the same and you get to feel progress both in the game and with your body. Every day I've been looking forward to getting home from work so I can boot up Ring Fit. When my workout is done and im exhausted and sweaty I'm disappointed because I want to keep going. And that's a good thing.

If you're like me and have been struggling with staying fit during Covid, and you own a Switch, I really recommend that you take a look at Ring Fit Adventure. I doubt anyone who enjoys games and fitness really can go wrong with this.

Now it's on to some "real" gaming. Continuing my journey through Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. I think I'm getting close to the end of the story with 18 hours played. Still a lot to do though as my completionist mind won't be able to put it down until every nook and cranny has been explored and every trophy has been collected. Hope everyone is having a great weekend!

All pictures in this post are in-game screenshots taken by myself.