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Friday, November 15, 2019

Ring Fit Adventure Fitness Log Week 1

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - It's the first week of me playing Ring Fit Adventure!

Welcome to the first of KoopaTV's fitness log series, as announced last week. I never figured out what a non-ironic fitness/workout/weekly I'm-going-to-lose-weight blog actually looks like, so I don't have anything to parody as a model. Given that, I'm just going to experiment with formatting and content. If you have any recommendations or things you'd like to see, let me know in the comments section. Normally, I'd write this sort of thing at the end of an article, but I feel like being upfront because it's easier to write this than the actual content. Not sure what I was thinking to be honest.

Week 1 Impressions of Ring Fit Adventure


Ring Fit Adventure pwned me on Day 1, and that was just doing all the settings. I had to select options such as that I don't do any exercise for someone of my age group, and that I live outside of Canada. I told the game my weight and age, and I guess I'll tell you the former number as well.


Ring Fit Adventure Tipp settings weight pounds
I'm 140 pounds as of Sunday night (November 10).
A lot of that weight is my shell and I can't do anything about that. But I'd love to get back to 130.

Playing Ring Fit Adventure, and this is a bad mindset I have right now that I'm hoping I'll lose later, feels like “I'm going to exercise and have fun with it.” instead of “I'm going to have fun and get exercise out of it.” I want to think of it as a game first. But I'm not. I also really, really want to play other games now, and I haven't played anything else on my Switch all week.

Ring Fit Adventure Exercise Log; Week 1


Ring Fit Adventure has these super convenient exercise logs saved in the system that you can screenshot just for articles like this. Though in order to access it, you need to be playing in Adventure Mode, and that means you need the Joy-Con on your leg and the Joy-Con in the Ring-Con, which is an annoying bit of set-up just to get screenshots and refer back to the game to get skill names right.

Ring Fit Adventure Exercise Log week 1
For your information, “Time Exercising” isn't equivalent to “Time Playing”.

You'll notice I didn't play on Wednesday. That's because I had a long day at work, my right foot/ankle wasn't feeling good (slight pain to walk), and I was napping when I came home. When I woke up, I needed to write and publish that night's article before going to bed. Oh, and eat.

The game strongly encourages you not to overdo the amount of exercising, and especially if you're not feeling well. After each world you clear, it'll basically prompt you to quit and cool down. It's routine now to start it off with a warm-up dynamic stretch, play some levels in Adventure Mode, and then do the cooldown static stretching.

I got through the first two worlds in my first week. World 1, In the First Place, has Beginnia and Transient Temple, as well as Dragaux Stadium. Beginnia was my Monday, and Tuesday was the other two stages. Dragaux Stadium was a boss battle with Dragaux, and a theme so far is that Ring and Dragaux know each other and Dragaux really isn't even a bad guy. There's just DARK INFLUENCE involved with him.

World 2, The Land of Night, is supposedly where Dragaux is from. On Thursday I played Nightcloak Pass, got a treasure chest, and played Dashalong Tower. Today I played the Game Gym Robo-Wrecker (Novice)—there's a whole set of minigames that come with Ring Fit Adventure that I'm sure I'll see in future worlds; Disturbance Meadow, and another Dragaux Stadium. I guess Dragaux just sets up stadiums every world he flies off to.

So far, these worlds have a wide variety of fitness actions. You're jogging. You're doing high-knee movements to go up stairs and swamps. You're pushing the Ring-Con to shoot air blasts at crates and pinwheel doors, or pulling it to suck in EXP Medals. You're pushing it against your body to defend against enemy attacks or break rocks. And then there is the combat with Fit Skills.

Ring Fit Adventure focus on your breathing Ring
Whether it's when I played Wii Fit, actually tried going to the gym, or when I'm playing Ring Fit Adventure,
I kind of forget to take breaths as I'm doing fitness. Ring Fit Adventure provides you helpful (voice-acted) tips to remind you to do the right thing.

As of finishing World 2, I'm at level 9, meaning I have 6 Fit Skills unlocked. You come with the first four: Squat, Overheard Press, Knee-to-Chest, and Chair Pose. Then I unlocked Front Press and Standing Twist, which can hit multiple enemies but with weaker power. The game divides these into Arms, Stomach, Legs, and Yoga, and having just completed World 2, Dragaux gave me type effectiveness for combat (and then flew away to be the boss of the next World), which I expect to be the game's way to make me pick a balanced variety of Fit Skills, instead of just doing Knee-to-Chest and Chair Pose. (Anything to avoid Squats—doing 16 literal squats in a row is a lot more tiresome than the other moves.)

Combat is decent enough so far, but I expect it to get far more complicated than it is now because I know World 3 is when they start introducing Towns, which feature items. Plus, the type effectiveness factor.

As I'm typing this, my arms are kind of tired, actually. Pushing the Ring-Con repeatedly is definitely resistance training. While I was playing World 1, the game started me off on difficulty level 12. When I progressed to World 2, I opted for a higher difficulty level—and the game suggested 16, which I've been doing since. The difficulty levels don't seem to be in-game difficulty, but rather difficulty to get through your attacks—when you attack, you don't just do one repetition of the motions. You do a lot of them. At lower difficulty levels, you do less hits (less movements) and they do more damage. At higher difficulty levels, each repetition does less damage, and you're prompted to do more of them to complete your action. As far as I know, it adds up to the same amount of damage either way, but clearly the higher difficulty level is more physically exhausting.

And now I'm at 142 pounds. I didn't know I'd be going up in weight from playing this. Hmph. Though before I started, I had a scrumptious (gluten-free) choose-your-own stir-fry on Monday afternoon. ...Ring Fit Adventure stresses that you need exercise AND a good diet to get results.


Ludwig is looking forward to seeing World 3 and the town of NPCs contained therein, and he also wants to see more Dragaux because Dragaux still strikes Ludwig as a fantastic character. Ludwig's body doesn't look forward to it, though, so who knows if he'll play Ring Fit Adventure on the weekends. He realises he put a lot of game impressions in the exercise log section, so he obviously needs to figure out a template that makes sense for these fitness logs going forward.


Ludwig changes up his format for Week 2, as he goes through World 3!
Ludwig provides some more detail on World 2 specifically as he plays through an extra version of it on Week 25.

6 comments :

  1. Replies
    1. Whoa, you've been gone for a WHILE.

      I'm... around 65.5 inches.

      Delete
  2. For being one of the heavier species in the Koopa Kingdom, you weigh a lot less than what I expected you to. Tell me, what is your secret?

    ReplyDelete
  3. I am underweight. Will this game insult me and I have to keep it to myself because of thin privilege?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. No, Ring Fit Adventure is very wholesome and supportive.

      It uses the weight to do rough calorie counts. The game hasn't mentioned my weight in terms of fitness goals.

      Delete

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