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Friday, December 20, 2019

Ring Fit Adventure Fitness Log Week 6: Darkly Influenced Four Masters

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - HAIL LORD DRAGAUX.

We're now at the sixth KoopaTV Fitness Friday, featuring the wonderful Nintendo Switch game Ring Fit Adventure. Quite frankly, I'm at a point with the game where I'm actually really looking forward to what happens. There's definitely a story cooking up here, and it's motivating me to want to play more.

Week 6 is a very direct sequel to the fitness log for week 5, since week 5 ended with us encountering three of the four masters in World 5: Dragaux vs. The Four Masters. That leaves the beginning of this log to have us see the fourth master, Guru Andma, and fight Dragaux. Then we'll start playing World 6, and we'll see what meeting the Four Masters brought did for us.

Over my birthday (which was published about on the day of week 5's fitness log), I got a real professional super electric toothbrush, the Oral-B Pro 5000. I think that's somewhat relevant for a fitness log because Ring Fit Adventure often provides diet-related tips. So far, there's nothing yet on dental hygiene, but maybe there will be. Dentists certainly claim there will. (I have a dentist appointment coming up in a month. You may remember I wrote an article five months ago with the title, “Remind Me To Bring A Plushie To My Next Dentist Appointment”.)

I increased the difficulty up by one to... TWENTY-FIVE! The next level is the Temple of Balance. We meet Guru Andma, who says she has a pet exercise ball miniboss fight for us. Let's do it. We'll be doing lots of Warrior I and Warrior II poses, I'm sure. “Ball”, which Guru Andma encountered in a forest walk, is actually a giant Green Sufferfish. In the process of fighting it, I actually got knocked out by its Super Attack, and used my Peach Smoothie (which is exactly a Paper Mario Life Shroom) to revive myself. I brought the Open & Close Leg Raise recovery Fit Skill with me and it's way too much effort to treat my legs like scissors for 30 repetitions to heal hearts. Much easier to just drink spinach.

Ring Fit Adventure Guru Andma exercise ball World 5 balance
Hey, lady, this took place on Sunday. You only had to wait a couple of days from Week 5's log ending on Friday.

After impressing Guru Andma by defeating her pet ball (I didn't... kill it, did I?) all the four masters come together and express their agreement in how great I am. Now it's time to go for Dragaux! ...Or... it's time to go to the Thigh Rider (Novice) Game Gym, which involves riding a vehicle and jumping over bombs by pressing my thighs. (Thigh Squeeze Hold.) The motion is trivial—I'm asked to sit on a chair (I sat on a couch), place the Ring-Con between my thighs, and squeeze and hold to cover my automatically moving kart. Don't hold it just to jump. The tricky part is standard gamer skills—knowing when to land from your jumps so you can jump again to avoid bombs and collect the point tokens without having bad timing and hitting a bomb. At the end of it is a cool “squeeze as long as you can to see how far you can get for bonus points!” section.

Now I have two options. Do the requests in town (and become more over-leveled) or fight Dragaux. I'm going with requests. These are easy (make an Apple smoothie and then Apple & Onion Soup and give it to a guy so the game makes sure I'm not ignoring new recipes, get 2000 points in 40 seconds at Bootstrap Tower Game Gym, or land between the 1000 and 1500 point range in the landing strip in the aforementioned Thigh Rider Game Gym) or dreadful (go to the demonic Leg Set Fitness Gym and get an average of 90 points—I got 88 points when trying it my first time and never want to step foot there again).

(At this point I took a break from playing to get a hair cut—a dreaded activity. So I returned to the game later on Sunday.)

Then there is the guy who wanted me to go through Armie Temple only hovering (pushing the Ring-Con down facing the ground to make a wind gust, and then running with your Leg Strap so you actually move instead of floating in place), instead of jogging through it like a normal person. That ended up being “Low Ring Press Hold” for 54 cumulative seconds.

Let's go into detail about the evil Leg Set. Now that I'm at a higher difficulty level than last week, it goes from 18 Squats/Thigh Presses to 20 Squats/Thigh Presses and 48 Knee Lifts/Mountain Climbers to 50 Knee Lifts/Mountain Climbers. I REALLY don't want to do this again if I fail (especially likely with the 50 Mountain Climbers), so I'm going to admit I'm cheating at the game by keeping it paused in the Nintendo Switch's Home menu until I'm physically able to do more repetitions of the other exercises.

The thing about Mountain Climbers is that you're prohibited from looking at the screen due to the posture of the exercise. So you don't really know how well you're even doing because the point count is displayed on screen, which you can't look at, so there's no feedback. You just got to keep doing them over and over without an accurate indication of success, since Ring isn't around to scream “GREAT!” at you.

But... I went through it... and got... an average score of 98! That's my first S-rank anything in this game! BOOYAH! All that for only 300 coins, though. STILL. TAKE THAT. And that's all the requests I can do. There's three unplayable (for now) request slots in Select World, and Dragaux's lair. We'll handle that tomorrow.

Ring Fit Adventure Leg Set Fitness Gym average of 90 points or more mission request
THIS IS THE HARDEST MISSION IN THE GAME (so far) AND I DID IT!

Actually, Tuesday. Hm. Monday got skipped for some reason. I was all set to fight Dragaux, but all four of the Masters started screaming, and suddenly, two more requests opened up in town. The suggested fit skill in Dragaux Stadium 5 is Blue (Legs), but by now, the only item I haven't bought out from General Store 3 is the Atomic Contender set (boosts Leg skills by 5% damage if you're wearing the shirt, pants, and shoes). With the funds from the requests (2500 points in Bank Balance in 40 seconds; score at least 1500 points in Aerochute—trivially easy, I got 3850 and an S-rank; and show Honey the full Shadow Aurora set of clothing obtained from completing requests in the prior worlds) I can afford it and be well-equipped! 

After much Squat Hold platforming to even just get to Dragaux, I suddenly leveled up to level 40... and a whole new aspect of the game unlocked: the skill tree, which was mentioned in the preview materials but I admit I forgot about it. I now get a skill point from each level up, and I can spend those (and coins) on different skills that change my characteristics in battle, including new Fit Skills! Interesting stuff.

Ring Fit Adventure Spend Skill Points tree Warrior III Pose
The first thing I want is that Warrior III Pose, so the first skill I have to get is the +10 Defence.

The reason the game recommended blue skills is because Dragaux has FOUR Matta Rays that all heal him; two of them are blue and the other two are colourless. At some point in this boss fight, I physically broke down and couldn't do GREAT! Wide Squats anymore. Oof. Still, Dragaux's super attack this time was tossing boulders at us that we had to break with repeated Ring-Con air presses, as opposed to the rest of the game where it's ab holds that break rocks. The boulders each gave hearts... so I wasn't in danger of losing the battle. Just my mind. Apparently, Dragaux did something to the four Masters, and we must save them, which made the world's title of Dragaux vs. The Four Masters something that happened... but off-screen.

Ring Fit Adventure Dragaux the Four Masters annoying group of flies sent them for a trip boss dialogue
The Four Masters aren't very competent, apparently.

By the way, in Dragaux's battle, I used the Overhead Hip Shake for the first time. That's holding the Ring-Con above your head and shaking your hips around 50 times, left and right. Great fun. Great damage too (70) and 5-target range. I also learned the Yoga Revolved Crescent Lunge Pose, which does the most damage we've seen yet (130 base) with a single-target range. Can't wait to use it.

Ring Fit Adventure Tipp cooldown Dragaux heals himself against the rules
A cool thing about the game is that Tipp will remark about what you did during the Adventure in the cooldown stretches.
...Except he's sometimes an idiot. If it's against the rules for Dragaux to heal himself, why isn't it against the rules for me to heal myself?
I get hearts from boulders, recovery smoothies, an auto-revival smoothie, and Fit Skills dedicated to recovering all of my hearts!

World 6, here we come. The Shrouded Land. Buuut, another day, please. I'm sweating over here.

Today is Wednesday, and we've entered The Shrouded Land. The Shrouded Land is totally under Dragaux's dark influence. The locals here refer to him as Lord Dragaux, and he has apparently warped the minds of the Four Masters (who serve as Dragaux's guardians and personal trainers) and the population into serving him. Honestly, doesn't seem all that bad a gig. Not sure why we gotta put an end to this, so rather than move forward to the Four Masters, let's head to our first-ever Battle Gym. 

Ring Fit Adventure World 6 Shrouded Land Lord Dragaux perfect ruler blue-haired Lady in town
This Lady not only has a great hair colour, but she's absolutely correct about Lord Dragaux.
Can I date her?

This is a continuous battle with multiple rounds of enemies (in this case, three rounds) that measures how many turns you take to get through them, as well as your ratio of Great! action commands. Your Fit Skill recharge times carry over between rounds, so you'll want to optimise saving Fit Skills with longer recharge times. I did it in 7 turns and 100% Great!, so I got an S-rank. (The Battle Gym also has unique background music.) By the way, the Revolved Crescent Lunge Pose is fairly easy to do. Simply rotate the upper half of your body back-and-forth from the front to the left side, or the front to your right side. Keep your lower body still.

Also to distract us from the Four Masters is a warp zone to a land of three treasure chests. Guarding some of them is the Squattery Wheel Game Gym. There is a desirable vase on the left side, and you need to operate two robots (by squatting to adjust for height, and pressing in the Ring-Con to make them start removing clay) to make your blob of clay resemble that vase. Then press a button on your Joy-Con to evaluate. However, the blob is constantly spewing more clay, slowly undoing your prior progress. I got 0 points (Failed) on my first try. ...And tried again and still got 0 points. They have high standards! Try three? 16 points... a failing C-rank. Try four was 68 points, a B-rank. That's all I need. Hardest minigame so far! Moving on, that gets me access to two treasure chests... Two peaches, and the Peach Smoothie recipe! (You may remember the Peach Smoothie as the game's Life Shroom.) Let's go make a Peach Sm-... oh... you need... THREE peaches to do that. Curses. The other Game Gyms blocking the last treasure chest is the return of Robo-Wrecker (still Novice, still easy) and the introduction of Smack Back (Novice). Smack Back has you holding a giant fan as you Upper Body Twist to the left and right to knock back frisbees at robots. The biggest challenge here is timing... a crucial gamer skill, which I have, and so I got an A-rank. The treasure chest contained the ridiculous-looking recovery Fit Skill, Seated Forward Press, which looks painful for legs and flexibility.

All of those diversions got me enough experience to level up to level 42, which got me enough skill points to unlock... WARRIOR POSE III. Awesome. It turns out Warrior Pose III asks you to stand on your leg, lift your other leg off the ground, and then bend your arms out forward while having your lifted leg go straight backward. You can get a Great! even if you don't reach all the way back, but it asks for a LOT of space in front of your TV. Well, you can do the whole thing not facing your TV if your room's aspect ratio is bigger that way, which mine is. Let's go check out the Four Masters. 

First is a dark-influenced Allegra at the Beaut Camp. That means leg skills, which means Wide Squats. This time, Allegra sics five super-powered blue enemies at me, led by the Blue Matta Slay, which can heal all enemies in one turn by sliding under them. Ring gives the very helpful advice that I should breathe in as I bend my legs, and breathe out as I get back up and extend them. That helpful bit allowed me to do much better with my Wide Squat than vs. Dragaux on Tuesday. I slayed the Blue Matta Slay. Allegra didn't snap out of Dragaux's control or anything, simply saying the other of the Four Masters will defeat me. ...Well, if I were her, I'd stick with Lord Dragaux, too.

Ring Fit Adventure Allegra Beaut Camp Shrouded Land Lord Dragaux undying loyalty
Allegra is clearly single-minded, but she's not the blue-haired chick I want. (TOWN LADY YOU'RE FOR ME!)

That ends my exercise for Wednesday. Thursday is a skip.

Now it's Friday, and next up is the Armando-sponsored miniboss at Arms-Race Gym, the Red Scuttleknell. (A giant enemy crab, but it's functionally a Slaking.) It attacks by raising its arms up (which takes a turn), and then slamming them down, which apparently does 3.5 hearts damage out of 5. Until you get it to half health. Then it becomes really mad and smashes the ceiling and sends a bunch of ceiling debris down on your head that you need to Ring Press to break, similar to Dragaux's boss fight from World 5. A Recovery Fit Skill is quite useful here, and the Seated Forward Press, which I mentioned a few paragraphs ago, doesn't actually involve you having to have great leg flexibility. It's measured by having the Ring-Con in front of you and pushing it to the ground while your legs are spread out by otherwise stationary.

Ring Fit Adventure Armando dark influence join Lord Dragaux
You can tell from that poofy gas effect around characters’ portraits if they're influenced by the dark influence.
Sounds like a drug.

Possessed Abdonis is next at Six Park, with his friend introduced by Lord Dragaux, the Yellow Stomper (and two Yellow Stepper+ buddies) named Absploder. A Banana Shake-boosted Overhead Hip Shake is enough to defeat the two Yellow Stepper+ in one round. Absploder has no special scary moves besides re-summoning two Yellow Stepper+ near the end, which did nothing because they all faint if you beat the Yellow Stomper. Abdonis retreated, opening the door to the Temple of Balance (and an easy Robo-Wrecker request) and leveling me up to level 44, getting me the Hip Lift recovery Fit Skill, which recovers more hearts than I even have.

Ring Fit Adventure Abdonis true friend Six Park Lord Dragaux
The true friend is the monster that's cowering behind faux-Claude.

Guru Andma awaits in the Temple of Balance. (Wait, that was the name of her place in World 5. They're reusing these?) Turns out Ball the Green Sufferfish isn't dead, just now powered up thanks to “Mr. Dragaux” and joined by friends, two Puffersquish+s. The balls got very deflated and demotivated once getting to around half health, so it was trivial defeating them. Guru Andma wanted to keep fighting, but Dragaux said it's his turn next. So be it.

Ring Fit Adventure Guru Andma powered up Ball Mr. Dragaux World 6
Guru Andma, before this statement, admitted that she's just here to beat me up.
(But Ball does all the work with her.)

...Well, a bunch of requests just opened (including a Beaut Camp housekeeper who needed it cleaned from monsters—this got me to level 45, and now I have six hearts). I'll take care of the rest of those... and Dragaux... NEXT WEEK!

Ring Fit Adventure World Week 6 Exercise Log Shrouded Land
I timed Tuesday to have EXACTLY 13:37 time exercising.

I guess the whole World 6 was just a bunch of miniboss fights and not much running, with that very minimal amount of distance traveled. I wonder what World 7 will be like! (As soon as we clean up World 6.)


As of publishing, Ludwig hasn't actually used the electric toothbrush. He charged it up and put the brush head on it, but it's just sitting there since he's suspicious of it and he doesn't trust it.


World 6 is cleaned up next week, which is also all about Allegra.
What makes a good fitness log? That's unclear, but Week 6 was voted the best Fitness Log of 2019.
Read about that dentist appointment and the Oral-B toothbrush here.
Ludwig fights the same minibosses again in World 29.

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