Ring Fit Adventure Fitness Log Week 19: The Robot Kingdom

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Robots can't get coronavirus...

So you know that KoopaTV has a new staff member, Heavy Lobster? It also has Ring Fit Adventure. I don't know if robots can lose weight (is it trying to become Slim Lobster?), or if the Leg Strap even fits around Heavy Lobster (or where it would be attached), but I figured that I would take advantage of Ring Fit Adventure's Multitask Mode and donate some reps to Heavy Lobster. As for the fitness logs, I don't expect Heavy Lobster to note its progress on KoopaTV's web pages like I've been doing on a weekly basis for KoopaTV's Fitness Fridays. I'll note here that I'm playing the game at the maximum difficulty level, 30.

Thanks to SOCIAL DISTANCING, I won't be near Heavy Lobster to see what it will do with the 500 extra reps.
But I figure it'll thank me later.

This week is a continuation of Week 18's trek into Chapter 19: Getting Rusty, taking place in the Robot Kingdom. It's very appropriate for Heavy Lobster, then. Not as appropriate for me, but we'll see.

The first thing I'm doing is taking on the Fitness Gym I was too scared to do last week, the Upper Arms Set. It involves many repetitions of five Arms Fit Skills, being...

1. Back Press (x30)—Simple beginning to the set. Hold the Ring-Con in back of your head while standing, and press it in until the game tells you to stop pressing it. Keep it pressed the whole time it tells you to press it and you'll get 100 points every time.
2. Tricep Kickback (x40)—Take a step forward with your leg, put that side's arm on your leg, and extend your other arm holding the Ring-Con backward. Alternative explanation: Do a dab, except instead of having your arm cross your neck, it rests on your forward front knee. Repeat for the other side. 20 per side. I'll note at level 30 in a fight, you do 24 per side. Click here and scroll down to the fourth-from-last picture for extensive images of Tricep Kickback in action.
3. Overhead Arm Twist (x60)—One of my favourite Fit Skills in the game. Stretch your arms out high above you (to make a V shape with your head at the bottom point) with the Ring-Con in the hand of your choice. Then just spin your wrists around. Very easy to get 100 points in every time, and these are in rapid succession. Make sure your ceiling is high enough for this—mine just barely is.
4. Overhead Press (x30)—Hold the Ring-Con horizontally above your head and push it in 30 times. If you falter in your push, you won't get 100 points.
5. Bow Pull (x40)—My least favourite of this set. Hold the Ring-Con like a bow in front of you (your hands, elbow, and shoulder should all be level, and the left grip is in front when you do the right side first; swapped in the second half) and pull the Ring-Con. I personally find it easier to do it sort of wrong and have the Ring-Con behind my shoulder and pull it backwards.  Actually keeping the Ring-Con fully pulled for the whole repetition is fairly difficult, so getting 100 points every rep is hard.

I'll note all five of these put together takes a little over 11 minutes of in-game time. Still, I got an average score of 99 points, and the Overhead Side Bend Lv.3 recovery Fit Skill as a reward for completion. (It heals an overlive amount of 14 hearts and I'll never use it.) IMMEDIATELY AFTER, a town request opened asking me to do the Fitness Gym all over again, with 2 Amethyst as a reward for clearing with an average of 90 points or more. Alright... I'll get it out of my way so the rest of this week will be smoother sailing... That puts me at 22:09. The last thing I need to do for the week to be smooth sailing is this world's Battle Gym request, which is to clear it only hitting one enemy at a time.

Left-to-right: Cobalt Matta Ray (squishy healer), Cobalt Puffersquish (bulky attacker), Red Dark Eagle (squishy attacker),
Malachite Puffersquish (bulky attacker), Malachite Megaphauna (squishy offence/defence buffer).
If you can only attack one enemy at a time, kill the buffer first. Then the healer. That's RPG good sense.

And that's my whole forty minutes (in-game time... much more in real minutes) on Sunday. Three things. Three very time-consuming, grueling things. Robot automation is gonna make this easier one day soon, right?

This is a fitness log, so I can discuss other things besides Ring Fit Adventure as long as it's related to fitness. I went outside Monday afternoon and took a walk for the first time in nearly a week. I haven't had face-to-face interaction with anyone besides my family inside the castle. I gotta say, fresh air is overrated. It was much colder than inside the castle, and walking past possibly-infectious smiling old people was scary. Then there were a bunch of young children riding around on their bicycles in the middle of the road without a care in the world. The whole scenario was detestable.

I'll gladly do my cardio through Ring Fit Adventure and, for now, just interact with robots and monsters. However, there is a HUMAN LADY in town who said she got her fortune told (...presumably by a robot?) and it's a bad-luck fortune. It may improve only if she defeats two Cobalt Belldogs. For some reason, she wants ME to go and defeat them. ...Well, alright, I'll keep an eye out in the next level, Ohoh Valley. The first fight in the level happened to be with a Cobalt Belldog! I also levelled up to level 165, giving me my 14th heart container. And just to complete the request as soon as possible, I quickly did the level over again. She gave me 800 coins for defeating two Cobalt Belldogs.

The next level is Ohwanwan Route, blocked by a thirsty robot who needs Pomegranate Juice. After providing the robot with the juice to refuel it, it thanked me, leaving Ring fascinated. By the way, there's another Cobalt Belldog fight in this level, at the enemy five-pack right before the end-goal. After Ohwanwan, there's ANOTHER BATTLE GYM. Blargh. Two in one world? So much for smooth sailing. Still, I cleared its 5 rounds in 10 turns.

The next level is Wanohwanoh Way, with our final starved robot, a gold one, that wants a Blueberry Smoothie. Ring doesn't know how to feel about how impressive it is. It's too good for him. The most interesting thing about Wanohwanoh Way is Ring's digression at the beginning:

Ring with the callback to the titular character Daddalus from World 12.
I really like that. Even though I don't know how that results in an anti-monster beam.

After completing it, Ring realises he's been too distracted by the robot technology and muses we should go after Dragaux, who has had a lot of time to train his arms. Instead, I went through Wanohwanoh Way again, this time at the request of Dashley's Marathon of Youth, wanting me to clear it in 220 steps. It's easy to do it in half that amount, for a simple 800 coin reward. And that's enough for Monday!

On Tuesday night, I ran through Wanoh Hills without drinking any smoothies because a robot in town requested me to. That happens to be how I'd go through there normally. I didn't even have to drink a sip of milk in real life for this. (Only immediately after the level was done.) By the way, not that it matters anymore, but there are two Cobalt Belldogs in the five-pack set of monsters for the level. For completing this, the robot awarded me the Pink-Grapefruit Smoothie, which is the ultimate revival smoothie, bringing you back to life with 8 hearts should you fall and drink it.

The final course before Dragaux's area is Ohohoh Tower. For some reason, it's really foggy, which has long been established as an unwelcome mechanic. Much of the gameplay involves squat-trampolines and overhead pulling zip-lines into the foggy morass, broken up by monster fights. (The second one also has a Cobalt Belldog.) 

Yeah, I just love going through this zipline with all of these pretty visuals to look at!

Special mentions to the fact that, upon levelling up to level 168, I unlocked Thigh Press Lv.3 (which is not only one of my favourite Fit Skills, but also the most powerful so far at 615 base power) AND got enough Skill Points to spend those to unlock the last Attack Power +15 on the skill points tree, which means my offence is at its maximum. I have enough power to one-round knock-out any generic enemy, basically.

With the next level being Dragaux Stadium, two more requests opened up. One is from Hubby wanting me to give him a Red Mix Smoothie and a Pomegranate Tea in exchange for two DIAMONDS. These have a resale value of 300 coins, and will apparently be necessary for buying items from the General Store later. The second request is to go to the second Battle Gym and clear it only with Abs Fit Skills, which should be easy enough to do, since Abs Fit Skills are amazing. Actually, I completed it in only 9 turns, which is somehow less than the 10 turns when I was playing normally. Wow. The reward was two more diamonds.

I didn't play the game on Wednesday, though I intended to. I decided that I'd patronise my local Chinese food restaurant so they wouldn't go out of business, and though I ate around 3 PM, I misjudged how long it would take my body to digest the large-sized chicken-fried rice without feeling incredibly sluggish.

On Thursday night, I went right to Dragaux Stadium, getting past the level that was mostly Back Pressing on a rail cart. Dragaux is red with fury... or arms power, I guess. And he has many friends: Garnet Matta Ray+, Dark Megaphauna+, himself, Garnet Megaphauna+, and Dark Matta Ray+. These exist for healing and buffing. Horrifyingly, on turn 1, the two Megaphauna+s gave the whole enemy party a great buff to both offence and defence. It's only right I drink some smoothies to make all of my attacks buffed and emulating a red colour, too! Like the two previous Dragaux fights (abs and legs), Dragaux has two health bars, but also has a weakness. On turn 2, Dragaux actually debuffed me with an effect I've never seen before: His eyes flashed, and I was debuffed out of drinking smoothies! I suppose that's the equivalent of a Silence status in other RPGs.

Incidentally, Dragaux's arm muscles are the same size as they've always been.

After four rounds of attacks, Dragaux lost his first health bar, and my fear of level 30 was finally realised: Defending against his super attack required a sustained Overhead Press that didn't last 40 seconds like it did while I was at level 29... it took a full dang MINUTE. And unlike previous fights, Dragaux actually went down with a fight after his super-attack, with his two-fisted overhead punch doing a massive eight hearts of damage. That's scary enough I actually had to drink a healing smoothie. Yikes!

Dragaux actually HAS been putting some work into his arms! It's not just a colour change!
This can 2HKO!

But I was able to defeat Dragaux anyway, since that's kind of my job as the protagonist. Dragaux laments that he needs balance and flies off to World 20. I'll go there in a little bit, but I want to 100% World 19 first. 

Dragaux is disoriented and dazed after my last attack, which has a random chance of happening.
As a result, I can attack him with Push & Pull Rushes.
This is basically Punch-Out!! where you rapidly punch your opponent while they're stunned.

After Dragaux's defeat, three overworld chests opened up, each also guarding a Game Gym. From left to right, these unlock...

Chest Contains...	Game Gym and Reward	Request and Reward
Peach Shake	Smack Back (Advanced) for Guru Gear (top)	Clear without taking damage for 2 Defense Drinks
Guru Gear (shoes)	Thigh Rider (Advanced) for 400 coins	Land between 1000 and 1500 points for 800 coins
One Amethyst	Dreadmill (Novice...foggy edition) for 2 Strength Drinks	Clear with 8000 points or more without standing still for 800 coins

Well? Do you know which lane the tokens are coming down and where I should be running to receive them?
CAN YOU SEE THAT?

You all should know that Dreadmill in the fog is absolutely horrible. However, the request version did NOT have fog. Only the initial version. That's a very good thing, because that'd be pretty much impossible otherwise, since you can't really see the coins in the fog, especially the ones that require jumps to get.

With that, World 19 is 100% cleared! Moving onto... World 20: The City of Open Eyes. Dragaux is making a racket in Dragaux Stadium, and this city (with a town) seems to be in his control. It's also filled with warp zones. The townsfolk are not only sleep-deprived, but Dragaux has influenced them into believing that sleep is bad. Somehow, people's lack of sleep is connected to Dragaux's power?

At the start, I have two options: Go right to some kind of boss fight, or go to a Fitness Gym above town which stars the Trapezius Set. I...might as well do that... It allegedly works my back muscles by...

1. Overhead Lunge Twist (x40)—Take a step forward and raise your arm above your head while holding the Ring-Con. Twist the top half of your body by a quarter-circle. You'll do this for 20 reps for both directions. Pretty easy Abs Fit Skill.
2. Overhead Bend (x30)—This is the bowing Abs Fit Skill again where the Ring-Con is raised above you and you bow forward a bunch.
3. Bow Pull (x40)—This was already covered much earlier in the article. I dislike that it's back.
4. Back Press (x30)—Normally not a problem at all, unless your arms are very tired from Bow Pulling.
5. Warrior III Pose (x28)—For some reason, I'm much worse at being able to stand and bend down while on one leg now than I was before.
6. Chair Pose (x16)—This a pretty relaxing way to close this out.

OH MY GOSH THE FIRST-EVER SIX FIT SKILL FITNESS GYM. WAARRGH.

Screaming aside, I stopped playing on Thursday, but now it's Friday and I have to publish this article. But I'd like to get some progress into World 20 before heading off to the weekend, so we're going to go right away to the Temple of Balance and have a miniboss fight with Guru Andma and her Malachite Sufferfish and Dark Sufferfish. ...Ball? I think it's Ball (under mitosis) because not only is Guru Andma throwing out super energy attacks whenever she wants, but the two Sufferfish are throwing out super attacks too (at half health) that I need to MEGA AB GUARD. I had to do long, drawn-out guarding multiple attacks in a row on the same enemy turn.

On top of obnoxious super attacks, Guru Andma can also greatly debuff your attack power with a righteous look, and strike a magnificent pose to heal herself. She saved the most dreaded super attack for last: Her massive energy leg, requiring an extended Overhead Squat. On the in-game timer, defending against it took from 13:49 to 14:33, or nearly a minute.

I suppose it's rather magnificent that she can not only levitate in the air, but her ball comes with her, too.

Basically, Guru Andma was probably the most grueling boss battle of the game so far, with three super attacks (and two minions that themselves have two additional super attacks) and a wide variety of other nasty tricks, plus high HP and defence. I mean, it took nearly 18 minutes to complete. As a reward, I got access to the rest of the world (well, a warp zone) and treasure chest containing the Guru Gear pants. A town request features an old woman giving two Diamonds away if I “lend” her the full Guru Gear set, since she thinks a nice set of pajamas will help her sleep. She failed to sleep.

They fit her, though. (That's a fitness pun on my part.)

Behind the treasure chest is the Squat Goals (Advanced) Game Gym, which provided me a nice 400 coins for completing it. And the last thing I'll do tonight? Go back to the six-Fit Skill Fitness Gym for the “special promotion” being offered from town as a request. If I'm able to complete it with an average of 90 points (and I'm certainly able to... it just takes a very long time and is physically grueling) I'll get two Green Basil Smoothies, which are new, health-restoring smoothies that I'll never have to drink but need in my catalogue for completion purposes. It heals 11.5 hearts, recharges your Fit Skills, and cancels negative status effects.

Just to make it clear: All raising the difficulty level does is make it take much longer to do the same tasks.

Ludwig realised by the end of the article that, despite the emphasis on robots on the article's title, there isn't a single picture in the article featuring a robot, so he doesn't really know what to put as the picture when sharing on social media. He might as well keep complaining about the fog. Ludwig plans to write a formal review of Ring Fit Adventure when he's done with the Adventure Mode, and you can bet he will mention the fog as a negative.


The epic World 20 conclusion is here, at Week 20!
Red Dragaux returns at World 42/Week 42 of the KoopaTV Fitness Log series.
In World 43, Ludwig figures out the optimal strategy in the miniboss battle vs. Guru Andma.