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Friday, October 8, 2021

Ring Fit Adventure Fitness Log Week 47: Beginning FITNESS MASTER Mode

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Here is what Fitness Master is about.

As I promised last week, this week I'm playing Ring Fit Adventure again after not having done so since July 9th. I do need to get back into it—my endurance is slipping, based on how less proficient I am at performing tasks like vacuum cleaning the castle rooms. I did stop because on July 9, I finished Ring Fit Adventure's Extra Fitness mode and proceeded to go off to the Tokyo 2021 Olympics held later that month.

Ring Fit Adventure Fitness Master ultimate challenge select world
Well, nothing in World 47 is an ultimate challenge.
Perhaps that'll change?
Also the image implies World 47 has Lv. 295 in the name, but it's Lv. 286.


When I turned Ring Fit Adventure back on on Wednesday and went to Adventure, Tipp was happy that I finally came back and said I've unlocked another whole world with even stronger enemies: Fitness Master. There, at World 47: Fitness Master Lv. 286, Dragaux and the Four Masters were inspired by my drive to become even stronger, so they, too, want to become stronger. And then Dragaux wanted to change how things worked and gave me Level 4 versions of every Fit Skill, which then prompted a message saying I've unlocked every Fit Skill in the game.

Ring Fit Adventure Dragaux gives level 4 Fit Skills dialogue
Ring... One could always use whichever Fit Skills in Fit Battles.
Moves just had cooldown so you'd have to vary them, and some Fit Skills were blatantly better than others.
If Fitness Master truly wanted to be difficult, they'd force you to use pre-determined skills for every single level.


The gimmick of Level 4 Fit Skills, and really the entire Fitness Master playthrough, is that all skills now have equivalent stats. All five-range skills have 655 base power; all three-range skills have 745 base power; and all one-range skills have 1000 base power. Perhaps even more importantly, they now all have 0 recharge, meaning you can use the same skill consecutively for an entire match. This means which Fit Skill to use is determined entirely by what the player wants (and Titles to collect—which are based on using a certain Fit Skill for thousands of repetitions on a save file) as opposed to game design... which I'm not sure I like.

Well, there's some game design in terms of colour effectiveness. Note that this world is based off of World 24: Extra Fitness Lv. 181, which... didn't get a full log to itself. Anyway, the first/only fight of Beginnia was a mere Red Hoplin, which I could one-round KO with a super-effective Front Press (a three-range Arm Fit Skill, so it had 745 base power), meaning I didn't experience using the same Fit Skill consecutively. (Back in World 24, I could also one-round a Red Hoplin with a super-effective Fit Skill, too.) I'm level 343 at this point, with almost 50,000 currency in my pockets. Despite an apparent power boost from the enemies (though the recommended level went from 284 last time to 286 now), I'm still very overlevelled, and I was granted a big power boost with these skills. Still, using a Tree Pose (base power 1000, not super-effective) didn't one-round the Red Hoplin in the next level, Transient Temple, so in that sense using super-effective things is still important if you want to go through levels faster (assuming one doesn't just skip enemy fights to begin with). I did Tree Pose again right after to finish it off, though! There continues to be no threat from the enemies in terms of their damage output.

At the risk of completing the whole world in one day, I decided to tackle one of two things I wasn't able to complete during Extra Fitness. I returned to World 45 for the purpose of going to its Core Crushing (Advanced) Game Gym. I wasn't able to S-rank it before—the only minigame I failed to do this in. The objective of this minigame is to hold the Ring-Con sideways and into your core, and twist your hips left or right to have your character twist a giant smashy-bat into rows of robots. You need to twist hard enough to get 100 points per robot, or else you'll only get 50 points with a weak hit. Some robots have shields that require you to twist in a certain direction. The challenge is that you have to release tension in the Ring-Con between twists, and the metagame is to spend as less time doing that as possible and as much time doing the point-producing twists. The issue with that is that you won't know until you twist whether or not you've relaxed the Ring-Con enough, and if you didn't, you'll be stopped by a message and that can be a run-killer with how much time it takes off the clock.

On my first try, I got 13,150 points... and my highest record from months ago was 13,200. Seems like I haven't much lost muscle memory here.


Core Crushing Ring Fit Adventure 14000 points rank A
Am I fundamentally playing this game wrong? Or did the developers not play test it?
What does it take to get Rank S?!


My second try? I got a new high score—14,000 points! WOW! Surely that's enough for an S rank? ...Unfortunately, no. Still an A rank. I cursed to my television screen. After that, I just sucked. I got stuck in inconsistent runs where the Ring-Con refused to consider itself relaxed. I continued until my time spent doing this more than matched my time spent going through the first 66% of World 47, and stopped playing since it was quite clear I wouldn't be S-ranking with this tilted mood.

On Thursday I woke up with this... very noticeable soreness on my stomach. Most definitely due to all of my Core Crushing attempts (and failures).

Skipping to Friday, most of that has subsided, so it's time to finish World 47. Dragaux claims that he'll rise to the challenge of making a Dragaux Stadium worthy of challenging my obviously demonstrated skills, and then we can have a delightful training session.

Ring Fit Adventure Fitness Master World 47 Dragaux Stadium overcome all obstacles
Well, by the sound of this, it seems like Dragaux has put in a lot of thought about this Dragaux Stadium design.


Unfortunately, the Dragaux Stadium was literally just a big set of stairs from my starting position to where Dragaux was doing some poses. That's not a challenge. Dragaux did not rise to anything and put zero effort, though I had to raise my elevation up the stairs to him.

Ring Fit Adventure Dragaux boss dialogue Fitness Master anything to teach you anymore
Is this how all of the dialogue in Fitness Master is going to go? This'll be very boring.


Dragaux is pretty much admitting that I'm the strongest person in the land... by far. So I six-round KO'd him with whatever single-target Fit Skills I chose. It doesn't really matter what I picked since they're all the same. Dragaux just did punches with no super attack or anything, though I admit it was physically painful to Ab Guard his attacks because that involves pressing the Ring-Con into my stomach, which is still in pain from the Core Crushing on Wednesday. When I beat him, he dropped a Citrine, just like in World 24.

Ring Fit Adventure World Week 47 Fitness Master Lv. 286 Exercise Log
This world would've been finished in about 16 minutes if I wasn't physically crushing my core at the Core Crushing Game Gym.



Will the extremely repetitive nature of playing through this game for a third time count as a mental obstacle that Ludwig will have to face in every Dragaux Stadium (and every other level)? At least the dialogue is different, but if it's just going to be every character talking about how great Ludwig is, there won't really be anything interesting to document in the Fitness Logs. Is Ludwig making a mistake? How should he approach this series moving forward? Would you like to know the specific Fit Skills he's using over and over? Please provide your feedback in the comments.


You can learn more about Fitness Master's predecessor, Extra Fitness, at this dedicated Extra Fitness primer article.
Next week's Week 48 Fitness Log! It's even more boring.

2 comments :

  1. Well it’s about time!

    If the dialogue isn’t interesting I think we would all understand if you just ended this series. I mean this is the third time your gonna be doing this. Maybe you could buy Big brain academy and Chronicle your mental acuity.

    And uh fight racism too.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. My mental acuity is already spot-on! Or else this website wouldn't be as good and it'd be like, I dunno, Kotaku or some trash site like that.

      (More on Kotaku later today.)

      Delete

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