When you select the main campaign, you are introduced to a narrator, and your physical guide, Tipp. Tipp is used to show you proper posture for the exercises you do during the game. These two provide encouragement and guidance before and after your play session. They also provide your body an optional warmup and cooldown, and helpful tips about exercising and general healthy lifestyles. This segment is not only great physically, but it is highly recommended by fitness professionals to warm up and cool down before any exercise. The advice and support from these two characters also made me more invested in coming back and hearing what they have to say next. 

Gameplay is Ringfit's strongest feature. During the main campaign, you jog in place in order to get from point A to Point B, and in certain situations high kicks and other cardio exercises to get through rough terrain; you’re always moving. In Wii Fit, Nintendo’s previous well known health game, when you were instructed to jog in place, you were instructed to do it without lifting your feet. This was because you were standing on the Wii Balance board, an expensive piece of equipment that probably wouldn’t appreciate you stomping your feet as you try to beat your previous time. Because of this movement limitation, it was more difficult to get your muscles engaged and go all out and make some sweat. Ring fit solves this problem with the leg strap, no need to worry about breaking anything as you speed through.

The true workout begins when you find yourself in a battle. In traditional RPGs, you often attack with a specific set of moves that you selected. The same can be said here, but what differs is that you have to act out the attack. All of the moves are actual exercise moves and come in four categories, which may have an advantage depending on the battle. The categories are arms, legs, core, and yoga. Depending on your enemy’s color, it may be more pertinent to your survival to select a certain exercise that will deal more damage. Not only do you have to do the exercise, it also detects how well you do it, dealing more damage to the enemy if you do it well and energetically. This immerses me and makes me feel like I’m actually playing a literal ‘active’ role in the battles, which can not often be said in RPGs. 

The rest of the RPG elements are very simple, purchasing different exercise clothes to replace armor, smoothies replace potions, and you also have a solid-sized skill tree. Although simple, it is enough to keep you thinking and on your toes, as they often have to be utilized, unless you want to lose during a battle or have one hell of a workout to defeat a boss.

The main story has you in the shoes of the classic silent protagonist who accidentally releases an evil workout dragon named Dragaux. And it’s up to you and this strange ring person you carry like your Ring-Con named surprisingly, Ring, to save the world from Dragaux’s dark influence. That’s all for the story. Understandably, the game focuses more on the exercise-oriented gameplay than a heavy plot, but it really still felt too bland and uninspiring. I would often mind myself skimming through the dialogue, disappointed and annoyed at the surface level story. I feel having more than the cycle of “Oh no Dragaux is in this world, we must stop him! Yay we defeated him, oh no he got away! Oh no Dragaux is in this world now, we must stop him!” would be great. The setting is segmented and has little connection to the other locations as well. This game has practically no world building.

The UI is clean and crisp, which leads to easy navigation, even if traversing through the menu with the Ring-Con movements. The game records all relevant information about your past sessions and has an in-depth settings menu. If you weren’t a fan of Ring’s… interesting quips and “encouragement”, there is an option to change voice languages while keeping English text. You can feel supported while you’re blissfully unaware that Ring for some reason is complimenting your sparkly sweat. In addition, RingFit also gives you the freedom to change the intensity of your workout. Tipp also asks you every time before your workout if you want to change the intensity, and asks you after the session how it went. I have actually utilized this a lot, and used the moment where they asked to reflect on the previous workout. Another way to ensure that RingFit can be played by almost anyone is the option of certain assist modes. This replaces certain actions with button controls, for those who may not be able to do all the actions the game asks for. If you are concerned about making too much of a racket while going through your adventure in RingFit, they also have a silent mode, which replaces all actions for traversing the map with different variations of squats. 

The graphics of the game are very bright and colorful, reminiscent of the highly celebrated Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I catch myself often during the middle of the fight focusing on a cool lens flare as I try to survive another set of knee kicks. Speaking of which, the enemies in this game are adorable, many of which are designed to look like traditional exercise equipment. From what I’ve seen, these are well designed, but I fear that if these are the only ones in the game players will lose interest quickly. I wish that even this set of monsters had something more to connect them to the worlds they are in. If in the dark world, make them more sinister looking and make them look more like Dragaux. The other people are fine too, the main cast is well designed, and the less important NPCs get the job done. 

Finally, the bonus content. First is QuickPlay, where you can play a series of mini challenges, plus all the minigames. You also have access to a custom exercise mode where you can select exercises from the game. My complaint is especially with the custom mode is that you are not provided with any of the settings you had: no special voices, no customized character, and especially no warm ups or cool downs. I really wish there was an option to access these modes in your own account. After the custom mode is multitask mode, where you can complete certain small exercises with the ring. Doing this rewards you with bonus experience. Finally the rhythm game. A bonus update occurred in March 2020 which gave us a rhythm game of all things. Surprisingly, once you get up in difficulty, it’s a very intense micro workout. 

RingFit wasn’t on my radar until last April, when I had to move out of my busy hustling life at Ringling campus back to my small quiet home in northern Pinellas County with my parents. I went from moving non-stop almost all day to a completely stagnant lifestyle. It wasn’t until two weeks before I returned to campus, a whole almost nine months after isolation began, I decided to purchase the game after lots of research. I had played Wii Fit in the past, with the hopes of losing weight in my early teens with no success, thanks in part to the strange selection and the restrictions of the Balance Board. RingFit took all the mistakes of Wii Fit and turned them into strengths, as the work outs I have done with RingFit has made me sweat and feel the burn more than any other exercise I had ever done in my life, which may or may not have to do with the fact I have been a potato for the past three fourths of a year. I am eager to see how far I have come during the next few months, while quickly skimming through all the boring dialogue on the way.

 

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