So, today marks the date of my completion of the adventure main campaign (haven’t started new game+), and I wanted to write a review for it, but it struck me that most people usually look up reviews of this game to ask, “does it work to lose weight / make me fit” and the answer I’m gonna give to you is a resounding “it can (with proper dieting and routine)”
Which is always frustrating to hear as every exercise tool is always given this answer, I get it too, you just wanna be able to determine if you can get fit with this game but if you’ve ever been interested in losing weight you know that exercise is only about 25% of the deal, I’m not a nutritionist not even a huge fitness person so I’m not gonna tell you if its gonna work to lose weight or gain muscle, but what I am going to tell you, is ring fit adventure a good exercise tool? In my amateurs opinion, yes!
But as I’ve been introspecting in between my exercise sessions, I wanna write a little bit more so in this review ill go over some pros, cons and talking about the story of adventure mode and my personal story with the game, cw for eating disorder talk on the rest of this review.

Pros
- Obviously, it’s a good way to get exercise at home as a newbie, I didn’t know most of these exercises and frankly didn’t know how to do how to properly do 90% of any of them before playing the game.
- The game is really nice to you, I really mean it, I said this in an old review here, but the game constantly encourages you, and never shames you for lowering the difficulty or taking breaks in your routine.
- I may just be a huge daydreamy nerd when I’m saying this, but this game makes me feel like I’m inside an rpg, as dumb as this sounds, the visuals and the sound design made me feel like I was actually a hero struggling trough a cool fantasy adventure, the physical struggle that I felt doing the exercises didn’t make me feel like usual when I used to exercise, you know, bored, in pain, waiting for it to end so I could go to have some real fun, but instead it immersed me and made me feel like I was running around the world and actually beating monsters, it kept my mind out of the exercise and the goal of weight loss and instead made me feel that my goal instead of losing x weight was to go and defeat dragaux, not to say I didn’t feel the exercise physically I obviously did but when I did reps of some exercise I didn’t feel like giving up or just plain bored, I just felt like I was a good ole rpg hero and I was just casting a move that was strenuous, daydreaming is a good way to get me to do things, so the game tricked me into doing more and more time and putting more difficulty level as I went ahead
- The best thing about this game, I think , is that its not at all focused on weight, unlike Nintendo’s past fitness endeavor, this game only uses your weight ONCE, to calibrate your fitness level, it never brings it up again nor does it inflate your mii character and play a comic trumpet sound effect while telling you you’re fat unlike…other Wii balance board based game of Nintendo’s roster….which is really good for someone like me whose weight is something that can be pretty triggering as I’ve dealt with eating disorders in the past and the urgency to lose weight really triggers it, if I had a Wii fit and I had to weigh myself EVERY DAY and see my bmi charting I would have basically died.
- A small little pro that doesn’t really matter if you’re just in it for the training stuff it doesn’t really “matter” but GOD I LOVE the sound design of this game, not only the instructions given by ring, the sound effects can make you tell if you’re doing an exercise well or not, and not to mention THE MUSIC while you’re in battle, the tempo changes while you’re doing more faster or slower exercises, and did you guys know that since some of the exercises are synced to the bpm of the background music, and the boss music is slower than the regular battle music, making you feel the exercises more, and so making the boss battles way harder physically, that’s really fucking neat!
- This is gonna be a hot take but…. I LOVE RING!! I know that he says weird stuff sometimes, but he is encouraging and nice and my only personal trainer ill ever have because ring would never be a dudebro pt he’s very nice….
cons
- Since this is all solitary, and the switch peripherals aren’t perfect, there’s ways to fuck up the exercise you’re doing and it still counts it, good posture is key in exercise and if you unknowingly have bad form, you can not only not do as much as work as intended, but fuck up your back, sometimes both, so make sure to follow tipp as best as you can! Once I was doing mountain climbers and fell down and the game counted it as me doing perfect reps, lol.
- If your switch joycons are fucky (whose aren’t?) you’re gonna get interrupted a bit while working out, there’s countless times I’ve been interrupted by my left joycons batteries being super fucked up.

Lastly I wanna talk about the story a little bit since no one is really doing it, and ik talking about the story of a fitness game sound silly but it frustrates me that people just say that its an excuse for the exercise, which in technicality it is, but it so much more than that. Spoilers
The dark influence is a running thing in the game, the four masters and dragaux himself are affected by it, making them cartoonish villain versions of themselves, the dark influence is a metaphor for toxic fitness culture, no shit, but as simple as it is it really did hit hard for me.
Small trauma dump, So, I first started playing this game in 2020, I was 15 and I had always been overweight, and the game offered me some sort of way to move, I was having fun! I reached about world 16 until burnout hit me, hard, I don’t exactly remember why, probably some sort of depressive episode, and it only got worse when my father started doing remarks of me not keeping my routine, in the end I left it for about 3 full years, as now presential school had me extremely busy and I didn’t care much for my appearance at the time
That’s until we had to perform a dance in front of the school for our senior year and I started getting outright bullied for being fat, plus I had my graduation suit hand tailored and although I know that’s a great privilege, the pressure of the bullying made being measured all the time to make me even more self-conscious, so I quit the dance, and started going on a calorie deficit , I only ate up until 500 calories a day and most days even less, if I felt like I exceeded it, I forced myself to vomit, that small period was maybe the worst period in my life, in the end It all ended with my meds getting upped and I stopped myself from engaging in ed content, I went to my first college semester and everyone was way cooler about it, we weren’t teens anymore after all, I took walks from the subway station to my campus as my exercise and didn’t go up nor down ever that year, undisturbed I kept going up until this 2024 where as I organized my living room for Christmas decorations I noticed the ringcon collecting dust on one of my shelves, and new year new me, January first 20204 I picked the game back up, recalibrated and was surprised at how hard the game was now that my skill level was way up from the recalibration and I had a ton of fun, but the thing that really made me happy was seeing the characters realize their strengths and be freed from the dark influence
Long things short, the four masters are rid of the dark influence and realize that the toxic fitness culture that was ingrained into them made them over excerpt their bodies to make up for their problems, Allegra was jealous of her mentor, Armando just wanted a girlfriend, Abdonis felt alone and abandoned, and guru andma felt self-conscious of her age, and as I saw them accept their flaws and why the dark influence took over them, I saw myself in them, I was self-conscious of my weight and took weight loss to an extreme, feeling like I had to be skinny to not hate my body anymore, and now as I was taking normal steps to exercise and are in the process of booking a nutritionist that works with mentally ill people such as myself I saw myself in them as they understood their real strengths, and at the end, beating not dragaux, but his toxic mentality, and seeing he’s actually just a big softie who wanted to open up a gym but he was too afraid to be seen as too weak so he took training to a cartoonish extreme made me very emotional , and I know I get emotional over very small things but I’m not above being happy for a fictional cast of characters from a fitness game and seeing myself in them
Ring fit adventure isn’t just a silly exercise tool, it’s a simple yet great story on why we should avoid toxic fitness culture and that staying fit should be a tool to stay healthy and have fun, not to fit a standard, that’s important too.

(btw! if you read all this, thank you! im gonna reply to myself with my ending stats and gonna update it when i finish ng+ and ng++ if i remember!)