Opinion: I Finally Finished Ring Fit Adventure, And It Might Be Peak Nintendo?

I must have some kind of record for Ring Fit, if not internationally (see: here), then at least for the West Midlands. I played 10 hours over the weekend, which probably sounds like a lot. I can confirm it was.

You know those charity fundraisers of dancing for 24 hours or whatever? It wasn't that. All I raised was my knees (a lot), the Ring (nearly as much), and my cat towards the ring to try and get it to jump through (once, he didn't).

But I fancied an excuse to finally dust off my file and finish it before 2025 was up, and so pitched this article and then realised last week just how much adventure there was still left to be had.

It’s been genuinely brilliant, a great game and a gorgeous vibe to engage with and inhabit for a bit. Here's some notes, only some of which can be attributed to the Stockholm Syndrome of largely running on the spot for six hours:

1) Ring Fit is one of Nintendo's most beautiful games ever

I am not just dehydrated and delirious, and yes, I have played Breath of the Wild and Yoshi’s Island and Super Metroid and Mario Kart World (I love Mario Kart World).

But Ring Fit’s colour is something else, verdant fields of wind-rippled grass with peach-pink pom pom trees, azure rivers, and dandelion showers with every ring squeeze. Sometimes a level is gilded in sunset gold, sometimes thick with mist. And all this with a sort of robust, pastel creaminess - like Skyward Sword set to Vivid.

I’m not sure if it’s just the bokeh or also the field of view or something that gives it such an open-air sense of stretching scope, but I know that just loading it up feels like adventure.

2) Its linearity is brilliant and the jump is brilliant-er

No one wants to go to the gym with that blank-page vagueness of what to work out today, pootling around the machines and then just deciding to do another ‘whole body’ session that starts with press-ups again. Clear direction is movement is progress. And in Ring Fit there’s always a direction, and that direction is forward.

Sure, there is a bit of back-tracking for items and some branching world routes, but nothing to bend the vector of onward. And each level is gloriously on-rails, the landscape expansive but the path laid out, with enough analogue interactivity in the moving and jumping to add swing in the tempo.

But it’s also a bit Sonic with its upper/lower level tiers, and suddenly seeing a gap in the bridge and hastily puffing the Ring-Con just so to get enough thruster-boost to casually flip across is so gratifying, I’d add it to the best video game jumps.

3) The writing is classic understated Nintendo

For an RPG it’s quite Ring Thrifty, focusing mainly on modelling enemies and boss-baddies and the charming couple who work in the shop (big fan of the wife’s criss-cross tights being made of tape measure).

The rest of the interactions are via low-stakes text window drama with NPCs drawn in that unique angular way. But within this you get a Robot World in which people speak in Binary (‘WANWANOH’), a sub-plot about a cyborg girl with literally Steel-y Buns and all sorts of other exchanges that don’t really add any real drama, but accent the whole game in lovely upbeat charm.

4) My sweat is so shiny and beautiful!

I know this because my (female-voiced, actually kind of endearing) Ring would say it at the end of some levels, which was quite uncanny. I am well known for my shiny sweat, after all.

But if you go straight downstairs without slapping on the roll-on before a marathon session you may start to get that acrid tang of old sweat, occasionally inducing a bin-juice wince. It was at about four hours in that I dreaded my own arm lifts.

5) Losing calories is gaining something else

People play games for different things, but I am particularly partial to movement. There is so much joy to be had in the compression of motion to fingers and thumbs, detaching it from actual body work to use it like a colour in a designer's palette.

And yet even when burning calories by playing Ring Fit, there was something wholesome in the exertion, something evolutionary endorphinous (this is not a word) and replenishing. It certainly offsets that slight feeling of ennui that can follow a 2am game binge finish. Call it evolutionary wiring, call it Protestant work ethic, but an arduous boss fight against Dragaux combined with actual physical ardour has a lovely back-patting richness.

As did my sugary chai midway through the day.

6) The boss level music is epic and might not even be the best

I actually bought the game at release because I heard the main menu music linked to on a forum. I’d thought the game looked a bit silly and on-the-nose, with its literal abs-as-shield and floating spirit feet for leg exercises and so on. But the reviews had intrigued me, then hearing that bright, poppy, electro-optimism sealed the deal.

I’m also partial to the cooldown music, and the calm voice of the lady who guides it, which is basically part of the texture. And the brass-blare when you do the victory pose sounds like Walking On Sunshine. And the winter level theme is great.

But! The chord sequence in the Drageux boss levels is epic and rousing and I can feel that slight lift in the legs and straightening of the back, living up to the showdown music, slightly revived by the drama.

7) Cats truly give no Ring Fits

Both were pretty good at not getting kicked by my flailing legs or whatever. But like I said my idea of Cat-Crufts instincts kicking in and them jumping through the Ring with nonchalant grace did not come true.

8) The UI is a treat to navigate

At Hour Five on Day Two I really appreciated this, splayed on the sofa and treating myself to a bit of RPG house-keeping: clicking across skill-point menus and flitting between worlds with pleasing speed; hearing the different harmonized tones as you boop across the main menu creating an impromptu remix; growing to like the the weirdly literal use of the actual box as the icon for the main adventure because everything has such a pleasant, player-forward vibe.

This is UI design as encouraging as a personal trainer, and then the California summer pastel and bossa-nova lilt of the smoothie-squeezing is a menu vibe you could book a holiday in.

But! This is all emboldened by:

9) The happiest of haptics

Seriously, the HD rumble deserves its own review, especially finding sweet spots of position and feeling that tremble of confirmation through the joy-cons, like Will finding areas of thickened air for his Subtle Knife.

I might be overstating this, but it really is one of the most pleasing uses of tactile affirmation in games.
Anyway.

10) Every time I run or go to the gym, I vaguely intend to do some mobility but never do

All the podcasts go on about it. My brother can squat like a 3-year-old making a sandcastle. But years go by and I still have the flexibility of a parking bollard.

But Ring Fit forces me to stand like a tree to bamboozle dangerous flying insect enemies (this is presumably not a transferable skill) and doesn’t give my girl that super-saiyan magnesium-burn hair of feedback unless I squat to the limits of my groin, now done so much that I’m converted or at least recalibrated.

11) Minigames Max fun

Seriously, these are the best minigames since Super Monkey Ball or Super Mario 64 DS (shoutout to Astrolander in Timesplitters 2, the best of all time).

Robo-Wrecker is a brilliant circular Whack-A-Mole, and Squattery Wheel sounds like the best kind of pun-first fun. In general there’s an old-school sense of kitchen-sink generosity from an era before the crutch of updates and patches, and with a one-chance exhaustive imagination of there never again being a chance to use this Ring Fit controller.

12) (Like this article) It is shockingly long

So I had to strategise.

I had done about 14 worlds after my first, ambling, intermittent half-decade with the game. 40-odd hours according to the Switch timer (which included a good amount of messing about with minigames and that Splatoon banger in the rhythm game). When I looked it up and found out there were 23 (!) worlds, I was impressed and a bit uh-oh..

It quickly became apparent that my previous random machismo choice to do everything at level 30 was not going to fly. Even at level 24, the amount of reps-per-battle was formidable.

So I put it down to level 1, which reduced the reps per exercise in battles and the time for long-holds. But there’s still a world to be traversed, a certain amount of paths to be jogged, sprinted, mud-trudged, high-kneed, canoe-rowed and flown across.

This gave things a meta-layer of strategy. Choosing to re-run levels with those rare persimmons (what a word!) to make a smoothie that would Double EXP to deploy only in a boss battle or prolonged battle arena. Or forcing me to sell precious gems like phosphophyllite (what a word!) to make enough money to unlock three-star skills in the skill tree like my beloved Russian Twist (level 3!).

The point is, sometimes you need an excuse to engage, and speed-rushing Ring Fit was a blast that made me lean into the game systems more than I had before.

13) It's been a lovely send-off for Switch 1 and for the year

Will there ever be a Ring Fit 2? I hope so, but am not confident. I had to bring out the OG Switch again to charge its rail track Joy-Con for the controller, surprised at the suddenly slightly hazy 1080p of the homescreen on my TV.

Will I ever use my Switch 1 for anything else? Again, I’m not sure - my Switch 2 can do most things better. But it can’t do Ring Fit without those old Joy-Con, and now I’m chuffed to have actually finished it. What else can I do with the right excuse?

Let’s go, 2026.