Episode 108 - Go Get 'Em Tiger, Grab That Ring - Ring Fit Adventure

Try to focus on maintaining the proper podcast! Welcome back to
NOCLIP! Today, after many months of preparation, our sweat and
tears (but fortunately no blood) have culminated in this episode
about Ring Fit Adventure! Ring Fit Adventure is a game about
exercising set within in a pretty self-aware RPG. You travel from
place to place and fight monsters, yeah, but all of your general
movement and attacks are performed by doing simple exercises like
squats and leg lifts. And that is ostensibly what we’re going to be
talking about today. However, if there was ever a way for a video
game podcast to analyze the mechanical feel of working out, we
haven’t found it, and the artifice surrounding the actual game
systems are so buck wild that they steal a lot of the focus. The
“Adventure” part of Ring Fit Adventure centers around a quest to
regain your ever-present companion’s powers to stop a comically
jacked dragon from wreaking havoc, all of which is nestled in a
very forgiving game that reminds you to take breaks at regular
intervals and to stay hydrated, far from the concerns of your
typical RPG protagonist. These things make Ring Fit both a real
novelty in the realms of both fitness games and RPGs and help it to
hit a ratio between carrot and stick that actually makes it worth
playing. We’re going to be talking about item management and fail
states in a game that wants you to keep playing it for your own
well-being, characters and voice acting existing where you kind of
didn’t even think about them as important elements, and we explore
the real and unreal universes lorded over by Tipp, Master of the
Space Between. Thank you for joining us again this week! This was a
weird one in a lot of ways, and if you didn’t play along, I can’t
say you’ll be spoiled exactly. If you did though, how did the game
work for you? Did it successfully trick you into doing aerobics in
your free time? We were personally surprised how much of an actual
workout it was and how little pretense it has for that workout,
unlike other games in the genre. Let us know in the comments or
over on Discord! Next time, we’re jumping back not just from very
active games but also to the far flung year of 2001 to talk about
Jak and Daxter, so we hope you’ll join us then.