Ring Fit Adventure is causing the speedrun community to really sweat.
Nintendo has been trying to mix fitness with gaming for over a decade with somewhat mixed results. Their latest attempt is Ring Fit Adventure, an action fitness RPG that uses the new Ring-Con to turn the Nintendo Switch into a fitness machine.
The game itself does a remarkable job of marrying fitness with classic RPG gameplay. Everything is laid out like a turn-based RPG where your attacks are done by performing various exercises. Different enemies are weak against certain types of exercise, while the Ring-Con lets you perform those exercises with customizable difficulty.
Each "world" in Ring Fit Adventure should give you about a 30-minute workout, with intensity ranging from Level 1 to Level 30. It does a great job of getting couch potato gamers up and moving, and we gave it 4 out of 5 stars for its engaging mix of classic RPG and fitness elements.
Ring Fit Adventures isn’t something you would normally associate with speedrunning, but if the game exists then someone will try to speedrun it.
However, the game presents some unique challenges for speedrunning. First, there’s the fact that it’s relatively simple to cheat the Ring-Con sensors to make it think you’re doing the exercises when you’re really not. The speedrunning community generally allows the use of such “exploits” in performing runs, but it’s generally frowned upon in fitness games.
So, Speedrun.com has two categories: Intended and Not Intended. Intended means doing the exercises in the way the game instructs you to, while Not Intended means tricking the sensors. There are also categories for each intensity level ranging from Level 1 to Level 30.
Level 1 speedruns can be done in 5-6 minutes since each battle only requires a few reps, but at Level 30, speedruns can be a grueling workout. Check out FlamegameVideos 29-minute, 33-second record to see what we mean.
So far, this is the record for a Level 30 run on the first world, but with 23 worlds to work through, a full speedrun is a true marathon.
Source: Kotaku