Nintendo has been all about motion control for some time, and with that motion is the desire to get you into shape. Its latest attempt to do that is with a Switch JoyCon strapped to you leg. Nintendo teased a new accessory for the hybrid gaming console last week at Nintendo Direct: a flexible ring you can push and pull to play… something.
On Thursday, the gaming company revealed the first use for what it’s calling the Ring-Con, a fitness adventure game where users will battle fitness monsters in order to save an extremely swole world. The game is called Ring Fit Adventure and looks like a fully fleshed out RPG that makes use of what’s essentially a workout accessory for the Switch console.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1orju1NsN8
The game has a pretty fun premise, too: An “evil bodybuilding dragon” throws the world into chaos, and it’s your job to strap a Joy-Con to your thigh, snap another into the ring and start jogging in place.
There’s a lot of running, some kayak-ish looking exercise, flying and some coin collecting. It basically looks like the next level of Wii Fit from the original motion-controlled system that Nintendo came out with in 2007.
The fitness battles you have with enemies are turn-based workout challenges, so you attack them by working out. Nintendo says there are four categories of exercises, and more than 40 in all. It’s kind of like a Wii Fit version of Final Fantasy, but the dragon is extremely jacked. It looks pretty fun, and the novelty of these workout games is often what gets people to try them out in the first place.
It’s tough to say whether buying the ring and game will be completely worth the, ahem, squeeze, but we’ll find out when the device and game drop on October 18.
