Review: (In)Accessibility in Ring Fit Adventure

I started Ring Fit Adventure with high hopes. COVID had halted most of my go-to fitness activities, and I was optimistic that Ring Fit would provide an in-home alternative. I’d been taking fitness classes through my school to keep moving, but this would give me some motivation to exercise on my own time!

When I found the accessibility settings, I was excited that they’d considered it at all. My shoulder makes everything that’s overhead difficult or impossible, but there’s a “shoulder assist” option! Unfortunately, I was disappointed by how limited the “assist” was. In the end, Ring Fit’s attempt at accessibility features left me frustrated and demoralized, but they may be enough for someone with consistent impairments. Even then it may still require some modifications or “cheating,” though.

TL;DR at the bottom.

Setting up the “assists”

Ring Fit Adventure is a fitness role-playing game for the Nintendo Switch where you defeat monsters through exercise. The titular ring is a controller device that you use for resistance exercises, and there’s also a leg strap that tracks your jogging pace as you play.

When you start, the game does some tests to calibrate to your strength, running speed, and intensity level. I had problems getting the strength properly calibrated, because it only asks you to squeeze and pull the ring once and then sets all your expected strength based on that. Because I have unbalanced muscle groups, I had to go back and recalibrate it to be significantly weaker because some of the exercises were impossible otherwise. (This seems like something that affects more than just disabled people, though, so the calibration system baffles me.)

Once it’s all calibrated, you can turn on “assists,” which are the accessibility settings in Ring Fit. They can be accessed by opening the menu with the left button and heading to the “settings” tab. You can select shoulder assist, knee assist, back assist, or ab assist.

The biggest problem is that assists only work in the overworld. Ring Fit Adventure operates like a turn-based role-playing game, where you run along a track and encounter enemies. As you run, you also jump over obstacles, open doors and chests, and collect rewards. The assist settings are meant to help with these activities. Instead of doing a squat or a ring squeeze, for example, you press a button.

You defeat enemies by competing sets of exercises, like squats, overhead presses, and yoga poses. However, assist mode does nothing to help you in battles. I think the idea is that you can work around this by customizing your attack move slots. This is easy to do later in the game, after you’ve unlocked many more exercises. Unfortunately, you start out with only four options, whether you can do them or not: squat, knee-to-chest, overhead press, and chair pose.

Each exercise has a cool-down period, so you can’t do the same attack turn after turn. This means that if only one attack is possible for you, you’re out of luck. There are no modified alternatives, like you might get in a fitness class. For example, even if you’ve had knee assist on the whole time, you’re expected to do full squats if you select that attack during battle.

I could go pretty deep into the question of whether the game should give modifications. There are many reasons that people need modifications besides a disability. But also, a game needs to be playable, and how much development time would that add? At the same time, my own experiences with fitness emphasize listening to your body’s unique needs, and this game seems to encourage the opposite.

I just don’t know why they bothered adding “assist” features if they wouldn’t more fully integrate assistance into the game. Turning on assist made me excited. I had tried it without assist first, and I felt left behind in ways I never did in my usual exercise. I thought that this setting would fix it! But it didn’t. If anything, it only made me more frustrated, because the attempt at making the game accessible didn’t go beyond the surface. I felt lied to.

Push through, cheat, or restart?

Say you’ve got something that makes it difficult to use your knees or legs. Squat, knee-to-chest, and chair pose attacks are all difficult or impossible. You can’t swap these attacks out until you level up, and to level up, you have to use the attacks. Your options are to push through it or fake the exercise by moving the joy-cons in the right way.

Pushing through a difficult exercise isn’t rewarding, though. The game really penalizes you for not doing an exercise as well as it thinks you can. Depending on how hard you squeeze, how well you time, or how deep you go in your exercise, you can do more or less damage to enemies.

I’ve got issues with my shoulder. My overhead press is rough. I’d like to be able to strengthen those muscles so it’s less rough, but because I can’t press very hard, I do the minimum damage when I attack with the overhead press. Trying to complete battles that way means I’m defeated more often than not. It makes it so I’m punished for trying to work on what needs the most improvement.

You also can’t back out of an exercise attack. If you think you can do something, but it turns out you can’t, you’re stuck. You’re again left with just two options: push through or fake it. Or, I guess, you could quit the level and lose your progress.

If you have any kind of condition that fluctuates, you might have to recalibrate all the settings every time. The game only asks you if you’d like to change difficulty when you load it up, so if you need to change your strength or running speed, you have to go back into the settings to change it, in the same tab where you set the assists.

For my shoulder issues, I could probably go back in and calibrate things better, but it’s really not worth it. It’s not quick or easy or clear how to fix my issues using the settings, and I’d rather do exercises at my own pace and in my own safe way. I know much better than Ring Fit how low I can safely squat or how strong my overhead press should be.

The summary

Exercise is important for managing many types of chronic illnesses and disabilities, but finding exercise that’s possible and enjoyable is a challenge. Even the things I enjoy most, like roller blading and strength training, have to be modified depending on how my joints are doing. At the end of the day, Ring Fit doesn’t have that same flexibility.

Every option in the settings is opaque, without clear descriptions of what you’re changing by adjusting the assists, difficulty, ring calibration, etc. It would take more time than it’s worth to make it work for me. You can’t see what a setting does until you start a level, and you can’t adjust settings while you’re in the level. It’s very time consuming, and pushing through a difficult attack exercise to avoid changing the settings is difficult if not impossible. You can’t back out of an attack after you’ve realized this, either.

The assists, which are supposed to help if you’ve got limitations with your knees, back, shoulders, or abs, only work during half of the game. Honestly, I think not including any kind of accessibility feature would at least be more truthful. It’s not very helpful when your accessibility only works half the time.

In the end, this is a good game, but it’s not made for someone with a disability or any fitness needs that aren’t standard. That’s not to say it’s not useable by a wide variety of people. My partner loves Ring Fit. He’s got rods in his back from scoliosis treatment, so he’s not the most flexible, and the game still works great for him. It’s a great motivator for him to exercise without leaving the apartment. It has a real story with real goals, and it accomplishes it in a way that makes exercise fun.

If the issues I had don’t seem like they’d be a problem for you, then I highly recommend Ring Fit. If a rigid exercise design wouldn’t cut it, then you’re better off finding a different kind of in-home exercise.

Stay healthy, everyone!

-Bri

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