Good Mistake I found myself working out at home after months of inactivity because I haven’t been able to continue the routine since the gyms closed. With Ring Fit Adventure in the offices, the opportunity to try Fitness Boxing 2: Rhythm & Exercise with time for analysis sounded great. And the truth is that I managed to move away from the chair and encourage myself to sweat a little, despite its shortcomings.
Nintendo Switch has struggled to break into family audiences beyond “The Marios,” and Imageneer benefited from launching the first exercise trainer for its motion sensors when it had been on the market for over a year and a half. An exercise program based on very simple boxing, the strength of which was that professionals had worked on the construction of the routines. Then Ring Fit Adventure came along and swept everything away before it even got locked. But this little Japanese studio has something else up its sleeve and the support of Nintendo itself, which is why they are back this year with a second installment that is literally the evolution of the previous one.
Fitness Boxing 2 is a game where you hit your fists and move your feet to burn off a few calories. There are 30 routines that can be performed at low or high intensity and 23 musical themes to put into practice. And when that is before you, you have to turn it over and over until you memorize it and do it perfectly in time, with your mind practically blank. It’s not that it’s repetitive, it’s that exercise training is methodical.
The essence of this software is to create a program and commit to following it. While boxing has few movements, it has enough variety to cover all kinds of physical form (light if you’re not used to it, normal or intense for those who don’t want to stop) and to allow you to choose whether to want to strengthen a part of the body or tone it in general. More hooks, more squats, more footwork … that’s where the change goes. It starts small in the beginning and adds more as you achieve success, so you get something already seen and something new with every visit. The sessions, which can last whatever suits you best, are neither long nor boring.
I chose to do extensive, medium-intensity workouts to lower the weight and increase tone during those months and gradually got excited about it. So from day two I found a way to improve it: taking footswitch breaks, a series of squats, and a series of sit-ups between choreographies (usually four per session). About 35 or 40 minutes with lots of exercise but without exhaustion.
But for Boxing Fitness 2 to work, you have to make a commitment: to want to get it right. As you can see in the video, each routine consists of repeating the punches that run across the screen at the exact moment. The closer the rhythm, the higher the score. Sharp, rapid blows (with the care required in the absence of a receiver) will ensure they occur. “Perfect“But doing it with restraint and a loose arm is tantamount to being late. The other possibility is to get a lot of points for wrong action, which is also possible. Because the Joy-Con only measures acceleration and braking, but neither the amplitude of the gesture nor the shape, he doesn’t care, a tick as a direct one, he will tell you both the same as the recognition is precise but inefficient.
This means that you train your own way, that it is only up to you to get it right and use these routines. The interactions are there and encouraging because of all of these Perfect and that score is yours, but you hold a grudge that it could easily be done the same way.
The second separation between game and reality is the virtual coaches that the title gives you. The studio did well between the original and this second part, with much more animated backgrounds and a more stylish, higher quality UI. The synchronization of the trainers (who only speak English) is better than the former. But they only have a handful of pre-defined phrases that they post to make it better or worse so you can’t get too carried away. Interaction with them is almost as little as someone watching a YouTube video, although you have to listen to what they say because they’ll sing you the news of the routine.
The third element of entertainment is music, so it is so important when it comes to exercise for people who are not addicted to exercise. The game contains 20 songs by licensed artists like Katy Perry, Ariana Grande, Pink or classics like Bananarama or Bon Jovi. It is appreciated to have noticeable background noise as this will help you connect, but these are only instrumental versions that appear to be being played with a communion organ. It goes without saying that they are reforming them to be more athletic, but it can be done a lot better.
And yet the funny thing is, Fitness Boxing 2: Rhythm & Exercise works. Despite the fact that there are many things element by element that are regular or worse than normal, I have managed to captivate myself and I am already noticing the change. It’s likely their expertly crafted routines that hit exactly what the body demands of you, regardless of the packaging. A very different concept from Ring Fit Adventure, with which it cannot compete in quality, but in which it improves in pace.
