Fitness Circuit Review: Fitting In
Since the astronomical success of Wii Sports in 2006, Nintendo has continuously dabbled in the niche of exercise and fitness games, as a way to lure the casual and/or the physically active market. The arrival of Wii Fit and the accompanying balance board in 2008 hammered home Nintendo’s intentions to give their fanbase a workout. This pledge continued on the Nintendo Switch, with Ring Fit Adventure being the most noteworthy evolution of this approach. Can Fitness Circuit carve out its own mark by encouraging you to make it your choice game for a daily exercise routine, or will it gas you out too easily?
Spike Chunsoft is well-known for developing and publishing anime games such as the Danganronpa games, Zero Time Dilemma, and AI: The Somnium Files. Now, as a publisher, they’ve turned their attention to the exercise and fitness genre with Fitness Circuit. However, if you think Spike Chunsoft and developer EXFIT have deviated away from anime influences, think again.
Runners Up
Your introduction to Fitness Circuit soothes you in by optionally asking you to give your height and weight details and which weight metric you want the game to apply. This is hardly the way to make you feel energetic about starting a game about getting fit and active, but soon you’ll meet your fitness instructors called Runners, who will encourage you to perform stretches and aerobic exercises in a manner befitting your personal preferences.
There are six Runners you can choose from to follow you through your fitness journey. They include Naomi, Ray, Scarlet, Maverick, JJ, and Max. Each of them provides gentle guidance as well as energetic encouragement to motivate you through the short but sharp levels.
All of the Runners are voiced with both Japanese and English voice options available, though you’ll likely be more inclined to engage in your fitness training rather than alter voice settings mid-game. Suffices to say, the anime aspects can be a little bit of a distraction from your fitness routine, but to its credit, they inject some liveliness into what would otherwise be a stale fitness game.
Exercising You Up
Without the peripheral gadgetry of its renowned forebears, why should you care about Fitness Circuit? The answer is accessibility, the ability to participate in Fitness Circuit’s battery of exercises with only the Joy-Cons, setting aside the need to splash out on plastic doodads that’ll outstay their usefulness sooner than later. In this vein, Fitness Circuit is similar to its contemporary, Fitness Boxing, meaning you only have to worry about using the Joy-Con controllers for following and corresponding to on-screen prompts.
As with similar games, there is a reasonable requirement that you’ve got enough space surrounding you, so you can safely play the game without knocking into furniture, obstructions, or your furry felines and/or canines who may be plodding about near you. Thankfully, you don’t need too much space like you would if you required a balance board, so the experience is predicated on getting you fit and healthy and not on superfluous distractions.
Before you begin circuit training, you’re invited to perform a series of warm-up exercises to get you all loosey-goosey before taking the main course. These warm-ups come highly recommended and not because your inner health professional says so, but also because your body will be well-prepared for the intense workouts ahead. The Light stretching of limbs is paced steadily, even though some of these stretches are odd-such as a low-down squat that rises to a flex of your arms, but to make up for it, there is an exercise that has you swinging your arms and hips similar to the floss dance, if you like that sort of thing.
When it comes to the main event circuits in Fitness Circuit, they are geared towards working out your body parts and putting them through their paces to a digestible degree that focuses on quick drills of activity, where you perform light workouts for a minute or so, before moving on to the next area to run another course until the so-called circuit is completed. At the end of each session, a percentage score is awarded to you, which will likely be at its highest if you complete the course, but if the timer runs out and you fail to complete the course, a lower score will be doled out. Weirdly, your runner says you’ll have to retry if you don’t complete the course, but you are instead taken to the next leg of the circuit.
Generally, these short-burst sessions are ideal for those who want to jump in and bolster their heart rate. There are a range of adrenaline-bolstering exercises you can customize too to change things up if you so desire. Yet a big dinger inherent with motion-sensing games threatens to de-escalate Fitness Circuit’s treadmill thanks to the way on-the-run feedback can be jarring and inaccurate.
Worn Out?
Fitness Circuit displays meters on the screen, both vertical and angular, informing you of your movement registrations. Feedback is given from these meters, where you’ll either miss, get an ok, or receive a cool rating, depending on how accurately you correspond to the movements on screen and how on-point (or not) the game is at recognizing your motions. Occasionally, failures to register movements can result in a low score, something which can be frustrating when you know you’ve mirrored every movement on-screen like you’re Homer Simpson in that classic episode where he becomes a baseball mascot.
Another dink in Fitness Circuit’s bodywork is it prefers basicness over beefiness when it comes to content. This isn’t a sizeable or succulent fitness game like Ring Fit Adventure, which isn’t a bad thing, though it’s lightweight and lacks incentives to keep going outside of unlocking new exercises and costume bits. There’s a bare-bones essence to Fitness Circuit, like it predominantly wants players to train on it for 20 minutes every day, without much in the way of actual substance to give it some spice and depth.
Levels are uninspiring, too. They’re akin to MGS VR training missions but without the spatial or characteristic presence to make them anything more than just backdrops to fitness training. Similarly, neither music nor sound design sparks your enthusiasm to want to train and work out; it’s all rather dry and unexciting, which is a shame.
Conclusion
For what it offers, Fitness Circuit is a nice entry to the list of games on Nintendo Switch featuring an exercise niche. Workouts are as relaxed or as energetic as you want them to be, and the sessions are ideal for short daily bursts of play, intended for those who find themselves incurred with busy schedules. Unfortunately, there isn’t much here to keep you invested in the long run, the lack of incentives to actively engage you are threadbare, and there isn’t the substance necessary to keep you hooked for long. You might like Fitness Circuit as a reliable exercise companion for a little while, but before long, it’ll run out of steam, and you’ll revert to a more substantial package.
Final Verdict: 3/5
Available on: Nintendo Switch (Reviewed); Publisher: Spike Chunsoft US; Developer: EXFIT; Players: 4; Released: May 36, 2023; ESRB: E for Everyone; MSRP: $49.99
Full Disclosure: A review code was provided by the publisher.
