I really respect this game for almost certainly being the best of its kind, but I'm not sure gamifying exercise really works for me. I played this regularly for a while there but the moment I fell off of it I never returned. That's the way of things with exercise, of course, but even when I do feel the urge or force myself to do it I never reach for Ring Fit anymore.

Running through a level now it's immediately obvious why: if you don't already have a healthy relationship with exercise, all this does is give you tons of things to associate exhaustion, embarrassment and negative thoughts about your body with. That ring's voice wasn't annoying when I started, but now it's the most grating thing I've ever heard. Seeing those featureless instructors or the goofy muscley demon brings out only the worst feelings I had during my original run with the game, not the many positive ones that I know were there.

This isn't the game's fault, it's mine. I don't think you can make a game explicitly about exercise without running into this problem. To a mind inhabiting a sufficiently out of shape body like mine, the most minimal of exertion can get the whiny little thing acting like it's reliving trauma. While I have yet to find an exercise routine and claw myself out of the hole I've found myself in, I've found the most success just going outside and trying to enjoy the world around me. The environment constantly changes and the reward of going on a long walk and grabbing a coffee is much more motivating than experience points in a game that only exists to contextualize exercise.

One last thing: I imagine Ring Fit works a lot better if you're starting from a better place than me, which I imagine a significant portion of people who pick this up are. If you think you have a shot with this, please don't let me discourage you.

I played a bunch of these games when I was younger and (as is typical for child Whom) never beat any of em, so I wanted to at least finish this one before checking out Rift Apart.

I love the retrofuturism, I love the stretchy animation, I love Clank being a little cutie, I love the simple as can be environmentalism, I love the absolutely nuts electronic soundtrack, and I love the early 00s silliness of it all, right down to Ratchet being an asshole skater bro too self-absorbed to even care about entire worlds being destroyed. I truly hate that little shit but it's fun seeing that "whatever man" attitude being pushed to such a ridiculous extreme and getting the latest and least earned turnaround possible.

The moment-to-moment gameplay is what really comes up short and makes this not come together nearly as well as I would hope. It's all kinda crusty in a way its more polished peers never were. Beyond minor UX woes with the menus that add up, my main problem is that the optimal strategy in nearly every combat scenario is to stay out of range and pick everyone off at a distance. This isn't too much of a problem at first but up-close combat gets less and less viable as you approach the end of the game and there's a point where it's pretty much a forced playstyle. Not only is exploiting enemy sightlines not that engaging of a way to play, but in this kind of giant arsenal game I expect to have a lot of unique ways to approach combat encounters and those are pretty lacking. The last few levels are mostly spent shooting rockets at stationary enemies who would annihilate you if you got too close, and that's a shame because other than the combat you're mostly left with a few scattered distractions, as the platforming is rather barebones.

I do like those distractions though! They are relics of the era that I adore: minigames and other jarringly different modes of gameplay. Like sure, I'll take racing sequences and a one-off optional turret defense minigame in my action platformer. Not that stuff like that doesn't happen anymore, but it seemed to be obligatory back then, and I sure appreciated any reason to stick around and just hang out in a game as a kid with a limited library who only needed the smallest bit to work with to remain engaged for a long-ass time. Playing this now, I only wish there were more.

I can still find quite a bit to enjoy, but I think the OG Ratchet & Clank is mostly of interest to me because it's a nostalgic curiosity released in the exact time many of my first permanent memories were forming. Ratchet & Clank is neat but it's no Jak and Daxter, let's put it that way.