I am fairly new to Wii exercising, and had read so many great reviews on My Fitness Coach (the original). I decided to hold out for the 2nd version to get the latest and greatest. I put the game into the console for the first time yesterday, and was very pleased to find there were 25 DIFFERENT “goals” within the set-up menu for my profile. I figured this was going to be super-sophisticated and give me exactly what I needed. I set up my profile with my two goals of “Weight Loss” and “Heart Health”, thinking I’d get a lot of heart-pounding cardio with a little bit of toning. The workout began, with no indication of how long it was going to be. It gave me a fancy, dazzling graphical list of the exercises, where each one flipped over (animated) named the exercise plus the number of reps or duration (such as 3-minutes). But nowhere could I tell how long the full workout was – unless I could mentally add up each exercise as it flipped by, and guess how long 12-reps of something would take.

Anyhow, the workout consisted of ten exercises. Two of them were push-up based, one twisted into alternating T-stands after each push-up; and the other had me lift alternate legs after each push-up. If I had put “Upper Body Strength” into my profile as a goal, I could understand the selection of these exercises as a full 1/5 of the 10 exercises given to me; but certainly wasn’t expecting them in my “Weight Loss” and “Heart Health” routine. I couldn not even finish them because the balance board was not registering my movements properly, and the game kept asking me if I was “having trouble”. Finally, it gave me the option to skip these exercises, so I got to actually DO eight of the ten exercises in my routine. The routine itself (minus all the tutorials) was probably only 20 minutes long. It was definitely not anything that would make me think I would either lose weight doing it, or improve the health of my heart. Perhaps, if I could stick with the game, the workouts would improve. But for my limited exercise time, I doubt I will waste time trying.

The other frustrating things were the extremely LONG time it took to score my performance after each exercise. I had to wait while flashing bars and various percentages and scores counted their way up to my overal performance level on that one exercise. Eventually, the evaluation screen rewarded me w/ a certain score (like 89%) and a certain color medal (like Silver or Gold). Sure, I could skip that section by pressing the A-button, but it was another distraction I didn’t need when trying to “exercise” rather than be “mesmerized” by the graphics. It seemed like it was geared towards providing instant feedback, but instead it just broke the flow of the workout. They could have just as effectively put all of this information at the end of the workout if you were curious about your “timing” or “effort” or “balance” on one specific exercise.

Then, my virtual trainer offered me the same “encouragement” phrases over and over and over again. “Way to go”, “You’re looking strong on this one”, “Keep it up”, “You make this look easy”. There were also occasional helpful tips thrown in like “Try to hold your arms steady when you lift your leg”, which made me think the programming had some degree of sophistication to match the comments w/ the exercises; however most of the chatter was inane and repetitive. Then at the end of EACH exercise, I got a camera shot of the trainer raising his thumb up and saying what a great job I’d done; but his LIPS didn’t move! He just stood in front of the camera and smiled, while his voice said I was doing so well. That was really weird, since the trainers look almost like living actors, and you’d think they could have at least had their mouth move to speak these words of praise.

I spent a lot of time after the workout trying to find some what to turn OFF those inane words of encouragement and just keep the helpful tips, but there is no way I could find in the menu to do that. All I found was a way to adjust the trainer’s voice volume. And that took me a while to figure out, due to the style and layout of the menus.

The menus in My Fitness Coach 2 are flashy and exciting – lots of eye-candy. They are Apple Computer/I-Pod Touch-like in form – lots of flipping square images and zooming graphics. But it’s slow to navigate and wasn’t intuitive to remember how to find an express workout, etc. The extra workouts provided are OK, but still repetitive each time you do them; so the boredom factor will set in quickly, I’m afraid.

All together, this was the biggest disappointment of all the Wii exercise games I have purchased so far (EA Sports Active, EA SA More Workouts, WiiFit Plus, Biggest Loser, Gold’s Cardio). I will be trading “My Fitness Coach 2″ to GameStop and will replace it with the original “My Fitness Coach” game to get all the features I had hoped this one would improve upon. In this case, I think a downgrade to the old game will actually be an upgrade in quality of exercising.

Update: My 2nd attempt confirmed my opinions above. As mentioned above, I purchased the original MFC, and I absolutely LOVE it – what a difference between the original and the so-called sequel! I never got around to taking MFC-2 to GameStop, so after a week of loving my workouts w/ Maya in MFC-1, I decided to keep an open mind and give MFC-2 another try. Again, despite my two goals of “Heart Health” and “Weight Loss” MFC-2 gave me more of those idiotic push-ups that don’t register. Again, those push-ups were in 2 out of the 10 exercises I was given (20% of my “Heart Health” workout??? Really????), and again I ended up having to wait until the game figured out that I wanted to skip them and try to move on.

This time, I even tried a different training, hoping he would give me the goofy thumbs-up w/ no lip-movement at the end of each exercise – nope; just as annyoing and fake as the other guy. Half-way through this workout I turned it off, stuck it back in the package and I’m going to GameStop. I’ve got to get rid of the $30 mistake before everyone figures out it’s pathetic and there’s no remaining trade-value to be found. Luckily the next person who tries my game disc will pay less for it than I did.

UbiSoft, please try again. I’ll be willing to buy MFC-3 AFTER I read a bunch of reviews to make sure it’s an improvement; definitely over MFC-2 and maybe even over the nearly-perfect MFC-1!
Rating: 2 / 5

Update: After six workouts nothing has changed. Even though I have consistently scored between 85-95% I am still doing the same 8 excersizes. One workout still takes around 20 minutes and is over before you are even warmed up. One positive thing is I have discovered that pushing the A button moves you through all the fluff between each excersize a little faster. Still havent found anyway to control the time or quality of your workout.
Rating: 2 / 5

Aspects of My Fitness Coach 1 not included in My Fitness Coach 2: the ability to use external equipment (stability ball, step, weights), vigorous workouts with little downtime and interruption, the ability to work out without holding the wiimote.

None of these qualities that I loved about the original are part of the new version. The new version boasts nutrition guides, but these are nothing you couldn’t find online. The addition of the nutrition section does not justify all the qualities this game is lacking. The new trainers are obnoxious and look horribly low quality, even on our HDTV.

Had the developers been able to retain the things I loved about the original and just added the fitness tracking and nutrition, it would have been a wonderful health and fitness center. Now it will just be getting sold back to Gamestop. We’re keeping our original version. Waste of money.
Rating: 1 / 5

I want to make it clear that the only similarities between the original MFC and MFC2 are the title and the general look of the case it comes in. Other than that, MFC2 is a completely different piece of software.

Negative points:

1. More flash than substance. The menus are pretty but slow to navigate.

2. You tell it your goals and fitness level. It picks your workouts. It doesn’t tell you an approximate length. You can see the activities but they “flip” at you 2 at a time. Someone must have thought it was a cute way to show them but it is not very practical. There’s no way to pause the display or change the pace.

3. There’s no flow to the activities. You do an activity and then it rates your performance. Again, flash over substance, as it counts up to your rating rather than just displaying it. I entered myself as “fit” so that I would be challenged but the activities are not very challenging.

4. The rating seems to be mostly based upon your timing rather than the quality of your moves. It does measure effort. There is a timing bar that you are supposed to watch which is quite distracting. Instead you just try to follow the instructor. The measurements are weak. It measures Jogging and similar exercises by the remote in your right hand. You can sit on your couch and wave the remote up and down. For boxing moves you also just have the one remote but it claims to measure both hands. EA Active rates the full movement and gives leeway on the timing. That makes more sense to me.

5. There is a nutrition section and a lifestyle section. Are you really referencing the Wii for nutrition and lifestyle suggestions?? I doubt it. Use a PC or a book instead.

6. Instructions on EA Active and the original My Fitness Coach are better than the ones here. These are mostly just watching a video without any useful audio.

7. There’s no way to customize your workouts other than changing your goals but there’s no telling what you’ll get.

8. There are 5 challenges. I did the Boxing challenge. It was more of a workout than the regular workouts but it is the same each time. It was a challenge to stay focused when it had me repeat the same 8 boxing moves for 48 reps.

Positive points:

1. It works. It picked up my movements.

2. It uses the balance board. I know that many of you care about that. I don’t. The balance board is small and often restricts movement. For example, on a squat you would usually spread your legs apart but if you are doing them on a balance board you have to keep them mostly together.

Wouldn’t it have been nice if they had just improved upon the original, maybe by having a pure step routine that could be done for 30 minutes?
Rating: 3 / 5