Neptunia Riders vs Dogoos review

Hyperdimension Neptunia is no stranger to odd spinoffs. While the main series sticks to its JRPG core, we’ve seen side games take the form of shoot-’em-ups, collectible card games, idol simulators, and crossovers with the likes of Senran Kagura. But Neptunia Riders vs Dogoos is easily the strangest one yet: a “motorcycle action game” about collecting dogoos—Neptunia’s equivalent of the classic RPG slime enemy—in a motorbike arena.

Unfortunately, it’s… not great. The concept is intriguing, bizarre as it may seem, but the execution falls flat. What could have been a charming oddity instead ends up being tedious and forgettable.

The concept is fairly simple: as one of Neptunia’s eccentric heroines, you jump on a motorbike, head into an arena full of dogoos, and try to collect a certain number of them before your opponent. The catch is that different types of dogoos have different effects on your bike while you’re carrying them: some slow you down or hinder control, others make it easier to collect more or unlock hidden areas, and so on. Luckily, the detrimental ones can be loaded up into a cannon and fired at your enemies, passing the negative effects on to them. A good old-fashioned drive-by whack works for helping them shed some of their collected critters, too.

It’s vehicular combat mixed with oddball item collection physics of Katamari Damacy, in other words—a concept just ridiculous enough to make it a perfect fit for Neptunia. But an intriguing idea needs a lot of other pieces to become something workable, and that’s where Neptunia Riders vs. Dogoos repeatedly falls short. 

The arenas are bland, lacking the kind of intricate level design that any sort of arena-based game relies on. Combat is messy, thanks to a combination of unresponsive controls, murky hit detection, and lack of feedback. Enemy AI is poor, which at least helps to make the sloppy combat manageable, but it makes these battles far from fun or exciting. The whole central game loop just feels sluggish, and while victory isn’t hard to come by, the lack of finesse makes victory feel more like a product of brute force than skill. A lack of any sort of multiplayer is a missed opportunity in some ways, but playing against real people would probably be a nightmare without much tighter design, so maybe that’s for the best. 

The story is silly in the way that Neptunia games usually are, but shallow and aimless in the way that Neptunia games typically aren’t. Despite its goofy, exaggerated, sometimes lewd sense of humour—and the reputation that comes with that, especially in certain corners of the internet—the main games have at least some degree of substance and emotional depth. That’s part of what makes the jokes land, and why the characters are so beloved among their fans.

Neptunia Riders has none of that. The sparse plot exists solely as a weak source of narrative context to the motorbike battles: fan-favourite Uzume Tennouboshi finds herself in another dimension overrun by dogoos, and needs to snap the rest of the Nepnep crew out of a dogoo-obsessed stupor and find away back home. That’s fine as a starting point—every story needs a catalyst—but it never amounts to more than a contrived plot device. Dialogue is largely a string of jokes that feel like they’ve been picked out of the writers’ room trash can—mildly funny is a rare best. There’s no depth, no substance, no character work, just the bare minimum narrative context and an assumption that the audience already knows these characters well enough for things to make sense (which is a fair assumption, I guess).

At a couple of hours long, and a couple more if you want to grind for bike upgrades and cosmetic collectibles, Neptunia Riders is a brief outing—yet it somehow feels both too short and too long. What’s already here isn’t great, and needlessly dragging out with more content wouldn’t make it any better; from that perspective, a short run time is for us best. At the same time, it feels like there’s a missed opportunity to flesh things out a little bit more. I don’t even necessarily mean more levels or characters—this is a game clearly made on a limited budget, and that’s fine—but even just some different types of objectives to make replaying more worthwhile, or a more fulsome, more meaningful story.

In the end, that’s really what Neptunia Riders vs Dogoos is: a missed opportunity. The concept is certainly an interesting one, a blend of motorcycle-based vehicle combat and Katamari-style item collection. But a good idea can only go so far, and it’s not worth a whole lot when every aspect of the execution falls flat. Only the most dedicated Neptunia fans will find something to enjoy here, but it’s the most dedicated fans, more than anyone else, who deserve something better.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch with a review copy provided by the publisher.