Neptunia Riders VS Dogoos review for Nintendo Switch
System: Switch
Release date: January 28, 2025
Developer: Compile Heart
Publisher: Idea Factory
Pick up any JRPG and the chances are good that one of the first enemies you’ll encounter on your adventure will be some kind of slime. The gelatinous mass of vaguely sentient ooze has been an unspoken staple of the genre since its foundation, but it is still often little more than a stepping stone on our heroes’ journey to greatness. The Neptunia series variation of this creature is the Dogoo, and it has usually served much the same role as an early game encounter that you quickly forget about. Neptunia Riders VS Dogoos puts the questionably adorable canine-based blobs in a more active role, and unfortunately the result is about what you would expect if you ran over a small blob with a motorcycle.
Neptunia Riders takes place in another dimension that is vastly different from Gamindustri, and is currently under threat by an onslaught of Dogoos. Our lead heroine for the game, Uzume Tennouboshi (first introduced in Megadimension Neptunia VII and a recurring character in a minor role throughout the series) is currently fleeing for her life on a bike she has no idea how she got or even learned how to ride in the first place. She is the only one left who is seemingly immune to the spell of the Dogoos, which has turned the Goddesses into fawning slaves. Why this has all happened, or what it is leading to, is anyone’s guess, but as she is the last one standing, it is up to Uzume to free the Goddesses from the control of these squishy fiends and put an end to their diabolical plot. Thus begins her life-and-death struggle to free her friends from the grip of mind control by getting them as far away from Dogoos as possible, and reminding them who they used to be before they came to this dimension.
Despite the absurdity of the premise, it is treated with an almost laughable degree of seriousness by the cast. It is par for the course for Neptunia titles to have a more serious underlying narrative tone to drive the plot forward, and the games will often deliver it in lengthy cutscenes, to the point that many of the more recent titles blur the line between being visual novels and RPGs, as exposition mounts and characters engage in conversations that require more than a little suspension of disbelief. However, this has always been counterbalanced by an underlying sense of humor that reminds you that, at the end of the day, it’s supposed to be a good time. A character will treat an otherwise ridiculous plot point with absolute seriousness, then make a light-hearted joke or reference to alleviate the tension. With this in mind, one of the most disappointing aspects of Neptunia Riders is just how poor the dialogue is by comparison to any of the previous titles, as it completely lacks any depth – or more importantly, any levity – whatsoever.
The series’ trademark references to anime and video games, its casual breaking of the fourth wall, and that shameless self-awareness that flirts with the line between being charming and outright obnoxious, has been replaced by dull, repetitive, and agonizingly serious conversations that not even the stellar voice cast can inject any sort of life into in Neptunia Riders. The bland and brief cutscenes sandwiched between equally bland and brief stages showcase nothing of the personalities of the various cast members and feel like nothing so much as a stopgap to remind you that they’re still there. Whatever intrigue, potential for humor, or point the game has is methodically and repeatedly stamped out by the vapid tedium of Uzume trying to knock some sense into the seemingly brainwashed Goddesses, only to add them to her party and forget about them as she moves on to the next one once that has been accomplished. The same process is repeated for each Goddess before the ultimate circumstances that led to their current situation are revealed, Neptune makes a few of her trademark comments that come in far too little and too late, and the story concludes with about as much fanfare as it began with.
Neptunia Riders’ describes itself as a motorcycle combat action game, which is as apt a descriptor as any. After selecting your character and an optional AI companion (an entirely aesthetic choice) you are thrown into a modestly-sized arena filled with various terrain obstacles, a handful of largely non-threatening enemies who will ignore you unless you crash right into them, and of course a couple of hundred Dogoos milling about aimlessly. Your objective is to race around the arena and collect the specified number of Dogoos (usually around 100 or so) before your two AI-controlled opponents, who will be attempting to do the same. Capturing Dogoos is as simple as riding into or near them, and once acquired they will drift aimlessly behind you in a giant, gelatinous ball of questionable cuteness. You have two attacks on a cooldown – one short range, the other long range, both with mild homing capabilities – to attack your foes with, and a successful attack will send them temporarily careening off course and scatter their Dogoos, which will be drawn to you. Of course, they can do the same, so you’ll need to keep an eye on their movements as well as your own.
Once you’ve acquired enough Dogoos, the stage will end, and you’ll be given some currency that can be traded for a whole host of cosmetic ideas, or a few different parts to customize your bike with. Completing a stage for the first time, as well as unlocking the next stage, will also unlock optional objectives for additional currency and items to trade it for, giving each stage some degree of replayability. The emphasis here is on speed: each stage will take around two minutes at most to clear, and with fifteen stages in total it is entirely possible to complete the entire game in less than a couple of hours, assuming that you watch the cutscenes in-between.
The basic idea behind the gameplay is nothing new, with the motorcycle having been introduced in the previous spinoff in the series, Neptunia Game Maker R:Evolution. Unfortunately this was by far the weakest element of gameplay in that game, and it has not improved noticeably in Neptunia Riders despite the entire game being themed around it. Unless you lean heavily into customizing your bike to favor the Handling stat (more on that in a minute), controlling the bike is an extremely awkward and frustrating ordeal, and becomes outright impossible and extremely nauseating once you accelerate and the frame pacing becomes unmanageable as the Switch struggles to keep up with the sudden burst of acceleration. The problems that plagued the motorcycle mechanic in Neptunia Game Maker have been transferred in full to Neptunia Riders, to the point that its short stages come as something of a relief.
But make no mistake, despite the complete lack of improvement in the bike controls between Neptunia Game Maker and Neptunia Riders, there is a surprising amount of depth to the latter’s gameplay that hints at the experience that it could and should have been if more care had been taken with it. Your bike can be customized with each part having different stats that contribute to an overall parameters of Top Speed, Acceleration, Boost, Handling, and Capture Range. There are only three parts that make up a bike, but the potential for customization here is not insignificant, and can have a drastic effect on how the game plays. Unfortunately, poor performance issues effectively require you to forgo Top Speed and Boost in favor of Handling unless you enjoy careening wildly out of control as the frame pacing fails to keep up with your overwhelming top speed and actually steering your bike becomes an impossibility. The game design fails to support this mechanic to allow the player to really customize their experience, and it ultimately falls flat.
Many of the different Dogoos that you’ll be wrangling also come with their own special effects that can alter the flow of battle. For example, capturing enough Angel Dogoos will grant your bike wings that allow you to glide, and grabbing a Stone Dogoo will dramatically reduce your speed – something that is supposed to be a negative effect, but turns out to be extremely useful when bike parts are limited in the early game and you have no way to improve handling. New types of Dogoos are introduced with each new area, meaning that you are constantly introduced to new and interesting effects with the potential to dramatically shake up the gameplay. Potential that is, unfortunately, also completely wasted, because the stage will be over long before these effects can manifest themselves in any meaningful way.
This theme of wasted potential is something that is frustratingly prevalent in Neptunia Riders. Some clear thought has been put into the game and I couldn’t help but think while playing that it would have made the ideal co-op experience with a partner, or an excellent PvP experience with up to four players, and it would definitely have benefited from longer, more open stages with other objectives than just collecting a specified number of Dogoos, to better capitalize on these gameplay mechanics. This would also have gone some lengths towards justifying the incredibly short campaign and made the experience far more palatable, or at the very least made up for the overwhelmingly disappointing narrative. There are some fantastic ideas at play beneath the surface, but between the tepid dialogue, all-too-brief stages that fail to take advantage of those ideas, and terrible frame pacing that make playing it for just a couple of minutes at a time a struggle, this is a game that reeks of rushed development and almost criminally wasted potential, to the point that the joke would fall painfully flat if it was made as a self-aware jab in the next Neptunia title.
The Verdict
The Neptunia series has always had what I would deem to be an undeserved bad reputation, and I think most of the games are better than people have been willing to admit. They may occasionally not quite stick the landing with their gameplay mechanics, but have never been afraid to experiment with new ideas or present old ones in interesting ways. If nothing else, the trademark humor and endearing charm of the core cast has always taken the sharpness off any cut corners. But if there was ever a game in the series that would more than justify this reputation for poor quality, it would be Neptunia Riders VS Dogoos. Whatever your feelings for the series are, this is a game you are better off avoiding.
Neptunia Riders VS Dogoos copy provided by the publisher for the purposes of this review.
