Neptunia Riders VS Dogoos (PS5)
The Neptunia series enjoys parodying common video game elements, many of its enemies riffs on what you’d find in big name titles. As the series continued to grow in popularity and receive new entries though, that also meant its comedic parallels started to become recognizable in their own right. Dogoos, for example, are meant to evoke the common slimes in Dragon Quest that serve as weak early monsters, but after appearing so often, they’ve become part of the series’s own iconography to the point that they now get to be the entire focus of a game on their own, Neptunia Riders VS Dogoos all about those little blobs with dog faces.
One day, Uzume Tennouboshi is busy adoring Dogoos when she suddenly remembers she doesn’t actually like Dogoos. Unfortunately for her, the land is infested with Dogoos, and even the little teardrop shaped creatures can be dangerous in a swarm. Uzume escapes with her life, but she finds her other friends have also strangely succumb to the apparent charms of the Dogoos, Uzume needing to face them in battle in order to return them to normal. Curiously, such battles involve all of them gathering the canine blobs by driving motorcycles around, the characters even making note how odd it is they are suddenly all adept bike riders. The mystery of why suddenly everyone is loyal to the Dogoos ends up being the little throughline to string together Uzume saving other recognizable faces from the Neptunia series, and while the game does make a note the story is separate from the usual setting of Gamindustri, the characters still talk about elements like how they can all transform into goddesses and each one presides over countries that compete for shares of the public interest. Even if the elements about Neptune, Noire, and the others go right over your head though, that doesn’t feel too crucial to understand what’s going on since the plot is mostly a deliberate farce, absurdity at the forefront with many of the other riders you face actually just being characters with Dogoo heads placed atop athletic scantily-clad human bodies. With the game only taking about 3 hours to clear there’s not as much time for comedic cutscenes as you might like and even the usually likeable cast of Neptunia ladies only gets so long to talk so they’re less funny and endearing than usual, this at once feeling like a spinoff that fans would more greatly appreciate but one that aims to be so ridiculous that not knowing what’s going on can almost have a silly charm on its own.
In a level of Neptunia Riders VS Dogoos, your goal is to gather a certain amount of Dogoos before your opponents can. Doing this mostly entails driving close to the little blobs, a ring around your bike showing your reach. While driving right into the slimes is a good way to gather them, drifting will actually greatly expand your Dogoo capturing range, meaning there is at least a little room for interesting maneuvering. Drifting allows for quick and easy turns as well, although many of the levels are fairly open arenas so turning is most often just used to face more blobs to collect. The Dogoos in your possession will float around in a spherical cloud behind your bike, this mostly just a way to visualize your progress but also important when it comes to the competitive side of things. You can attack the enemy riders to knock some of their haul out, although since there is no multiplayer and the AI opponents are fairly weak, the battle side feels like it is more an occasional nuisance you easily recover from when you’re hit or just an alternate way to earn some Dogoos if you have the chance. Regular enemies also wander around most stages, and even though they can take the form of giant mechs or scary looking stallions, they all fold easily to attacks as well and produce some Dogoos to grab.
While driving around grabbing Dogoos you do sometimes have to consider the variety you’re grabbing, some having positive or negative effects. A holy Dogoo must be grabbed so that you can then scoop up the zombie Dogoos, some of the canine slimes might give you the ability to jump higher or glide once you’ve grabbed enough of them, and some like food-based pudding and marshmallow Dogoos will attract other slimes towards you to be scooped up. This gimmick forms can sometimes change how you move a bit or you might face a barrier that only opens when you get enough of the right type, but others feel fairly weak in concept or are pure hindrances. A token Dogoo, for example, will cause a giant slot machine in the relevant level to start spinning, but while the machine can produce effects that impact the match technically, it can also basically be ignored since it’s not necessary or too impactful. In other levels, some Dogoo types will cause problems if you grab them like disabling your boost or slowing you down, and some aren’t introduced properly so you learn the hard way what their effect is. At the same time, unless you collect a lot of hindering slimes, you can usually come out on top still, levels often barely taking a few minutes to clear and the Dogoo grabbing not often a task that requires too much work.
Some stages do try to shake things up a touch. Beyond the earlier mentioned barriers and the slot machine, you have levels like one where you need to grab shrinking or enlarging Dogoos to reach certain spots, and one level has the floor disappear in certain sections so you have to make sure you are in the right spot to avoid missing out on a Dogoo smorgasbord that drops in if you stay on the platforms. Sadly, the gimmicks are often fairly basic or don’t really make it likely the opposing riders will win as they’re just as susceptible to hindrances if not more so since they’ll never learn. There are only 15 levels in total and just one very slow boss fight, most stages just about seeing what new little disruption will shift up the gameplay a touch as you easily gather the required quota of blobs and move along to another all too short bit of action.
Once you beat a level though, you can replay it to tackle its two challenges. Normally, Neptunia Riders VS Dogoos lets you play as any of the girls you’ve rescued and bring one along as a partner, one of the challenges being to win on your own. The partner is normally not too much of a factor so their absence might not even be felt, but the time challenge is a touch more interesting. You can’t attempt either challenge on your first go through on a stage, but the time challenge at least rewards learning the local Dogoo dangers and stage specific concerns since hitting the par time can require a touch of skill and thought to hit. It does not greatly increase the complexity or demand too much of you, but you do get some cash for replaying levels and rewards for beating the challenges, new bike parts letting you customize your ride into something more capable while there are many unlockable outfit pieces you can dress the heroines up in. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this game where you see a giant Dogoo man’s head and arms bursting out of a haunted mansion decides to include many silly outfit pieces that can be placed pretty freely on the characters and made incredibly large or small for even further goofiness. The strange and humorous world really does help mask how short and simple the overall experience is, and little bits of whimsy provide frequent fun surprises like scooping up a virtual Dogoo forcing your view of the action to briefly be obscured by a fake VR headset. That is one reason it’s sad that there aren’t more scenes to further revel in the absurdity, the game not having nearly enough time to really find its footing with the gathering gameplay or truly explore the depths of how deliberately weird the normally unassuming Dogoos can be made to be.
THE VERDICT: Neptunia Riders VS Dogoos is a fairly uninspired gather ’em up where the collecting barely takes much thought and the silliness only does so much to invigorate a very short experience. It’s almost too short to be awful, the game going by in a flash, and while unlockables and the challenges try to breathe a little more life into it, the slime grabbing is far too basic and levels too short so most moments fail to leave much of an impression. Besides some cute absurdity, there’s not much here for fans of the series or newcomers because it feels like it’s barely the start of an idea rather than a full-fledged game.
And so, I give Neptunia Riders VS Dogoos for PlayStation 5…
A BAD rating. Neptunia Riders VS Dogoos really feels like it should be some optional extra in a regular Neptunia adventure. There it wouldn’t matter that it’s so shallow and short, it would just be a little diversion to dabble in rather than the star attraction. Sadly, even compared to other games in the franchise, you don’t get as much time as you’d like seeing the leading ladies interact so you only get to see their fun personalities on show a little, but at least some of the Dogoo absurdity lands because the game likes to set up ridiculous visuals but not ruin the fun by dwelling on how strange it all is. You get to snicker at the latest weird creature or interaction and then do a very short slime collecting stage, nothing ever lasting long enough to charm you or thrill you but rarely do you face speed bumps that keep you from clearing this game quickly. Of course, adding in more difficult foes, more involved collection tasks, or multiplayer might be a way to give the game an edge and make it feel like a concept with legs rather than a half-baked experience.
With how quick and mostly uncontested your Dogoo grabbing usually is, it seems like even the core of this game wasn’t considered much, perhaps too much focus given to the strange ways to present the unassuming Dogoos rather than considering the experience that was to host such absurdity. Neptunia Riders VS Dogoos would be hard to recommend on its own, but maybe one day there will be a Neptunia bundle or collection where its can serve as a small amusement to busy yourself with between the major titles. As a standalone experience, it’s a disappointment, although at least being so weird means it’s not a totally forgettable one and its oddities can be remembered fondly thanks to the friction-free gameplay not getting in the way of appreciating the Dogoos.