It’s hard out here for a Hyperdimension Neptunia fan, guys. Every year for what’s felt like a decade, a new game comes out that is tangentially related to this franchise, but never actually a proper sequel or continuation. There’s a lot to love about these anime girl proxies for video game consoles, but they’ve been stuck in a non-canonical limbo for far too long. At some points, this has produced gold – like when one of these spin-offs introduced an anime girl based on the idea of Touhou, or when another was secretly a tightly-crafted character-action crossover with my other favorite niche Japanese game series Senran Kagura. Unfortunately, far more often these Neptunia diversions end up being poorly polished and instantly forgettable. Neptunia Riders VS Dogoos falls hard into that category.
First of all, don’t even look in the direction of this game if you aren’t already familiar with the Hyperdimension Neptunia series. The game throws you into Uzume and the Gamindustri Goddesses’ latest dilemma so swiftly that it feels more like a side-quest from a different game than its own standalone product.
Due to hastily explained shenanigans, hordes of jelly-shaped pup creatures called Dogoos are invading the realm, so our heroes hop onto some anime-as-hell motorcycles to round ’em all up before it’s too late. Every character, as usual, is incredibly silly and funny and charming. I’m sure if you hop into this blind you’ll get some joy out of Izumi’s straight-man act or Nep-nep’s almost Deadpool-level meta shenanigans. If the game were really fun, the context for these characters and their quest wouldn’t even matter.
That fun, however, is few and far between. Neptunia Riders VS Dogoos consists of five stages, each containing three levels that repeatedly task you with collecting every Dogoo you see – a mission that will take you barely two minutes to complete. In between the missions and the cutscene chatter, you can buy costume accessories and motorcycle upgrades, but it all feels so tepid when the actual gameplay is so short, so basic, and so repetitive.
There’s almost an arena car action angle to this game, but the lack of any mechanical depth or lengthier stages makes everything feel like the tutorial for a bigger game, or a mini-game you’d play in the latest Hoyoverse gacha game to earn some extra gems. The Dogoo collecting is just okay. Your motorcycle handles fine, and the game tries to spice things up by tossing different stage layouts at you and sprinkling a few Mario Kart-style debuff items in your way. Those short levels make it impossible for you to spend enough time in a stage for any of this to click or matter, though.
What hurts is that I don’t hate the idea of a motorcycle-focused Neptunia spinoff at all. If this had been more of a racing game, or a proper car-combat game, or even Rocket League with the cars swapped for motorcycles and the soccer balls swapped for Dogoos, I feel like it’d be golden. What’s here now is so barebones and basic, though, and you’ll have it all wrapped up in barely a couple of hours.
These Neptunia side games have established a pattern of moving on and re-doing everything from scratch in a whole new genre instead of ever building on what the previous game did. If they bucked that trend now, a follow-up to this game could be something special. There’s something here that die-hard fans might appreciate as it is now, but it’s so brief and half-baked. Plus, with how long it’s been since a meaningful entry in this series, I have a hard time believing there are very many die-hard fans left.