While the first N64 Doraemon game was a 3D platformer, this is more like Goemon: a game with an overworld and dungeons, but the dungeons being more focused on platforming when compared to Zelda.

It starts off when Doraemon, the blue robot cat, and his friend when one of them (Nobita) messes with a strange crystal, breaks it and starts the process of the end of the world for a fantasy land, so they need to restore the crystal to fix their mess.

You can no longer change characters on the fly, instead you can only swap characters at certain points in the story. Due to this, the different abilities of each character are now completely removed, only having a very minor damage increase when using one weapon.

Jumping is extremely stiff. Once you jump, you have very little leeway over your movement, and the game’s camera often tries to “help” and makes you jump off in a completely different direction than our intention.

The overworld is also extremely bland, made up of empty spaces. The more top down camera view means you can never see much, either, so a lot of the time is spent looking at mostly a ground texture. Most of the overworld is a straightforward path, with only two instances where you need to jump over platforms, one near the start of the game, one near the end. There are also no enemies on the overworld.

This wouldn’t be to bad it it was just a simple hub world, but there’s an immense amount of padding on the overworld, and you’ll spend hours and hours walking back and forth. I’ll use the path to the second dungeon as an example.

You walk from the first village down past a few empty areas and find a broken ladder. If you’re not here on the right day, you’ll need to return to the village and sleep until a “tree day” and go back, some mushrooms are slightly bigger and you can jump up. You get to the entrance to the second village and your path is blocked, you have to get an item from right next to him to proceed.

In the village, you speak to the elder and he’ll tell you the path is blocked, you have to go down this path to see it for yourself (it won’t trigger the right dialogue later on if you don’t) and you’ll see tornadoes blocking your path (and likely guess that “wind day” is the answer, but it won’t work…yet). Return to the village and speak to three people in the right order. The last one is ill and her friend has gone looking for the herb.

Backtrack half way to the first village. He forgot the key to the maze containing the herb, you’ll be warped back to the village. Speak to the elder and backtrack back to the maze, get the herb and return to the village. She’ll tell you that a kite will show the correct day. Find the kite and it’s broken. You’ll take control of a specific character and walk all the way back to just before the first village, you’ll find an item (that wasn’t there before).

As you walk back to the second village, a cutscene will happen and you’ll be stuck. You need to take control of another character and backtrack again to fix something, and then walk back to the village and fix the kite. Now some shoes will spawn in a house that make you run faster (I double checked with speedruns, nobody gets them until this point) and you can wait for “wind day” and get past.

You then get to do another very basic maze before you get to the second dungeon. The dungeons let you use weapons and have some more platforming sections. They’re also very short and linear, with a couple of side corridors for keys. None of the three dungeons have interesting layouts or styles.

And, yes, three dungeons. While the overworld is lots of walking back and forth for hours and hours, the dungeons don’t add up to an hour combined. It’s a very short game, with almost all of it padding. To add extra insult, you get a fast travel item inside the final dungeon.

If you really want to, you can aimlessly walk around the overworld some more to get extra items that don’t help you in any way. Very few of these are hidden, most are in water that are visible and just inaccessible until you get the swim item (also inside the final dungeon). But at that point, you’re right by the final boss.

There are parts of a fourth dungeon in the game’s files, but it was not finished in time, so it’s straight from the third dungeon to the final boss, a large obelisk. This is a dull, tedious game where almost all of it consists of walking back and forth across empty maps with nothing to do along the way.

Worst

And, although you can rotate the camera, and move to a limited first-person view, the default view never quite lets you see enough of your surroundings, meaning that it’s frustratingly hard to know where to go, relying on objects you’ve already passed as landmarks. Which is less than great.

Jes Bickham, N64 Magazine #26. Review Score: 52%

Remake or Remaster?

There isn’t much reason to play this game.

Official ways to get the game.

There is no official way to get Doraemon 2