Doki Doki Ragnarok Review

Doki Doki Ragnarok is exactly what you think it is. This isn’t your average dating sim; you’re not after your ideal anime (or pigeon) husbando. No, this is far more nonsensical. In Doki Doki Ragnarok, you are a Viking called Eivor, and you’re here to find yourself some villages to raid.

And by raid, I mean date. You are here to romance these villages. Note how I say villages. You don’t go around finding villagers to join your ridiculous pillaging harem. The settlements are sentient, and they want you to pillage them. Truthfully, trying to explain the plot of this game to my friends led to all of them sighing and rolling their eyes at me. They were tired enough of me after completing Hatoful Boyfriend. But this? This was a new level for me; it led me down such a joyous rabbit hole because, let’s be honest, I love these kinds of games.

Let’s get right in. You start this game as a shy Viking who just wants to raid villages in Odin’s honour. Your name is Eivor, and there are three characters you can choose to represent them. However, this doesn’t impact the plot in any way, so I decided on the burly buff Viking dude. Now, you’re here to go on a quest for Odin, who is always there. You can call Odin down whenever you want; he’ll even give you some sweet dating tips.

Okay, I say whenever you want, but that’s not exactly true. It’s only when you’re in the middle of dating a village that your four options appear. If you choose Odin as an option, you’ve probably just wasted one of your turns to seduce the village in your favour. Why does it waste a turn? Well, your prospective village might not be the biggest fan of Odin. After all, you’re mostly raiding in Britain, France, Sweden, and Iceland. But you can get some hilarious dialogue, so I’m willing to forgive this lost turn for the amount of hilarity this choice has given me.

But then there are the three other options you have. You can raid them, but that’s only really recommended when you’ve improved your relationship with them. Let’s be honest: running right in there and raiding can make it seem like you’re moving way too quickly. The villages can see that as well. Some might be into that, but others? No, no, you’d better do something else first.

Perhaps you just want to drink some mead. Nervous? Are you terrified you’re going to mess up your chances with that lovely village over there? Don’t worry, we’ll make sure that you’re drunk enough not to regret your life choices, or at least drunk enough to not remember them. Some of them will be impressed by your careful Viking strategising. Personally, I think drinking is one of the best options for Eivor. The villages are weirdly impressed if you barf all over them.

Then there’s your last option: attack England. Your first village is in England, and they tend to have mixed feelings about you attacking the rest of the country when you’re meant to be paying attention to them. But the other countries? They’re either overjoyed or baffled. I’m not going to lie, attacking England was a fun option.

Now, these are your four main raiding options. You only have a certain number of turns to romance — I mean raid — your village. It’s more of a challenge when you want to get all three hearts. If you get one heart, you pass. Two hearts? Impressive. Three hearts? How? How did you manage this? That isn’t an easy challenge. Even when I was paying utmost attention to the dialogue, I found that I couldn’t figure out just what I could do to get the maximum three hearts. I’m still trying to figure out how, especially when you only have a certain number of turns. If you rewind, you’re right at the beginning of the dialogue with the village you’re courting. Personally, it’s my goal to one day get the maximum number of hearts, but I’ll save that for later. You can complete the game by only getting one heart on each village. They tend to class that as a success, and then you can unlock the next section.

But, you don’t only meet villages: there are other characters you can meet on your way too. So, why don’t I introduce some of these characters to you?

We have various goats; you’ll meet one in each country. There’s also even a village of only goats, which you don’t have to get one heart on to complete. You can ignore it if you want; I didn’t want to though, simply because I-Am-Definitely-Odin-And-Have-Never-Heard-of-Loki told me I should go there. There’s a particular joy in Loki wearing a terrible disguise, and Eivor just… following along. You could be suspicious, but Eivor won’t realise it’s Loki when it blatantly is.

Then, there’s the Corgi. The Corgi can be weaponised to your advantage, especially when you meet the most important character in Doki Doki Ragnarok: Bjorn Rivalson. I love Bjorn Rivalson, and he hates it so much. You can show friendship, love, camaraderie, all of these things to him. He will hate your guts. He will be absolutely baffled because he’s on the exact same quest. But truthfully, I found him far more compelling than our many villages.

But then, you two aren’t the only ones out there. There’s also Olaf, another fellow Viking, who isn’t too confident in his raiding abilities. You can help him out too, and Valhalla will smile upon you for doing that. You’ll even meet Olaf’s grandmother and a profoundly uncomfortable villager who really wishes they didn’t have to be involved in their world's bizarre raiding/courting rituals. Ah yes, and there’s a guy who definitely isn’t from England, but blatantly is, just running around and pretending to be a Viking.

If I’m honest, I was far more invested in anything Bjorn Rivalson was doing than any of the villages. Most of them didn’t have actual names, and although I get picking out historically accurate settlements could have been tedious, I’d have found it better for immersion. You could tell you were about to handle something important when a village wasn’t just named after one of its traits.

To get any of the villages to like you, you had to pay attention to what they wanted. However, even after reading what they wanted? I didn’t know what they really wanted half the time. It felt too much like figuring people out, and I get it’s part of the challenge, but it felt more like a decoding puzzle than a dating sim. I enjoyed the dialogue a lot, but I saw quite a few typos as I was playing, so there could have been some better proofreading before the game was published. But, this was the only major issue. All of the villages had unique designs, including minor one-off characters.

Overall, I would say that Doki Doki Ragnarok is a fun game, even if it does fall into a lot of clichés; I would happily return to it again, just for the feel-good factor that comes with it. I believe Bjorn Rivalson stole the show, and I just didn’t care for seducing Valhalla by the end of it. I’m sure they’re nice, but Bjorn Rivalson exists.