Dragon Ball Z: The Legacy of Goku (GBA)

Back around the time of Dragon Ball Z: The Legacy of Goku’s release there was a magazine covering it that claimed that in this title Goku, a hero who at this point in the series’s timeline should be able to shatter stones with his fist and blow apart vehicles with a ki blast, would be finding himself dying to completely normal wolves while walking around. Since Dragon Ball Z: The Legacy of Goku is a role-playing game though, I figured it might just be some sort of technicality. It’s fairly common for RPGs to feature fairly mundane enemies at the start that you aren’t really expected to lose to and a wolf sounded like the perfect fodder for an early section of the game. What I didn’t expect on playing it finally though was not only were the regular wolves as lethal as the magazine claimed but they are even more difficult foes than the planet-destroying aliens who make up this game’s bosses.

Dragon Ball Z: The Legacy of Goku covers the first two sagas of the Dragon Ball Z anime, things kicking off when the martial artist Goku learns he’s not human but a member of the alien Saiyan race. These powerful human-like beings were responsible for building up a galactic empire before they were nearly wiped out in their entirety by a different conquering alien named Frieza who they now serve, the game having you head off to stop the Saiyans who came to Earth and later heading to the planet Namek where Frieza aims to use their wish granting dragon to acquire ultimate power. To face off with the main foes in this story though Goku first must walk to where they are, most of the game focusing on him doing things like making his way through a forest, passing through a town with a bank robber problem, and exploring a Namekian temple in situations mostly invented for the game to provide more areas to explore. One area where the game does do a better job of not only justifying exploration but balancing the threat foes pose with your power level is when Goku finds himself in the afterlife facing off with rogue spirits and having a bit more of a clear direction in his goals rather than simply trying to travel to where a major villain is patiently waiting.

Near the start though you’ll be going up against things like those infamous wolves as well as other forms of wildlife like large crabs and surprisingly enough dinosaurs that will continue to reappear throughout the adventure even as you’re on another planet. The dinosaurs are able to get away with this though because the battle system barely undergoes any meaningful evolution and most foes will attempt to fight you in the exact same way no matter what they are. Goku starts off with only an incredibly short range punch and an energy blast he can charge a bit to make it go a little further and hit a little harder, but it will take multiple hits from either attack option to even put down the most mundane of early foes save for snakes and squirrels. Wolves are immediately a dangerous threat because they run towards you and stand on top of you as they attack, the player trying to hammer punches as quickly as they can to hopefully be spared of either having most of their life lost or all of it. Dinosaurs are at least a little slower so you can run circles around them and very slowly wear them down with energy blasts, but the only way role-playing game mechanics really factor into Dragon Ball Z: The Legacy of Goku is that you start off horrendously weak but by spending time fighting enemies you can slowly grow your power a bit.

The power increases can start to make the battles against wildlife less likely to nearly kill you, but you will have to engage foes pretty regularly to level up and early on growing your strength is complicated by how easily enemies can almost floor you in a normal fight. You are able to gather healing items, herbs often scattered around an area but you can only carry six at a time. They heal a fourth of your health so they’re not efficient, but you can make them reappear in the world by exiting an area and coming back. However, this can make enemies reappear and most will follow you pretty closely if they spot you, meaning to make more herbs reappear you also will have to face foes who likely will necessitate some herb healing after you’ve put them down. The early game ends up incredibly obnoxious as you feel horrendously weak while the fights aren’t even interesting to participate in, either boiling down to fist flailing or pestering baddies with blasts that take a while to wear them down. Eventually you will start to be able to dispatch wolves with a punch or two, and naturally that’s about when you’ll be moving onto new fights and foes.

Frieza’s forces primarily consist of humans and aliens who are armed with arm cannons that fire blasts similar to your own, so now that your foes have projectiles they become much harder to wear down at range. Similarly, by the time they appear you still likely won’t have increased your strength enough to really be a solid match for them unless you devoted a lot of time to tedious level grinding. You’re basically going to be back to losing around a third of your life in a single hit and likely needing a heal after every encounter if you can even justify it. The game does let you save any time, but if you are killed and reload your file you will only be at the start of the area you saved in with all enemies back to life. It actually becomes prudent to save after nearly every kill just to ensure you save the experience points from beating them or leveling up can become even more grueling, saving after other things like finding story specific items or doing anything with a level of permanence ending up being crucial so that you don’t walk forward and get immediately destroyed by some basic baddie.

Eventually you will get two new moves to add to your repertoire. The Solar Flare is a bit of a risky power to use, this briefly stunning enemies and allowing you to move in to punch them while they’re immobilized. However, the moment they can move again they will immediately attack, the stun not that long so trying to pull this plan off can be incredibly dangerous. The Kamehamea Wave is mostly just a stronger ki blast though, giving you a quicker way to kill things near the game’s later parts even if it costs more of the constantly regenerating energy meter to use. Solar Flare at least adds a new attack option, but your second energy move doesn’t really move the game away from its incredibly plain fighting system that allows the most basic of enemies to be remarkably pesky.

The boss battles with characters like the Prince of All Saiyans Vegeta and the final boss Frieza are much easier than the regular enemies because of the way their arenas are designed. You’ll often find yourself facing wolves in a forest where trying to run off might lead you to more enemies or the wolf will simply be fast enough to catch you. Frieza’s soldiers are often placed in areas with tight quarters and their energy blasts fire quickly. Boss characters will attack almost exclusively with energy blasts they need to visibly charge for a bit and their boss arenas are fairly large, have cover you can hunker behind, and often a good amount of herbs you can pick for healing item replacements. Bosses also seem to lose track of you a bit if you stand in certain places so you can rest and regain energy for your special attacks, the only real danger being if you corner yourself or the foe is offscreen when charging a blast so you don’t see it before you accidentally walk into its path. Boss arenas also have ample flight pick-ups, Goku able to briefly take to the air to travel a tiny bit faster. This can normally be used in area navigation like getting up onto cliffs or crossing water, but since bosses mostly just march behind you at about the same speed it gives you a way to put some distance between you and the boss. Notably a boss is often best fought by turning around repeatedly and loosing blasts their way so long as they’re not close enough to punch you when you do so, and since flight pick-ups gradually reappear there’s not really much to these battles with important named characters. The battle system isn’t any better in these special skirmishes and they can’t even match the peril of trying to save and heal your way through a space filled with fairly basic enemies, although considering how little there is to like it’s probably a relief they aren’t even more difficult than the standard soldiers.

The battle system, despite being so bare and boring, is the actual focus of the experience. You can sometimes accept small side quests like bringing a lost girl back to her parents or helping a few lost souls in the underworld find their way back to the demon overseeing their afterlife, but these are mostly just to put you in danger’s way or make you do a little flying or rock breaking that is hardly substantial content. The plot is a poor retelling of the anime’s events and is rushed as well, many characters from the show present here solely to stand in place and maybe catch you up on what they’re doing that is irrelevant or filling in large amounts of plot that can’t really be conveyed with stills from the anime. The character of Yajirobe for example doesn’t appear until his one plot necessary moment in which a character has to introduce him, and the game will threaten you with a good time by having a Saiyan boss turn into their massive monkey monster form only for them to be immediately shoved aside so you can’t even face this potentially new opponent type. More attention is given to a Namekian temple made up for this game than is devoted to recognizable characters and elements from the show, the game handling neither its original content in interesting ways nor doing justice to the franchise it is meant to be adapting.

THE VERDICT: Dragon Ball Z: The Legacy of Goku is an awful action game that kicks off with an incredibly bare fighting system not even fit for properly challenging wild dogs and never really improves from there. You get stronger but battles never get better as they involve invalidating danger by running around pestering them with blasts or saving and healing immediately after to offset how weak your defensive options against foes who can so easily kill you. The bosses however end up being the simplest foes because their battles are just as basic but more generous in letting you avoid danger and recover, no battle able to bring any excitement in the end. Add to that a sloppy story that barely has a handle on its source material and new material that provides little to make up for that and you get a game whose only legacy will be how abysmal it is to actually play through the whole experience.

And so, I give Dragon Ball Z: The Legacy of Goku for Game Boy Advance…

An ATROCIOUS rating. It baffles me that the designers of this game thought its battle system had any merit. You walk around at a pokey pace dishing out punches with barely any oomph, your special ki powers still feeling rather flimsy since they wear down foes so quickly while still being vital to overcome your incredible strength deficit even against mundane foes. Even if the enemies weren’t absurdly powerful at odd points in the progression it’s still not satisfying to clear them away since the battle system is so lean there’s not much thought you can actually put into it. Bosses could at least be said to technically require some more work since you have to go grab flight power-ups and will be moving around a fair bit in the constant chase, but those fights end up dull because you aren’t provided many options to fight back other than gradually executing a tedious energy beam routine. The game put so much emphasis on a battle system that has absolutely no depth to it unless you count the weak “Solar Flare and then punch as much as you can” strategy as complexity. Besides some obvious rebalancing in terms of strength the game really does just need some actual variety to how a battle can unfold. The wolves could have been dangerous without being devastating if they just popped out, tried to get in a bite, but you could easily knock them out with a punch. Frieza’s troops could have tried to fire with different patterns, bosses could have had attacks that cover more terrain than a small space in front of them, it’s practically too easy to suggest useful additions since there is hardly anything present here in the first place.

Even if Goku was swapped out with a basic character with no preexisting expectations about their strength, Dragon Ball Z: The Legacy of Goku is still far too simple while also being obnoxiously punishing, your options too limited to respond to bad battle design beyond things like constant saving. The battle system is almost comparable to the simple fighting in games like the original The Legend of Zelda but that even had additional tools and foes who attack in different forms to break it away from simply stabbing a sword forward. Here your punch doesn’t even go that far and your beams are hardly a band-aid for your normal weakness, and even when you do get strong enough to better trounce basic foes it’s not like it becomes entertaining. Incredibly shallow mechanically and everything else somehow having less substance than an already threadbare fighting system, Dragon Ball Z: The Legacy of Goku isn’t just a sorry attempt to adapt an action-packed anime, it is a pitiful little experience that doesn’t even seem to understand the basics of making an action game.