Dragon Ball Z: The Legacy of Goku

"Dragonball anime = good, Dragonball game = crap"

For starters:

I personally am a big fan of the DB/DBZ/DBGT anime series, have been for a while now. I have played every game I have been able to find, and I have tried to enjoy them. But this, this is an insult. Not only did they take a great license, and try and cram only a part of its story into a game, but they completely screwed up with doing it.

Dragon Ball is best suited for a fighting game, as seen in Hyper Dimension (one of my all time favorite fighting games), NOT an RPG, but for some reason they keep trying to make it into one. I will give Legend of the Super Saiyajin credit, at least that attempt at a DBZ RPG followed the story of the long running anime/manga. Legacy of Goku attempts to follow the story, but Infogames, rather then let the story go at it’s real pace, decided to make it longer, they put in…..

QUESTS!

But not just any quests, these are quests that serve absolutly no purpose what so ever, a few will give you experience, one teaches you a skill, the other just give you a senzu bean. There is no purpose to any of them, and you can easily beat the game without bothering with any of them (with the exception of the very few that actually effect the story, I stress the word few).

But enough with the bashing, I’ll just narrow it down to categories.

Graphics:

In game, the graphics are one of the only real pluses. Characters look the way they should, colors are right, and backgrounds are nice. Just what I was expecting from this game. Then you have the cut scenes. Scenes from the anime that are put in to help the story, well, they’re terrible. Slow moving, very pixelated, and the game could have benefited from the majority of them being cut. The fact that Infogames omitted Piccolo’s Special Beam Cannon from the Raditz scene (replacing it with a KI blast), really marks it down.

6/10

Gameplay:

Control pad moves, A is punch, press B to fire weak energy blast but hold it to charge, R is fly, and L is switch energy attack. Simple enough, right? I mean, how could you screw that up? Well, that part thankfully worked out, it’s the fact that everything else sucked that hurt it. Collision detection is way off in a lot of areas. I was facing Vegeta, and he was right underneath me, dealing damage to me, and I couldn’t hit him. I’ve had times where I’ve been walking and I walked over a tree and then was unable to move anymore, would it be more realistic to not be able to walk into the tree? There’s no diagonal movement, which is a problem with me, but I could live without it.

6/10

Story:

Yep, going to rant some more. And this rant will be for the people who know the basic story. You still start on Roshi’s Island with Gohan, Krillin, Bulma, and Roshi, oh yeah, Turtle was there too. Gathering of friends who haven’t seen each other in years, Raditz shows up, nabs Gohan, Piccolo shows up, Goku and Piccolo team up. But from there you have to go to Goku’s house and you’re met with a bunch of meaningless sub quests before you’re even allowed to face Raditz! And that’s just the first 5 minutes of the game. And for the times when Goku isn’t around and things are still going on (Gohan’s training, the Z Fighters getting killed by Nappa, just about everything on Namek, etc.) the game makes no point in letting you know except for having a sentence long synopsis of the event. Had they let you play as characters other then Goku, and been a part of the events he was not apart of, the game truly would have benefited.

Should be 8/10 since I love the DBZ story, but instead it gets a 3/10 for filling it with mindless crap and leaving out major parts of the story.

Length:

I beat this game, first try, while attempting to do as many sub quests as I could, and I was done in under and hour and a half. I’ve read elsewhere that people have completed it in just over thirty minutes. The part of DBZ they are trying to cover is somewhere around 90 episodes long, the length of this game is unacceptable in comparison to that.

1/10

Sound:

There are a few looping background tracks to set the mood. I personally would have liked for the opening scene of the game to have had the music from the anime (whether it be Rock the Dragon or Cha La Head Cha La), but oh well. Goku does yell “KAMEHAMEHA!” when you charge it fully, that’s a plus.

5/10

Overall:

Infogames dropped the ball. They took a good license, filled it with mind numbing crap, and butchered the story to make what they thought would be a good game.

4/10

Rent or Buy?

Rent it if you must, but if you buy it, well, I hope you wanted a $40 coaster.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 08/12/02, Updated 08/12/02