Playing through Dragon Ball Z: The Legacy of Goku reminded me of cheap movie tie-in games from my youth. Those big Nintendo "Seal of Quality" stamps didn't mean much after an hour of SNES Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. With poorly designed levels and inanimate objects trying to murder Kevin McCallister or Wayne Campbell, these games barely reflected their source material.
Dragon Ball Z: The Legacy of Goku is like that. It plays like someone's first attempt at an RPG Maker project. More accurately, it plays like someone coded “He11o Wor1d” but used 1's s in place of lower-case ls.
This playthrough marked my first time finishing Legacy of Goku. I beat its sequel so long ago that I still had a functioning Gameboy Advance SP, and I remember it as a rewarding little gem. I'd skipped over LoG because I didn't have the cartridge back then. I'd also heard bad things. In lieu of…certain other measures, let's say, hearing bad things can and will save a player fifty bucks.
We'll get into that. But first, the plot. You are Goku®, among the last of the alien Saiyan race. You were sent to destroy Earth as an infant, but became its hero instead after a head injury. Your older brother Raditz shows up to shatter your idyllic life, delivering the harsh truth and then kidnapping your half-human/half-Saiyan son, Gohan.
This is an urgent matter, as Raditz is a dangerous individual with no qualms about vaporizing a small child. Thus, Goku sets out on a mission to find little Gohan, deciding the best course of action is walking very slow and poking through the woods outside his house.
This is where the game's bad reputation confirms its ugly self. Right from the beginning, the forest creatures are as vicious as they are overpowered, capable of killing Goku in one hit. Beyond that, they have mastered the forbidden art of 'piss-poor hit detection.' Goku, who once took down an entire army of armed soldiers, has the endurance of wet tissue paper against common rural wildlife.
Now, full disclosure here: before I started playing, I applied a ROM patch that rebalances everything. I wanted to rid myself of as many bad design choices as possible.
Anyway, once Goku survives the natural, local wildlife, he comes across a village. For whatever reason, he cannot rescue his son, or Earth itself for that matter, before completing a bunch of boring fetch quests. An old man needs Goku to build him a stupid bridge. A young man requires flowers for his date. A couple has lost their wandering daughter; faced with the choice of locating her or preventing all existence ending regardless, Goku chooses the former.
From there, the game continues through the Dragon Ball Z canon, stopping at the end of the Freeza Saga. An awful dungeon, the late 80s kind with teleport tiles, pads out the game before the final boss. However, this game came out in the early 2000s, so there is no excuse. The Namek dungeon is also oddly placed, as no dungeons to speak of precede it.
To say that the game “goes through the story” depends on the player's familiarity with the source material. It does go through the story, but it does not retell it well. It jumps from setting to setting, saga to saga, with no real regard for anything happening. Without warning, Goku dies. Gohan goes Giant Monkey. Goku is on Namek. Stuff happens. The plot is told through brisk text next to hideous character portraits.
And yes, I utilized a ROM patch for this run. The hacker did everything possible to make this game tolerable. Too impatient to play the normal way myself, I watched TeamFourStar's Let's Plays for comparison; indeed, without the patch, boredom alone Legacy of Goku impossible to finish.
Short of rewriting the ROM from scratch, there's only so much a hack can do. There were still plenty of places where wolves burrowed themselves halfway through my character sprite before I could punch or Ki blast them. Plus, there's no method for fixing boring. Legacy of Goku has the dry, cheap presentation of a Tiger Electronics handheld, albeit with a prettier Gameboy Advance palette. Upon reflection, I feel as if I played a video game under the influence of codeine cough medicine.
But I finished Dragon Ball Z: The Legacy of Goku, mostly so I could replay Legacy of Goku II. I wanted to start from the beginning and get a feel for a continuing story. Halfway through, I wanted to quit, but that wouldn't have been fair.
Besides, when you're already halfway through a gauntlet of knives and needles, do you turn around and go back the other way, or do you keep going till you reach the other side?
Final Grade: D