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DBZ: The Legacy of Goku
next to Budokai and not counting the extremely hard to find “Legendary Super Warriors”, is probably the best DBZ title out so far. It’s unarguably the best DBZ RPG, and that’s all we’re really concerned with. Not that is has a lot of competition, but it makes it sound decent… for now. Starting at the very, and I mean VERY beginning of the entire DragonBall Z series, and ending with the death of Freiza, this is an overall pretty bland title.
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Controls
Normally this wouldn’t be mentioned in a GameBoy game of any kind, but I have to say that this is maybe one of the best parts of the game. Granted, it only has 6 buttons to work with, and that’s if you include everything but the D-Pad, but Webfoot did well with what they were given. A is your basic attack button, nothing more than simple punches that are said to gain speed, but if they really do get faster I sure as hell don’t notice. B launches your Ki Attacks… all 3 of them: your basic energy blast, your enemy-stunning solar flare, and the infamous Kamehameha wave. Holding down any of these will strengthen the effect of whatever attack you may have selected (L button cycles through attacks). No complaints here, not one at all.
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Gameplay
This hurts, and it hurts bad. Tons of puzzles, all a barely-disguised clone of the last, all involving battles with enemies that are barely-disguised clones of the last. First, the “flying” part of the game, you get flying charges, the max amount you can hold increases with each level up, and you hit R to start and R again to land. However, some ridges you can fly over, and others that are identical, you can’t. Sometimes you can fly over buildings, and sometimes you can’t fly over a rock. The landing is tricky since sometimes your landing zone is quite small, and if you don’t hurry up and land before your charges run out, you’re shot right back to where you first took off… and fresh out of all those charges you saved up. Next, the puzzles, each more monotonous than the next. Mainly, it’s finding an item or a person, and bringing it to a certain location or person. This takes place probably a little over 20 times in the game, maybe in the high 20’s or low 30’s even. Trust me, it’s just too painful to talk about. Last are the battles, which the game has tried to enable long-distance battling full of flying around and Ki attacks, but I’ve already covered flying, and the impact detection on your Ki attacks is HORRIBLE. Sometimes is goes over the enemy, sometimes below them, I realize it’s only a GBA screen to display everything, but sometimes the wave goes STRAIGHT THROUGH THE ENEMY and out the other end, and no damage is done, in fact the enemy doesn’t even notice you.
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Graphics and Sound
For the most part the graphics are so-so, but every once in a while you get a picture straight out of the cartoon, which are reproduced VERY nicely in high resolution. The music you’re going to have to listen to for hours on end is thankfully pretty good, and it might even get stuck in your head once or twice, something I didn’t see coming. Depth perception isn’t all that great, which thwarts about 90% of my sneak attacks on enemies while trying to build experience. The last real complaint in this department is that when you’re talking with another character, sometimes it’s not obvious who’s talking to you and your only way of telling is by the picture of the character’s face, and those aren’t very hi-res. Other than that, especially if you plug in some headphones, there’s some great sound in this and the graphics just about hit par.
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Overall
A DBZ RPG had A LOT of potential, and it would have been really easy to incorporate all the usual elements… leveling up, stats, exp, storyline, you name it. Technically they did all these things, it’s just that the creativity was miles away when they put it all together. It doesn’t represent the intensity of DBZ, and it’s so freakin' linear you can’t even walk or fly diagonally, it just seems like they ordered a bunch of farting ducks to put together graphics, puzzles, and sound bites and slap a DBZ name on it. It’s supposed to be a 10-hour quest, but unless you get stuck at a real stupid part in the game involving collecting ghosts which are sometimes IMPOSSIBLE to get to, you’ll finish it in a day or two, or one really long crap.
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