I’m on a INTENSE Dragon Ball kick lately. I finally watched the last arc of Super after a year or so away from it, I watched Super – Broly, I started re-reading the original manga, I’m thinking about torrenting more of the old movies, and this streak has carried over into an itch for GAMING. Now being a bitch who just can’t find it in herself to engage in fighting games, my options are somewhat extremely limited (even the single cool one, Budokai 2, is the one that was left out of the HD collection for reasons I don’t know) ((it’s cool because the story mode is the weird board game)). If Kakarot is still on sale when I get paid on Friday I might pick it up but in the meantime I’ve revisited the game that in my head was the best DB game there could possibly be when I was a kid: this one you know, you’re reading the writeup.

It’s sick as hell, a story-driven RPG with five playable characters??? Would that every interest of mine got this treatment. Eight year old Ina was feasting. Upon revisit though, I think I appreciate what was going on here even more. It’s kind of astounding what Webfoot has pulled off here on a number of levels. First and foremost is the elephant in the room which is that Legacy of Goku 1 is an unmitigated disaster on every level, one of the worst I’ve ever played, so bad that even as a very young child I understood that no actually this thing just sucks. Being a kid however I did just buy the sequel anyway and lo, it’s a complete 180. The game is well-balanced, well-paced, well-written, looks beautiful, sounds gorgeous, only like half of the character portraits are terribly ugly. The other thing has to be taken as a whole: there’s just an impressive amount of STUFF in this game. It covers the middle third of the Dragon Ball Z phase of the story, which is a big chunk of shit, and even makes room for a filler movie and a lot of original side content. There are many locations, tons of unique NPCs, and the game is absolutely jam-packed with dialogue. As much as people make fun of Dragon Ball as the show where people scream a lot and it’s nothing but endless fights, the central body of the work (the manga) is actually really story and dialogue dense by this point and I think it’s a high compliment that I think you could easily plop a complete neophyte down with this game and they would be able to not only follow the story easily but also get a full sense of this very large cast’s unique personalities. Every time there’s a big story beat where everybody is hanging out you can talk to every single person in the group and they’ll all have two or three unique lines of dialogue in every situation it’s wild!

The game was clearly made by fans of the property and a lot of what’s really charming about it comes out in the loving attention to the property paid here. Like, there’s one part in the story where you have to blow up three generators to shut down a force field, but one of them is being used as a nest by a dinosaur lady. At this point in the game you could be tackling this open area as the friendly sweetheart boy Gohan, stoic alien with a cruel past but a noble heart Piccolo, or barely repentant mass murderer who only a few moments into the future from this scene will declare himself to have “a heart of pure evil” Vegeta. All three of these guys have completely different interactions with this dinosaur mom, and even though the little minigame you do to get her to move is always the same, the context of the interaction fits each character perfectly. You can get different responses from random NPCs you talk to or accept quests from depending on who you’re playing as, bosses will respond differently if you fight them as someone different than the story sets them up to fight, one guy is an original Dragon Ball reference and will have unique dialogue with Goku if they meet, it’s all very referential.

The extra content goes out of its way to fit in cleanly too – one early chunk of story sees Gohan have to run around town because Famous Phony Martial Arts Idiot Mr Satan is supposed to be holding a parade but refuses to start it until he gets a particular sandwich, but the guy who makes those won’t do it without reading his morning paper, but the newspaper stand is closed because the newspaper guy’s kid was involved in a bus crash you need to save him from. Then once you’ve resolved that and HAVE the sandwich, Stan insists the SONG at the parade is wrong and you have to track down his shitty record. THEN as soon as you get the parade going and Satan is given the key to the city, it’s stolen by a guy who is angry because he actually did the thing Satan took credit for to GET the parade and the reward. Mr Satan is an important character in Dragon Ball but in the story proper he shows up right at the end of the content covered in this game; here he’s introduced at the start, you get his whole deal, and references to him are sprinkled throughout the game. It’s a cool way to flesh things out.

The gameplay could read as shallow, but for a system with four buttons total and 8mb on a cartridge to work with I think Webfoot really hit a complexity sweetspot. You’re mostly balancing a basic melee attack and your limited energy for ki-based attacks, which you acquire a few of for each character throughout the game, and while there’s no combo system there is a certain rhythm to combat; stats and levels are really important and enemies hit hard when you’re not a fair bit ahead of them, so finding a way to keep a guy stunlocked based on the distance you keep between yourself and them and the frequency you hit the attack button at never stops being a satisfying management game. There’s a really good enemy variety, with a not-offensive number of reskins mixed with new enemy types all the way to the last moments. You can’t just trap a guy against a wall either, they bounce off it and through you, meaning you can’t really cheese any bosses by edging them into a corner or anything. It’s never the most challenging thing in the world, but the only dedicated recovery item is extremely scarce and tedious to farm, so it’s more fun to just stay on your toes, which I think actually helps the game balance.

One more thing that I think is really interesting is this game’s place in Dragon Ball’s localization history. Dragon Ball is famous for having many dubs from many companies even just in the English language, and for the really spotty way that stuff all aligned with the truth of the series until like, the late 2000s really. The most settled home for DB in the English language turned out to be Funimation, and their second, definitive dub of the original show is the era this game sits in. The interesting thing, though, is that while by this point DB games on console would always get English voices, they were firmly and obviously Japanese games, with the bright colors, peppy music, and poppy stylization that Toriyama was famous for. That stuff was obviously a part of Dragon Ball and we all became familiar with those vibes through the games, but it was always at odds with the much more intense, synth-and-metal soundtracks and deep red color palettes that Funimation was pushing in the marketing and openings for their English releases. The small handful of games developed by Webfoot on the Gameboy Advance are, as far as I know, the only Dragon Ball games every developed outside of Japan, using a non-Japanese version of the text as their source, and as such they’re a really unique and interesting relic of an era of the franchise that’s unique to a specific time and place that’s been firmly left behind. It’s present in small, funny things, like never spelling Frieza’s name the same way twice, which was a huge thing at the time, to curiosities like Piccolo’s species being referred to as “Nameks” instead of the now-correct “Namekians,” but the biggest and most important instance of this is that this game uses Bruce Faulconer’s iconic for that dub of the show and there has been a simply incredible and outstanding accomplishment in crushing those songs onto the GBA’s soundchip and retaining what makes them so infectiously kickass. I think the GBA soundchip gets a lot of undeserved hate from people who hear games that tried to put outside music onto a thing that wasn’t built for it. Here, music from an external source was instead deconstructed and reconstructed directly with the hardware in mind and I think it’s just hugely successful. Even in original songs, the vibe is perfect, wouldn’t change a thing.

I feel like I could get bogged down in the details I appreciate in this game forever if you let me. Like how Piccolo ends up having the weakest stat spread but on a technical level I think he’s the most fun character to play as because his charged melee attack has the highest risk-reward in it’s extremely short range/high damage/multi-hit element and that his transformation gets a higher speed boost than the super saiyans do to make up for his slightly lower power curve? That’s sick! But I won’t I’ll stop myself. I hope that my affection is evident, that my enthusiasm for the game shines past my obvious fangirl phase, that the merits of this cool little six hour tie-in action game can poke through a little bit between the cracks of this writeup. I do think the game is just a blast to play. I fully 100%ed it which involves grinding every character to their level caps, including a cute alternate ending with the statistically worthless character you get for doing that with everyone else and I feel like I wouldn’t do that if I was ONLY here for the cool attention to detail. Sometimes you just want some good clean fun to reset your brain a bit when things are unbelievably fucked up at work for the foreseeable future, and right now that game is DBZ the Legacy of Goku II!