Handheld Wars #181 - DBZ Legacy of Goku (GBA Civil War)

I know we have some Dragon Ball fans on this forum so I thought this would be a fun discussion.

I myself am a casual Dragon Ball and enjoy OG DB, Z, and GT. That said, I am NOT a fan of the gameplay of Nintendo's top-down 2D Zelda games, which The Legacy of Goku games clearly take inspiration from, which I why I didn't really care for the only Legacy of Goku game I played, II, which is widely considered the best entry in the series. But being a good clone of something I'm not fond of isn't going to win me over.

In terms of what I liked about II (which I've heard is extremely similar overall to III at least), it did have fairly nice visuals and good effort put into the storytelling. But the gameplay simply failed to impress me, and there's not really much to talk about outside of the gameplay since the game's presentation/audio is expectedly bare-bones being a top-down GBA title, so I'm just going to focus on that because that's all I really remember about the game.

It's basically a Zelda-clone and feels instantly similar to titles like A Link to the Past and the original LOZ on NES, expect there are some differences. For starters, there's some JRPG leveling from what I remember, like using certain powers builds the skill levels of certain sayian skills and such, so it's essentially a real-time JRPG. Think A Link to the Past only with upgradable skills. The game features multiple playable characters but I can't remember if there was any noticeable difference between them when it came to the combat or locomotion. Also, another major difference between Legacy of Goku (or at least the second game) and the top-down 2D LoZ games is that, unlike in those early top-down Zeldas, enemies no longer respawn in chapter sections that you have beaten, which makes it feel much more linear and less sandboxy compared to the top-down Zeldas. This is something that I hated about the game because it not only detracted from the challenge but it also made back-tracking feel so barren, pointless, and depressing. There was nothing going on, no enemies to fight, no way to relive old memories of fighting specific monsters from earlier in the game, basically no fun to be had with backtracking. So there was no reason to do it.

I also remember the AI being pretty bad. When I borrowed my friends cart back in the day, he had made a save right before the final fight with Cell, so I would fight Cell over and over just for the fun of it, and more than just a few times the android would get stuck behind a bolder while I would charge up a spirit bomb and lay waste to his sorry ass. So the AI felt very primitive in general, although I suppose that's to be expected given the wimpy hardware its running on and honestly that wasn't such a huge issue for me since a lot of games I love have mediocre AI. I was much more disappointed by the game's other issue of the lack of respawning enemies in areas that have already been conquered.

Overall The Legacy of Goku II was an ok game but I would say it's only a must-play if you're either a fan of the top-down Zeldas or a hardcore DB fan. Otherwise, for anyone else I think it's worth passing up. Based on my so-so experience with the supposedly best entry in the series, I have no interest in playing the other Legacy of Goku games.