Dragon Ball Z: Legacy of Goku 2 Review

DBZ Legacy of Goku 2 was a game I always heard about and especially for being one of the best Dragon Ball games, I owned the poster for the game despite never owning a copy of it or the actual GBA system. I still have it on the wall to one of my rooms to this day, it's a really good poster and it's been there since the early 00s which is crazy in of itself. I was looking for a DB game I never played and all ones on modern consoles I already played or don't interest me so I decided to give Legacy Goku 2 a shot.

As a whole, Legacy of Goku 2 never rises above just being "okay". It's a serviceable game but at the same time even it weren't for a certain grinding spot in the Northern Mountains, I wouldn't be able to beat the game at all. I haven't played Buu's Fury yet but I'd say Dragon Ball Advanced Adventure is the better game if I have to compare the GBA DB games I have finished. I prefer Advanced Adventure being a pure beat em platformer instead of Legacy of Goku's action RPG approach, and this is coming from someone who prefers the post timeskip part of the DB story when Goku is an adult.

Right away, when I start up LoG2 for the first time there is just something I need to accept regarding the game, this is the wackiest and most insane Dragon Ball game ever made, everything about LoG2 is just introducing weird and wacky scenarios that weren't even in the anime and all though the original run of DBZ had it's filler, LoG2 just amps it up to 11 regarding this.

To name some examples, you have an entire section where you play as Gohan adventuring around Goku's house and you have an entire pointless dream sequence fight with Frieza and when the latter shows up in the story for real, he gets beaten in a cutscene. You also have the Garlic Jr. Saga's Black Water mist of all things being used as a narrative reason as to there are hostile enemies in the various environments of the game.

It doesn't just end there either, the game covers the Cell Saga of the Dragon Ball story and it takes at least 3 hours of the game for Androids 19 and 20 to show up in the story, before then you will be fighting dinosaurs, resuing children, getting a key to the city back from an old man who somehow knows magic, and to top all of this, none of this adds anything to the overarching plot, and nothing is new is revealed about the characters. All of this is padding for the sake of padding.

All though this gets toned down the more the game goes there is still other wacky stuff like destroying a force field to Dr. Gero's lab and needing to destroy 3 generators to get to that said lab where in the anime, they just fly there.

This padding is as charming as it is obnoxious since well, I've played so many DB games over the years and they tell the same story over and over so having new content that isn't well executed is pretty interesting but at the same time, it's still basically padding that doesn't add to much of anything.

One great thing about LoG2 is the fact that it uses the Faulconer Productions score of DBZ, I love that score of the series and the music in LoG2 is fantastic stuff, I'd say it's worth checking out for those who don't even like the music that it's based on since some songs are improved like the Super Namek and Cell's theme and other songs are as great as ever like Android 16 and Shenron's themes.

Outside of all this, the game is nothing remarkable, combat is "okay" but it's mainly at it's best when fighting hordes of enemies since it can be fun taking them down with fists and then switch to key blasts to fight them at a distance. Special attacks are mostly usesless outside of Piccolo's Special Beam Canon, since it has a large blast radius and it damage adds up to enemies while they are getting hit by it. Enemies also give plenty of health and energy drops upon death making the combat at the very least feel fair to some degree.

Transformations are also handled pretty well and are true to the source material too since you need ki energy to maintain the transformation and it's draining to use as well but it also doubles your strength and speed upon activation which needs to a few seconds to be activated and can be interrupted. It's nice to have a source material accurate take on this in a game.

However problems start to show during boss fights because it reveals that LoG2's playable characters are basically tanks. You can't dodge, block or no defensive options and bosses don't give health so bosses are tank battles. Hitboxes are pretty large for you and the enemy and there are no attack telegraphs. At this point, you need to grind in the story to beat many of them. You get stronger in the story but not during gameplay. Without grinding and some Senzu Beans late game where you can grind for fish, LoG2 would be hard to beat for me.

The final battle at the Cell Games is really easy because of all this and I breezed through it by that point.

Overall, it's an okay DB game but hard to reccomend to non fans whether it would be the immense grinding to get past the various bosses before the Cell games or how the plot itself which mainly covers the Cell Saga can be have it's fair share of padding.