4/5 ★ – KHFanXIII's review of Dragon Ball Z: The Legacy of Goku II.

Dragon Ball Z Legacy of Goku 2 is a sequel to the original game on the Game Boy Advance. Do I feel it's so significantly improved that is makes the first game obsolete? Well... Firstly, I should state that I enjoyed the first LoG game. It was rough around the edges and pretty basic, but after years of hearing it be called trash, I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed it. So going into this game, the only way I could rationalize why people hated the original was that this game and the sequel made huge improvements. And for the most part, I agree. Right off the bat, this game's story picks up right after the first game ended and continues until the end of the Cell Games. I don't think I really need to explain the story of Dragon Ball Z here, so I'm just going to leave it at that. The game faithfully recreates (to the best of its ability) the scenes from the show and it even feels more authentic to us Toonami viewers as it contains 16-bit versions of Bruce Faulconer's DBZ score, which was a treat to hear. The only part in this area where I feel they kind of dropped the ball as it were, was the Father-Son Kamehameha scene. They kind of ruined it by not having Goku show up, however it's only one scene in the game and it doesn't ruin the whole experience for me. The first major change (in comparison to the first), gameplay-wise, this game introduces is the ability to play as multiple characters, and this is a huge improvement. In the original game, you are restricted to only playing as Goku. While this isn't a huge deal in and of itself, due to how the story of Dragon Ball Z unfolds, there's a lot of time where Goku is absent during major key events. This leads to several portions of the story being cut for the game, or replaced with short, odd additional areas added to play as Goku. This can only be seen as padding. Actually playing a game that accurately represents the story of the first game, which only includes the moments Goku would be present for, would be incredibly short (and the game ended up being incredibly short anyways even with all of the padding and "optional content.".) Due to this, it's an incredibly massive upgrade being able to play as multiple characters. You actually get to be an active participant in every major battle here and it feels great. The only real problem is that all of the characters are basically the same, with the only thing differentiating them being the specific special moves they can learn. Every character has two special attacks, a special melee move, and a transformation. I personally don't have too much of an issue with this, but I thought I would mention it as it could be a detriment to some. Speaking of special moves, let's get into how combat works. It's actually very similar to the first game with some minor adjustments. In the original game, you only had 3 special moves, one of which being a Ki blast (which every* character has in this game, so I'm not really counting that as one in this game). In this game, not including the secret character, there are a total of 9 different special moves spread across 5 characters, as well as regular melee attacks. Each special move costs a portion of your Ki meter, and many of them can be charged for more damage (at the cost of additional Ki). There is also a special melee attack each character can do by holding down the melee button for a few seconds and letting go after you see your character flashing; this costs no Ki. Unlike in the first game though, Ki is handled somewhat differently. In the first game, Ki recharged VERY quickly. You could spam your special moves and only have to wait less than 5 seconds in order for it to fully recharge. In this game, Ki is MUCH more valuable. Not only do moves cost more of your Ki, but it recharges VERY slowly. This makes it not viable to spam special moves and makes you be much more conservative with your Ki. They do try to counteract this within the game by having restorative pickups that pop out of objects you destroy (as well as with Senzu beans), but it's random as to whether one will pop out, so it's not reliable. Keep this in mind for later. Throughout the game you will also gain access to transformations. Be they Super Saiyan or Super Namek, it doesn't matter as they all function the same. While in a transformed state, they boost your stats a fair amount as well as increasing your movement speed. In order to transform, you must make sure your transformation meter (which is a little yellow triangle in the HUD), is full. While in this state (which can be activated at any time), you Ki meter is constantly draining and when it runs out, you will transform back into your normal state, with your transformation meter emptied (it does automatically refill though). Now there is a bit of a caveat to this. Transforming (and un-transforming), have an animation that must play out before you can gain control back. These animations, while they look cool, have some drawbacks. The transformation into your super-state has to fully play out before you can actually transform. If an enemy attacks you while the animation is playing out, you're booted back to your normal form, with your transformation meter depleted. This is actually something I like. Transformations are POWERFUL and having this kind of creates some risk in using them as, bosses especially, hit pretty hard, and taking the chance to transform mid-battle could cost you a lot of health. It also makes you have to be on the move a lot to try and figure out the best place to stand in order to give yourself enough time before the enemy hits you. Granted, you can transform prior to entering a boss fight, as (especially if you're familiar with the DBZ story) they make it fairly obvious when one is going to happen and your meters obviously don't drain during cutscenes. The second animation, the one for powering down, I'm not as fond of. While it can certainly be viewed in the same light as the transformation sequence, giving an additional risk for transformations, it doesn't feel necessary or fair to me. If you happen to use up all of your Ki and are forced to transform back, you are left standing there unable to move until the animation finishes. While you can't be hurt DURING this animation, you can immediately after it's done, meaning the enemy can get in a free hit or close in on you if you were keeping your distance. If you get into this scenario it's pretty much impossible to not get hit and I think it's pretty bullshit. Now you may wonder why I spent so much time talking about transformations and not the special moves? Well, that's because they are fairly useless in comparison, and I'll explain why. In this game, enemy stagger is introduced. What that means is that when you hit an enemy, they will be pushed back and be unable to attack for a second. Now you can't just spam the melee or special attack buttons, BUT if you time your attacks you can stunlock your enemy into being unable to do anything. Like transformations, your special moves also drain your Ki, but (as mentioned above), your Ki recharges very slowly. While some of your special moves may (and I mean MAY; it's not guaranteed) be more powerful than your melee attacks, you can actually do more damage-per-second with your melee attacks. So you can either use a few special attacks and deplete all of your slowly recharging Ki, OR transform and use powered up melee attacks to make quick work of the enemy, stunlocking them with punch after punch until they're defeated. Now every enemy does have a different range at which they can hit you with their melee attacks and the timing can be a little hard to nail initially, but I bet you can see which one is the more viable strategy here. This does trivialize the difficulty of the game if you master this technique, however, the original game wasn't that difficult either if you knew how to cheese it so I'm not going to knock this game for it. This game also makes a few alterations to things that were present in the original game. In Legacy of Goku, there were flight power-ups scattered throughout levels that would let you fly for a limited amount of time, depending on how high your flight meter was. In this game, flight is restricted to being used to cross certain gaps when you come across a flight symbol on the ground as WELL as traversing the overworld. Oh yeah, this game introduces an overworld. It's actually pretty neat too. You fly over the entire world, being able to stop and visit pretty much all of the iconic Dragon Ball locations. Back to flying though, this change doesn't really bother me as flight in the original game was really only used to help put distance between you and a boss. This is something you can still do by using the new run mechanic (activated by double-tapping the d-pad in a direction), even if it is a little clunky to activate. The other slight alteration to the original game's formula is how saving works. In the original game, you were free to save anywhere, something that greatly helped cut down on the tedium in that game. In LoG II? You now have save points (which also act as character switching stations). This is a downgrade I feel. If you die, just like in the first game, you are booted back to the title screen where you have to reload your last save. With this being relegated to save points, this means you can end up losing a lot of progress as sometimes they are quite far from your destination. This isn't enough to ruin the game or anything, but it is annoying and I wish they wouldn't have changed it. Another change in how this game differs from the first is how they handle progression. So in the first game, while it was never stated anywhere that you *had* to, grinding was pretty much required as there was no stagger on enemies, Goku's defense was abysmal early on, and each level felt like a significant boost. In this game, progression is gated off by these level gates, which are doors with the level the character has to be in order to progress. Now, this can be a bit annoying as experience isn't shared so you will have to individually level up your characters, but this isn't a huge deal. There are a few times throughout the story which give you some free levels, and also you gain new characters gradually which either scale to your current level or have a predetermined level which is usually fairly high. Now I actually prefer this method as it lets you know if you are an appropriate level for what's coming up. This is much better than the first game's kinda shotgun approach where you just go and see if you can defeat an enemy, and if not go grind. This makes it clear as day what level the developers expect you to be, meaning difficulty is much more balanced. Grinding also shouldn't really be too much of an issue as long as you aren't skipping past enemies. The other major area this game improves is with side content. The original game had barely any and the content it did have I very much would hesitate to call it even that. This game fixes that by not only having official side quests, but collectibles to find if you search hard enough in the form of capsules. Most capsules increase one of your three stats (strength, power, or endurance), but other than strength, I wasn't super clear on what the other stats did so I just usually gave them to whatever character what lacking the most in the stat that capsule increased. The other type of capsule is a golden capsule. This ties into one of the two side quests that last the whole game. Throughout the game, as you explore areas, you may come across a golden capsule. These can be pretty well hidden at times at will require you to explore the locations in the game thoroughly, but upon collecting them all, the reward is entirely worth it. In this game, to exit a level and access the overworld, you need to find a sign with a map on it. This can be a bit tedious as after you are done in an area, you will have to sometimes backtrack to the last sign you saw. Usually in places you have to go for the story, this isn't too bad. There will usually be a sign nearby, or the game will teleport you out of an area at certain moments. However, if you're grinding or looking for collectibles and the such, this can be a bit of a hassle. Well, this reward fixes just that. The reward for collecting all of the Golden Capsules is a singular Golden Capsule which allows you to exit to the overworld in any area. This makes exploring, grinding, and looking for collectibles much easier. I would try to get this as soon as possible. The other game-long side-quest in this game is collecting the displaced Nameks. After the end of the last game when Frieza blew up Namek, many of the Nameks resided on Earth until a new habitable planet was found. Well, a few stragglers didn't hear the news and were left behind. Your goal is to find them all. Now the reward for this one isn't nearly as good as the Golden Capsule one (being able to access a secret boss fight with Cooler). Now another area I feel this improved is that this feels more a lot less basic RPG as the first one. While yes the combat is pretty much the same, the level cap is DOUBLED from the first game, maxing out at 50, and unlike the first game it actually takes effort to reach that cap (which I did btw). This, along with all of the extra content and just having more story due to not always being stuck with Goku, expands the game's length CONSIDERABLY. Now I have no exact number this time as unlike the first game which was fairly short and I played in one sitting, I played this game over a month or so. If I had to guess, I'd say this game (with all of the side content and grinding to max level) took me 36-40 hours or more to complete, which is such a HUGE contrast to the first which took me 7-8 hours to complete it. And unlike the first game, they didn't have to pad out the story, so those are genuine hours enjoying the game and experiencing what it had to offer. Now the final verdict, does the existence of this game retroactively make the last game bad? No? Not really. The first game I still think is alright. This game however, I would say is pretty good and feels like the ultimate form of what they were trying to realize in the first game.