Dragon Ball Z: The Legacy of Goku is a linear action adventure that pretty much follows the anime's plotline to a tee. The game opens as our hero, Goku, watches in horror as his son, Gohan, is kidnapped. The quest to get his son back takes this guy from Master Roshi's Island, to the Home for Infinite Losers, back to earth, and continues on through the entire storyline of the Dragon Ball Z series. If you're looking for an accurate representation of the story-arc of the series, you've got it. If you're looking for an accurate representation of the series' style, well...you're not going to get it. As players continue through the game, they'll earn experience points by talking to characters, completing quests, and, of course, defeating enemies. As you get deeper into the quest and become stronger, you'll gain additional combat abilities and increase in speed. And more speed is definitely a good thing...Goku walks around like he's sloshing through mud...you may find your thumb aching from pressing the D-pad more forcefully, as if that's going to help this guy move faster.

This design is a far cry from the wild, exaggerated action sequences that the Dragon Ball Z is known for -- these battles aren't the wacky, over-the-top airborne fist-and-fury fights that Dragon Ball Z fans expect out of hte series. No, these battles have been reduced into a very traditional ground-based control scheme. Players control Goku in an overhead scrolling environment that attempts to mimic the Japanese-style RPG, but it's extremely crude and clumsy. You can only move up, down, left and right...no diagonals allowed. Which means, to walk up and left, you need to perform a really awkward "staircase" motion with the D-pad. What's worse is that Goku's sprite is a bit sticky in places, latching onto background objects because of the items' wide collision border.

If you're not learned in the way of Dragon Ball Z, you may find yourself confused with just what the heck is going on . It's a sloppy presentation since the designers don't clean up the transitions to orient the players. When you perish and end up in Hell, it just happens. No elaborate sequence to show the passage of time...you just appear in a new location. Conversations are held via text boxes with character faces of who's talking...but the artwork is so small it's a bit difficult to tell who is who in those little squares. And most confusingly: you can save your position anywhere in the game, but it isn't clear what is actually saved to cartridge...when you restore the game, you have all your health back, but all enemies you've defeated are alive and well. So, essentially, players can cheat and build up their experience and combat by saving and loading their games, defeating enemies over and over.

The puzzle elements in Dragon Ball Z, pretty much what extends the game into its ten-hour quest, are extremely straightforward. Quests are extremely simple "find item/person A, bring A to location B, which opens up puzzle C" creations with solutions that are never further than the location you're currently in. Some puzzles are sloppily implemented, and you'll find yourself stuck not because the puzzle's difficult, but because the game designers don't make the objective clear enough. You'll know when you need to use your flying ability to get to a specific location, because of the obvious placement of the "flight" icons right next to the access point.

And combat in Dragon Ball Z is actually a tremendously mixed bag. Dragon Ball Z features action-based fighting versus the turn-based style of Japanese RPG titles. Think Zelda combat vs. Golden Sun. The game's sprite engine has a hard time offering flawless collision detection, so playing the long distance "throw the fireball at faraway enemies" game is a bit on the annoying side...if you're off by a pixel or two the game won't register a hit on the enemies, especially if they're hovering around the borders of the screen. Luckily early into the game you gain the ability to "blind" opponents (basically stopping them in their tracks for a short amount of time), so up-close combat is definitely encouraged with this technique...although it gets a little tedious and tiring on the thumb, since the D-pad controls aren't exactly what you'd consider "loose."

On the plus side, the artwork in Dragon Ball Z is well rendered, with a mixture of tile-based backgrounds and hand-drawn scans for interior building shots. But what this game lacks is the animated flair from the cartoon. Character sprites walk around in bland three-frame cycles, and enemy deaths are just as uneventful. Sure, the development team lifted a few sequences from the actual show, but they don't pump up the action into anything exciting. They're just there.

Fun Rating: 7.5
By: Super Vegeta