The game kicks off with a horrendously pixelated intro, looking every single bit of its 16-year-old age, with all the hallmarks of an early-2000’s Game Boy Advance title, rife with a bit-crunched guitar riff from Bruce Falconer’s western Funimation dub soundtrack and exceptionally short GIF-like animations of all the main cast, ripped straight from the anime.

At the very least, it couldn’t possibly be worse than the first, right? Cynically, I selected it-I’d play it just for a bit, if only to see how horrible it would be. But, eventually, years later, whilst scrolling through a list of games on my Supercard, I saw the game innocently sitting there, begging to be played. So, in the following year of 2003 when a sequel was released, I pointedly ignored its existence, entirely certain that the game would be just like the first: clunky, awkward, a chore, difficult to control downright terrible in every single way. Sometimes licensed games can be very, very, bad. At the time, it didn’t really matter that most of those games were clones and reskins of more popular franchises, or licensed purely to make a quick buck I could play as my favorite characters-what more could possibly matter?! So, when the day arrived, and I excitedly popped the cartridge of Dragon Ball Z: The Legacy of Goku into my GBA, younger me immediately learned a valuable lesson: Sometimes licensed games can be bad.

As a kid, there were few things more exciting than going to the local game store, and finding out that one of my favorite anime or cartoon series would be getting a brand new video game.

Dbz the legacy of goku review