Occasionally they’ll show a still photo from the show. There are even times where they’ll just stand still while you’re shooting them. If you fight them and run away they sometimes don’t follow you and just spastically run about trying to figure out where you went. They’re running around frantically for absolutely no reason and can’t even understand the environments around them. The enemy AI is just as broken, which makes it even more insulting when they kill you. Shouldn’t programmers have caught this in the debugging process they never bothered to do? What’s worse is when an enemy is fighting you, their model goes over Goku’s and during this no physical attack can hurt them because Goku hits the person in front of his model and can’t hit himself when an enemy is occupying the same space as him. Physical attacks are virtually useless because no matter how many times you hit them, the monsters will always kill you faster.
There’s also flying, but it’s never really used. This is the Legacy of Guldo! All energy attacks can be charged up and blasted for more power and you recover energy over time. Very low defense, easily killable, and can stop time? This isn’t Goku’s legacy. It works instantly and you can get out if someone is chasing you. In this game it basically stops time, regardless of what your opponent is doing. If you watch the show you know it’s a blinding flash to anyone with open eyes. When you’re leveling up, Solar Flare is your salvation. The latter of these is only really useful if you’re taking on a large group of enemies, which is no help because if you are fighting more than 3 you have no chance of survival. A regular Ki Blast, Solar Flare, and Kamehameha.
You have all 3 attacks by the time you get to Nappa. Very long and drawn out fights where your only chance of survival is avoiding their attacks rather than being tough enough to endure some of them. Remember how in the show whenever a wolf clawed at Goku’s arm five times he keeled over and died? Of course you don’t. If anything hits you a few times, you die and go to the last point you saved. Here is where the biggest problem with the game reveals itself in stunning detail: combat is broken beyond anything reasonable. Long, drawn out, grinding areas filled with wolves, dinosaurs, and minions. So for extra padding, they added levels in between fights. So if you’re playing Goku, that’s only five main battles and whatever grunts they could add in between. In “Legacy of Goku,” he fights Raditz, Nappa, Vegeta, four members of the Ginyu Force (in rapid succession so that counts only as one fight), and all of Frieza’s forms. There is a lot of fighting in “DBZ” with everyone else. My point is Goku’s ideally the finishing move. Usually, the other Z Warriors deal with lesser enemies and when a mid-level fighter intervenes, Goku mops the floor with them then nonchalantly confronts the final boss. He’s not a usually a good first responder to new enemies. He spends a lot of time recovering from previous battles, traveling through space slowly, bedridden with heart disease, training for the next battle, and more times stuck in Other World being dead than times he’s actually died.
The “DBZ” formula involves a lot of downtime for Goku in order to let other characters borrow the spotlight. While playing as Goku is expected, it’s easy to forget that he is absent from the majority of the show’s fights. “Legacy of Goku” is a very short game, as it only follows Goku’s fights from Raditz to Frieza, basically the first three seasons out of nine (as plotted out here). When both are on the same cartridge, you feel like you need to beat the first one before you move onto the second. In short, “Legacy of Goku” is terrible but the sequel is great.
I never thought I’d say this but this was actually a problem. Digging into my little collection of old handheld games, I’m drawn to “Dragon Ball Z: The Legacy of Goku I & II.” It was real nice of them to release both on the same cartridge.