I'm quite fond of the Game Boy Advance. I didn't own many games for it as a kid, but I was still able to play stuff like Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, Mega Man Battle Network 3, and the 3rd gen Pokemon games. Then when I learned what emulation was in high school, I discovered a wealth of games that I otherwise wouldn't have gotten a chance to play, like the GBA Castlevanias. There were a lot of good games on this thing!
There was also Dragon Ball Z: The Legacy of Goku.
(the cover art and box copy)
For those who are unaware, Legacy of Goku is an action-RPG developed by a small American studio called Webfoot Technologies, and published by Infogrames (now known as Atari SA, a French game holding company). Webfoot was founded in 1993, and mostly put out budget licensed games; I'm honestly not sure if they're still active, since their website seems to have not been updated since 2018, but even still that's an admirably long time to run a successful studio of less than twenty people.
Legacy of Goku is something of an unlikely success story. There's not a lot of information about this game floating around out there, even from the developers themselves, but I think LoG was Webfoot's first time developing an RPG; I'm also like, not sure how they got the license?? That part is unclear. But it sold pretty well - probably due in no small part to the fact that, as far as I can gather, LoG was the first Dragon Ball Z game on the GBA - and that success led to two sequels, Legacy of Goku II and Buu's Fury. They also made two other DBZ games - Dragon Ball Z: Taiketsu (a faux-3D fighting game) and Dragon Ball GT: Transformation (a beat-em-up with comically huge sprites). I will not be covering any of those other games beyond this post, but they're at least worth mentioning for added context.
I had a physical copy of this game as a kid, and I played the hell out of it, largely because it was the only game in town at the time. I have fond memories of it to this day, which is why I'm revisiting it in this thread. But as the first game of its kind, it has some growing pains; that box copy posted above is doing some pretty generous up-selling of its features. I'm fairly certain that bullet point about there being 75 characters to interact with is just counting the number of NPCs and enemies there are in the game, for instance. It's a pretty rough game in general, but it's not all bad, and we'll be looking at it in reasonable detail throughout the course of this thread. If nothing else, I'll be playing it so you don't have to!
There was also Dragon Ball Z: The Legacy of Goku.
(the cover art and box copy)
Legacy of Goku is something of an unlikely success story. There's not a lot of information about this game floating around out there, even from the developers themselves, but I think LoG was Webfoot's first time developing an RPG; I'm also like, not sure how they got the license?? That part is unclear. But it sold pretty well - probably due in no small part to the fact that, as far as I can gather, LoG was the first Dragon Ball Z game on the GBA - and that success led to two sequels, Legacy of Goku II and Buu's Fury. They also made two other DBZ games - Dragon Ball Z: Taiketsu (a faux-3D fighting game) and Dragon Ball GT: Transformation (a beat-em-up with comically huge sprites). I will not be covering any of those other games beyond this post, but they're at least worth mentioning for added context.
I had a physical copy of this game as a kid, and I played the hell out of it, largely because it was the only game in town at the time. I have fond memories of it to this day, which is why I'm revisiting it in this thread. But as the first game of its kind, it has some growing pains; that box copy posted above is doing some pretty generous up-selling of its features. I'm fairly certain that bullet point about there being 75 characters to interact with is just counting the number of NPCs and enemies there are in the game, for instance. It's a pretty rough game in general, but it's not all bad, and we'll be looking at it in reasonable detail throughout the course of this thread. If nothing else, I'll be playing it so you don't have to!
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