5MVG: Five-Minute DBZ: The Legacy of Goku

[Zeke]

Ready for something silly and self-indulgent? No? Too bad, it's my birthday. Here's a new fiver for a game even I barely played!

I grew up at the right time to be a big fan of Dragon Ball Z, but there have always been two obstacles to doing anything with it on this site. One is that we specialize in one- or two-hour content here; the fiver format doesn't lend itself to shonen anime, whose individual episodes are short but whose arcs are massively long. The other is that DBZ Abridged is already out there. 5MV predates the Abridged fad by about a decade, but I'm not so jealous of its greater popularity that I can't appreciate the standouts. DBZA is absolutely drop-dead hilarious, and fivers of DBZ would always be in its shadow.

But you know what does fit our format? DBZ video games! There are all too many of them, most not very good (sound familiar, Trek fans?). My favourites are the GBA games, generally called the Legacy of Goku trilogy (although the third one had a different name). Games 2 and 3 in that series are phenomenal. Game 1? So bad that to this day I struggle to believe the same people made it. Bad news for players, but good news for me, since it lets me tackle the first two DBZ arcs and a very flawed gamification of them in one swoop!

Here's Five-Minute Dragon Ball Z: The Legacy of Goku. Spot the joke I've been waiting for a chance to make since before 2005!