Every Dragon Ball Game Where Goku Isn’t The Main Character (In Chronological Order)
Every Dragon Ball Game Where Goku Isn’t The Main Character (In Chronological Order)
Dragon Ball didn’t keep Goku away from being the protagonist for too long, but the franchise’s games haven’t forgotten the value of sidelining Goku.
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It’s hard to separate Dragon Ball from Son Goku. The story is ultimately about Goku’s life, beginning when he’s just a boy and ending with him a grandfather. Dragon Ball is a narrative contextual used through Goku’s growth, both as a person and a martial artist– but he’s not the franchise’s sole protagonist. In fact, Dragon Ball was set to replace Goku with his son, Gohan, as the main character following the events of the Cell Games.
While Gohan ultimately did not remain Dragon Ball’s main character, this passing of the torch made it clear that DBZ didn’t need Goku front & center. Dragon Ball didn’t keep Goku away from being the protagonist for too long, but the franchise’s games haven’t forgotten the value of sidelining Goku.
10 Super Butoden 2 (1993)
Super Butoden 2 for the Super Famicom and SNES (in Europe) released at a very interesting time for Dragon Ball: Goku had already passed the torch onto Gohan, but the Buu arc hadn’t quite started and solidified Gohan losing his role as main character. As a result, Super Butoden 2 is very earnest in its attempt to showcase Gohan as Dragon Ball’s definitive lead– to the point of omitting Goku from the game’s base roster altogether.
Goku is the only heroic playable character not to have his own story mode, but this is exactly what makes Super Butoden 2 so special. Adapting the Cell Games and loose versions of Broly: The Legendary Super Saiyan & Bojack Unchained, Super Butoden 2 is a fascinating glimpse at the Gohan driven franchise Dragon Ball could have become.
9 Budokai (2002)
Adapting the Saiyan, Frieza, and Cell arcs, Budokai has one of the best story modes in the series. Budokai emulates the Dragon Ball Z anime as much as it can, to the point of featuring the opening song and even episode titles in-between major gameplay sections. Covering only a limited portion of the story, Budokai contextual uses itself around the relationship between Goku & Gohan.
They’re the characters used most often throughout the story and Gohan even gets the final fight against Vegeta during the Saiyan arc. Budokai stresses Gohan’s importance to the point where him being handed the torch during the Cell Games only makes sense. Budokai is his story.
8 The Legacy Of Goku II (2003)
The first Legacy of Goku might be a dud, but The Legacy of Goku II is a genuinely great GBA action RPG that adapts the Cell arc with a surprising amount of detail and soul. Goku is playable, but the story is told primarily from Gohan’s perspective while alternating between Piccolo, Vegeta, & Trunks. Goku only joins the party right before the Cell Games and is completely unavailable during the post-game.
That said, this results in a Dragon Ball games that emphasizes the importance of the supporting cast in an arc that already made good use of the series’ ensemble. The Legacy of Goku II is one of the best instances of a video game putting Goku aside. The final product really is all the stronger for it– down to control of Goku being taken away to emphasize his sacrifice. That’s just good game design.
7 Sagas (2005)
While The Legacy of Goku II proved that a great Dragon Ball game could be made outside Japan, Sagas more or less destroyed any good will the game had garnered with a marketing campaign that greatly exaggerated the final game Sagas would ultimately be. What was promised was an open world action RPG that took fans from the start of the Saiyan arc to the end of the Cell Games– complete with animated cutscenes to round off the plot.
What fans instead got was one of the worst Dragon Ball games ever made, failing to deliver on all its promises. Sagas was a level based action game with minimal exploration, few cutscenes, and extremely repetitive (and broken) combat. Gohan ultimately winds up the main character, but Sagas is not worth playing to completion.
6 Harukanaru Densetsu (2007)
A lesser known DS game, Harukanaru Densetsu takes a page from the card based Dragon Ball RPGs of yore while adapting the Saiyan, Frieza, and Cell arcs. Goku, Piccolo, Gohan, and Vegeta all have their own campaigns, but the nature of the story’s ending means that Gohan winds up the game’s true leads. He has the most fleshed out development with the most conclusive ending, and like most Dragon Ball games that only adapt up to the Cell arc, Harukanaru Densetsu primarily frames itself around the relationship between Gohan and his father.
5 Shin Budokai – Another Road (2007)
Shin Budokai – Another Road was the first Dragon Ball game to feature neither Goku or Gohan in the lead role. Instead, Another Road tells an entirely new tale where Future Trunks travels back in time to get help for his Majin Buu crisis. Another Road predated the Goku Black arc by a considerable amount of time, beating Super to the punch as far as reintroducing Trunks is concerned.
The story does go off the rails the further it goes, tapping into aspects of Dragon Ball’s lore that often only pop up in fan fiction (like the importance given to a character like Bardock,) but Another Road is still one of the better Dragon Ball games and its chaotic story is a big reason why.
4 Burst Limit (2008)
Burst Limit set itself up as something of a reinvention of the Budokai formula, to the point where Burst Limit only adapted up to the Cell Games and even featured a fairly in-depth story mode comparable to the original Budokai’s (albeit without the anime framing.) As a result, Gohan winds up Burst Limit’s main character, but it all feels more circumstantial than it did in Budokai.
Burst Limit genuinely does a very good job at adapting some of the series’ biggest scenes (Sean Schemmel notably delivering an inspired performance as Goku in the English dub,) but the thread isn’t as cohesive as in Budokai, resulting in a story that doesn’t pass the torch to Gohan as gracefully.
3 Online (2010)
Dragon Ball Online has since become a footnote in the franchise’s history, but it was the first real attempt at Akira Toriyama expanding Dragon Ball’s canon beyond the end of the manga. Toriyama provided a post-series timeline that detailed everything following the End of Z, even clarifying how major characters died.
Online has players creating their own character as they travel through time. Unfortunately, Online was cancelled before its main narrative could be completed and its timeline has since been completely retconned in favor of Dragon Ball Super.
2 Xenoverse 1 & 2 (2015/16)
While Dragon Ball Online no longer exists, its lore lives on through the Xenoverse sub-series– two games that extensively feature time travel and an alternate version of Future Trunks who joins the Time Patrol following all the meddling he did in the Cell arc. Like Online, Xenoverse 1 and 2 have players creating their own character. Should players transfer over their data from Xenoverse 1 into Xenoverse 2, their character from the former will be treated as a legendary hero in the latter– a nice bit of continuity for Xenoverse fans.
1 Fusions (2016)
Dragon Ball Fusions is one of the most unique games in the franchise. A turn based RPG for the Nintendo 3DS, Fusions mixes the monster catching sensibilities of Pokemon with the absurdity of fusion in Dragon Ball. Virtually every character in the series can join your party and be fused together, leading to countless bizarre martial artists.
While the conceit behind Fusions is to collect as many iconic Dragon Ball characters as possible in order to fuse them into superpowered martial artists, players once again create their own character to take the lead. Considering Fusions’ structure is fairly similar to Pokemon, this isn’t unreasonable.
Link Source : https://www.cbr.com/every-dragon-ball-game-goku-not-main-character/
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