The purpose of this page is to serve as a knowledge base of Dragon Ball Z: The Legacy of Goku (GBA).
Note: Loading times are much shorter than normal on VBA compared to mGBA core in Bizhawk. The mGBA core should be used for TASing.
Faster movement
Normally, when in flying mode, your energy units (which determine how long Goku can fly) will drain every 9 frames that you fly. If you switch to walking mode before that happens, you will not lose any energy. You can move about 20% faster by flying for 8 frames, switching to walking mode, then switching to flying again - although it causes movement to look very spazzy.
Invincibility Glitch
In order to gain invincibility, get hit by an energy blast while flying. You will change back to normal mode and take the damage for it, but enemies won't attack you as long as you don't change into flying mode and back again. This will work only on the US version of the game.
Dialogue Glitch
If the game triggers a dialogue at the same time that you naturally talk to a person to bring up dialogue, the game will mess up and show graphically glitched character icons during the dialogue. The game may mess up in other ways as well, specifically:
- If you defeat Gregory and talk to Kai on the same frame that Gregory talks to you, the dialogue glitch will occur but once the game sends you to the next room it will crash. This may happen because part of the glitch is that it brings up the two dialogues one after the other, and once you are sent to the next room, the game gets confused about whose dialogue it is supposed to load.
- If you do it on Krillin after defeating Vegeta, Krillin's text will come up when you arrive in Namek but the game will not crash.
- If you save your game on the same frame dialogue is triggered and it takes you to a new room, the game will not be saved.
- If the game is paused on the same frame that dialogue occurs, the background will disappear (it turns white).
Dealing more damage
The damage Goku deals or takes depends on timing. Generally, enemies will have a short span of invincibility when Goku hits them. Only hits with a crash sound will deal damage. What exactly determines the amount of damage dealt or taken is not researched yet.
Skip the Ginyu Force
On the map where you fight the Ginyu Force, simply fly in the top left corner of the map to go to the next room right away. This seems to be a misplaced warp that wasn't intended to be there.
This skip may not save any time in a speedrun because you skip a lot of experience points along with it.
Negative damage
This glitch will cause an enemy's punch to heal you rather than damage you.
This has occured with Jeeze, Burter and Frieza final form.
Mugg's WIP on VBA v21 from 2008 encountered this bug. Jeeze punches at framecount ~42800, causing Goku's health to go from 582 to 6522, mysteriously.
Stay in current room when touching a trigger
It is believed that this works with a few triggers in the game, although this was only specifically verified with the flying Nimbus at the beginning. If you touch such a trigger and then press into the other direction while advancing the screen (i.e. clicking away the Anime splashscreen after touching the Nimbus), the screen will be black and Goku will stay in the room.
The blackness can be cleared by pausing and unpausing. Touching the Nimbus now will send you to the next room immediately. If you enter and leave the Kame house prior to touching the Nimbus, the Anime splashscreen will appear again.
This is all useless for speedrunning though.
Zombie mode
When you run out of health, you are still allowed to walk for a moment before collapsing. If you walk into a new room, you will not collapse but you will be unable to bring up your pause screen as you have no health. You can only bring up the pause screen again if you gain health, and you can only do so by leveling up, or possibly by using the Negative damage glitch.
Missing Kid Skip
You can skip the kid and go past the soldiers by flying over the gate (at the corner). Since you only gain a capsule as a reward for saving him, there is no drawback from having lesser experience if you skip him.
Faster route in Underworld
In the underworld, where you have to pick up the 3 spirits, there is place where you can go through a wall. Taking this route to the 2nd spirit is faster by about 50 frames than the intended route.
Memory addresses
See
here for a few addresses, a stat growth guide and a lua script.
TODO: Make a list here.
Links
- Lua Script (for Bizhawk 1.11.1, Dragonball Z The Legacy of Goku (U) )
if you want to use it for newer Bizhawk versions, edit line 101 to gui.drawText(x, y, text,color,0x00000000,8,"SF Intermosaic B")
- RTA Leaderboard
- The Cutting Room Floor