Dragon Ball Z: Gokū Hishōden (“Goku’s Soaring Legend”) was the first of only two Dragon Ball-specific games made for the original Nintendo Game Boy. The crossover trivia game Cult Jump on the Game Boy came first in 1993 and Dragon Ball Z: Legendary Super Warriors for the Game Boy Color hit later in 2002, but 1994’s Gokū Hishōden and its sequel Gokū Gekitōden from 1995 are a special blip of history.
Starting with Goku’s training leading up to the 23rd Tenka’ichi Budōkai, Gokū Hishōden ultimately takes the player through the full tournament and subsequent Saiyan arc of the original series. Fighting gameplay is controlled through menu selections with various types of attacks, special moves, and even movement around the game field/grid, with a few mini-games to break up the action surrounding Goku’s training with Kaiō. Gokū Hishōden notably supports the Super Game Boy, providing it with a special color palette and even unique border when played with the additional hardware.
The game has been largely ignored by the western fandom, who instead went on to have a wealth of riches on the Game Boy Advance contemporary with the franchise’s English dub production, with game releases hitting from both Japan and America.
At the end of last month, translator and game hacker Kazetrigger released a comprehensive English translation and patch for the game. We reached out to learn more about their experience with the franchise and work on this game translation.
What’s your origin story? How did you get into Dragon Ball, as well as into game translation?
I was a little kid in the 90s when Dragon Ball Z really took off in North America. Everyone I knew tuned in everyday to see what would happen, especially during the Frieza Saga. I bought all the manga, and I played many of the games, especially on the PS2. Even more so than DBZ, I was a fan of the .hack// series. I wanted to combine my interest in Japanese with my interest in video games, so I joined the team translating .hack//Link. In order to complete the game’s translation, I started learning how to romhack. Things started out slow. I struggled a lot, but I learned a bunch. I contacted Hilltop a lot and he was gracious enough to go over things with me. I probably annoyed the heck out of him, but now I have a much better idea how things work. Once .hack//Link was done (or as done as I was willing to get it), I wanted another challenge, so I started looking at other games. Next came Pixygarden and then Dragon Ball Z: Gokū Hishōden.
Why this game in particular? Was there anything special about it that appealed to you?
I can’t recall where I first heard about it — probably on Romhacking.net — but I noticed that it hadn’t been translated and I thought that a smaller Game Boy game would be a good way to work on something without going overboard with too large a project. And Dragon Ball Z was a childhood favorite, so it made sense to pick that instead of some game from a franchise I was unfamiliar with.
Were there any unique (or perhaps just interesting) challenges in translating this game?
In terms of translating from Japanese to English, that was not too challenging. I had to remember to use the official localizations, but there’s plenty of info out there on that. The Game Boy can hold only so much data, so the dialogue was not very complicated. However, in terms of romhacking, the game proved a bit tricky because a sizable portion of the graphics and some text were compressed with a custom compression algorithm, so extracting those took a little time.
That first fight against Copy Goku might be a rough intro for some players. Any advice?
When testing the game, I had to do that fight several dozen times and there seems to be a fair amount of RNG. I found that moving behind an enemy increased my chances of a hit and I tended to go for larger attacks initially, such as the Kamehameha, in order to get a stronger HP lead at the start. That way, if I missed a few hits after that, I would have a little cushion. I also found using Dodge to be the best damage mitigation option. Counter was useless for me.
In an era of absolute slop, what does a real translator bring to the table that AI or machine translation never could?
Machine translation has improved immensely over the past few years, but its current major drawbacks are that it lacks context, it leans too literal/formal, and it can hallucinate or anticipate user wants. The computer doesn’t know who the speaker is or the situation in the game, so it can struggle to apply the right speech register or meanings to a particular scene. Since Japanese is a highly-contextual language where things like pronouns are left out if they’re clear from context, using correct referents can be a challenge for AI. For example, it might use he instead of she or you instead of I. If you’re not careful, these things are easy to miss.
Also, idiomatic expressions and wordplay are also not always handled well. Worst of all is the hallucination where AI, hoping to please the user, tries to go beyond what the user asked for by doing things that weren’t specified. This can lead to extra words and paraphrasing being used that aren’t representative of the original text. If you’re not at least somewhat knowledgeable in the source language, you may not realize what has happened.
What AI can do well is give you a reasonable starting template to help speed up the process and it can also help with research. I don’t begrudge anyone who uses it as an aide, but you definitely should not use it for a release/final draft.
A natural follow-up question would be, “So what about the second Game Boy game, Gokū Gekitōden…?” and it seems we already have a hint about that:
Dragon Ball Z: Goku Gekitouden is a bit trickier than Hishouden. The ROM is tightly packed and uses a lot more compression. But I was able to get the opening narration figured out. Now for the rest of the game.
No idea when this will be done. Just wanted to show off my minimal progress.
— kazetrigger.bsky.social (@kazetrigger.bsky.social) August 9, 2026 at 12:19 AM
Special thanks to Kazetrigger for taking the time to share their answers and expertise. They can be found on Bluesky and Patreon, while the patch for Gokū Hishōden can be found on romhacking.net.
