gemini://gem.lizsugar.me/2024/03/12/golden-sun.gmi

I've been trying to play this game for a very long time now: back on the GBA via my DS, on the Wii U Virtual Console, and finally on Nintendo Switch Online. I did finally play and complete it on Switch, and it was fantastic.

What's always hit me about this game is how gorgeous it is. The sprites and design used in the overworld and towns feel very PlayStation in a good way. Battles are gorgeous, beyond anything else I've seen from the era. It's all entirely 2D, but they have sweeping camera motions with scaling and sliding backgrounds and make intelligent use of sprite scaling, positioning, and ordering to give the sense of depth. The battle camera often changes angle depending on who's attacking, which gives the whole thing a very dynamic and active feel. And the artists on this game created enough sprites that it never feels jarring going from looking at your characters backs to their fronts. Battles are not just fun to play but fun to watch too.

The other thing that always struck me was how dialogue heavy this game is. The intro sequence is pretty pretty long. That's because dialog and character interactions are trying to feel realistic. Whether they achieve that or not is unclear on certain scenes. Sometimes you just want the characters to stop questioning things, accept things as they are, and move forward. Characters will hem and haw, they'll repeat and confirm instructions and information, they'll question everything, they'll make small talk, they'll look around in embarrassment after a quip that wasn't received well. Visually, the character sprites are surprisingly expressive despite the fact that all they do is bounce, expand, shrink, and display emote bubbles. It makes every interaction feel a lot more real, it makes the characters feel a lot more real, but it also takes foreeevvveerrrrr.

I also used to struggle with the Djinni system in my previous attempts, but this time around I understood it fully and it added much needed depth on top of the standard attack/magic/item battle system. Djinni are basically two-step summons that are equippable. You have to equip them to a character (which, depending on the character and the Djinn's element, can affect the character's stats and change their available magic) before you can use them. Then in battle you can use a Djinn to cause an effect. There's a good balance between attack and support Djinn. After that, it de-equips from the character and is put into a summoning state. Now, any character can summon it for a very strong attack and then a couple turns later it re-equips itself to the character it was originally on. There's some strategy in when you choose to summon too. If you keep using Djinn of the same type, up to four can be summoned at once for a stronger attack at each level. The graphics on these are gorgeous and over the top in the 'that move should have ended the world' kind of way you see often in Final Fantasy, especially the level 4 summons.

The music is just fantastic. I generally don't like much of the GBA's music (Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire are especially grating), however the Golden Sun composers are on a different level. It all sounds fantastic and again gives it that feel of a larger, PlayStation-style RPG. The primary battle theme especially stands out. It's so catchy and sounds like it comes from a full console instead of a handheld.

The world and story both feel appropriately huge. You're tasked with tracking down an evil group that somehow includes your friend's dead brother (ooh, mystery!) after they kidnap said friend and mentor and set about reigniting all four lighthouses to reintroduce alchemy to the world. Per the lore, humankind abused alchemy and thus it was sealed away. Small villages now exist to protect the lighthouses, with others set up to protect the secret of Psynergy (magic that's also useful and necessary outside of battle). You and your best friend hail from the latter. You're always a step behind the enemies and it feels like they're always winning, they keep lighting the lighthouses and all you can do is chase them harder.

And then the game ends after only the second lighthouse is lit. It ends with you getting in a big boat to discover some forgotten land. It ends with the main enemies dead, but your captured friends _still_ continuing the enemy mission. What's that about?? To find out, you'll need to play Golden Sun: The Lost Age! Yes, the first game ends on a _massive_ cliffhanger. And if you want to import as much progress as possible from the first game to the second, you better have a link cable and two systems (which doesn't work as well as you'd want on the Switch release), because otherwise you have to type in one of three passwords (description taken from goldensunwiki.net):

Bronze: This 16-character password preserves each original party member's level and changed name (their levels will be treated as 28 otherwise); how many of the original 28 Djinn were collected; which of the first game's non-essential utility Psynergy items were collected; and which optional story events were completed in the first game, which unlock bonus events and rewards in the second. This is technically the only password needed to access every optional dungeon and cutscene.

Silver: This 61-character password additionally adjusts each original character's statistics to precisely match their values at the end of Golden Sun, which is primarily meant to preserve the effects of any consumable items that permanently boost stats that were applied to the first game's party throughout that game.

Gold: This 260-character password additionally fills up each original party member's inventory with all the same items they had by the end of the first game, and it also preserves the amount of coins the party had amassed by that point.

And don't worry about the mystery of the party you're chasing around the world, they are who you play as in the second game, still on the run from the party in the first game. It's a really inventive set up and I'm keen to start The Lost Age after some downtime.

Golden Sun is an incredibly well executed RPG. There's a reason it's the top of most "Best of GBA" lists. The story of Golden Sun already felt huge and important well before the cliffhanger leading into the second game. It does a great job representing the stakes and making you feel like part of something bigger. There are a lot of side quests to complete which also help with fleshing out the world and making it feel alive, along with of course giving you incredibly useful reward items and weapons. And the dungeon puzzles barely enter the realm of tedium. Often in RPGs like this I get tired of the dungeon puzzles, but that didn't happen as frequently in this one. There are definitely some repeated puzzle types, and they can be real head scratchers, but I can only think of one or two where it began to feel tedious. Overall a highly polished game that is absolutely worth your attention.

I feel like I should be writing more about this game, given that I enjoyed it so much and I'm saying such great things about it, but.. despite how good it is, it's also a straight forward RPG. It doesn't have any truly unique mechanics, and much of the story is pretty standard End Of The World affair. The two parties, where you play as one in one game and the other in the other game, is pretty cool and I haven't seen that done before. But beyond that, it's just a super well executed RPG. It stands out mostly because of how polished it is. You won't find in-depth minigames or deep characters here. But you will find a quality story in a fleshed out world with competent systems to back it all up. I can't think of a single thing that Golden Sun missed the mark on. And that really makes it worth checking out.