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Review: Golden Sun [lj] WARNING: LONG
15 years ago
General
I guess since I just beat the super-special-secret boss in Dark Dawn, I ought to get around to reviewing these finally. :V
Golden Sun is a JRPG series that started in 2001 with the game of the same title. It encompasses three games, the latest having just come out in December of last year. The main game mechanic centers around collecting and using elemental Djinn, which are little bugeyed doodads that give you certain powers. Equipping them increases your stats and changes your class; then in battle, you can 'unleash' them for cool attacks, and once you've unleashed enough Djinn, you can summon them. So there's a balancing dynamic between having the increased stats and better spells afforded to you by being a higher class, and doing shittons of damage to everything on the field. On top of this, you have magic called Psynergy, that can sometimes to be used on the overworld to do things like move statues, uncover hidden doors, etc.
Golden Sun
The first game starts us off with a neat setup, your three party members being friends who all experienced family tragedies three years ago. Furthermore, they're all magic-users who live in a town populated by magic-users, in a world where magic-users are unknown and feared, and as such, their town is meant to protect magic from the nonmagical. From there, they get entangled in a plot that spans two continents and shakes the foundation of their very way of life. There's a bad group that wants to unleash some kind of awful power upon the world by lighting the Elemental Lighthouses, and it's up to you to stop them.
The first game is pretty simple and clean, although it does feature a hidden dungeon (which appears in the third game, much to my surprise!) with a super-hard boss (who doesn't, sadly). There were something like 28 Djinn for your four party members, and it introduced other things like weapon unleashes. It did have some failings, notably a severely limited inventory (18 items per character, which includes whatever they have equipped at the moment), the fact that assigning someone to attack an enemy meant that they did nothing if they enemy died before their turn, and the disappointing fact that you only get to go to two lighthouses. But you get to go all kinds of places, there are some elements of non-linearity to the game, there are a couple minigames but not so many that they get overwhelming, and you get to meet lots of interesting people and witness crazy things happen. Like people turning into trees.
Overall, it set everything up for the games that followed to build upon, and build they did. Taken in retrospect with the rest of the series, the original Golden Sun is almost bare-bones in comparison.
Golden Sun: The Lost Age
The second game is my favorite, despite the fact that that it's FUCKING HUGE and TAKES FOREVER to get through. Though, the last time I played through it, I was hurrying to finish up so I could play the third game, while trying to get everything, so it all got a little annoying after a while.
What can I say? From the start of one continent, you eventually get to sail the entire world, a total of seven continents and a dozen crappy little islands. The amount of Psynergy increases threefold; the Djinn at least double, and you get eight party members instead of two. The truth behind the Elemental Lighthouses is revealed. The best part was that you could create save data at the end of the first game and input it into the second game so that you can have all the stuff you had from Golden Sun available. (Without the save data, there are many, many Djinn and weapons you'll never be able to get.) The plot is vast, and many times you'll lose sight of what's actually going on as you quest to find all the piddly Psynergy items. (This isn't always a good thing; the main bad guys show up maybe four times, and mostly towards the second half of the game.) You got introduced to Summon tablets that held multi-element summons, which were way awesome and really made the battles fun. The ending was really satisfying, though, as is the whole joining of the two parties from two games.
Again, some of the problems with the first game exist, though at least with eight characters, the inventory limit isn't as big a worry. Of course, like the first game, in fact even worse than the first game, getting your fourth party member TAKES FUCKING FOREVER! D:<
There's another problem with both these games, especially the second one, and while I won't say it wasn't a problem in the third, I'm going to talk it about it now. The Psynergy you get is very linear in use. If you see a pile of leaves, you Whirlwind it to find whatever's behind it. If there's an empty pillar, you know you're going to have to get a flame near it somehow so you can use Blaze. Almost all the Psynergies have a very specific use, so that Psynergy-based puzzles are fairly straightforward. It would have been nice if there were multiple ways to get through a given situation, depending on which Psynergy you have available or would like to use. Sure, there were numerous places in the game where you could get to something hidden much later on when you found the right Psynergy (Grind itself opens up half the world to you!), but there was never really a situation where, say, you could Move a pillar to take the long way around an area you have to travel through frequently, and then near the end of the game, Burst something in that same area so that you could take a shortcut. And any Psynergy you got near the end of the game you would most assuredly only be using a few times, like the aforementioned Blaze. Numerous Psynergies are usable only in one or two areas. In the third game, the number of situations in which you can use a Psynergy (Whirlwind especially!) has increased significantly, but the other problems still remain to an extent.
Golden Sun: Dark Dawn
Which brings us to Dark Dawn. Seven years elapsed between Lost Age and this. Seven! It was thought that a third Golden Sun would never happen, but lo and behold, here it is! And, I kind of want to say I'm disappointed with it, but I do still like it and I do still think it's worth playing. Let's go through this little by little. There may be incidental spoilers.
The game starts thirty years after the last game, and yes, all your party members (well, most of them) are the children of the first two games' party members, which is kind of cheesy until you realize they handle the passage of time very well, like how Tron: Legacy did, oddly enough. It's a weird comparison. But what starts out as three friends screwing around and trying to fix something that got broke quickly turns into, "Oh shit we can't go home", and from there into, "Oh shit, time to save teh wurld!"
The plot's pretty okay, I guess. There are numerous convolutions that are fun to figure out... except that nothing ever gets resolves. This is a big reason to hate this game, honestly. The big bad guy from the first two games (this isn't a spoiler, by the way, IT IS OBVIOUSLY HIM) is back and up to his old tricks, but he never really explains why or does anything. He even ends up helping you. In fact, there's pretty much only one or two things that actually happens during the course of the game, aside from the main characters getting to know each other.
The main thing that happens? EVERYONE FUCKING DIES! This game is depressing as shit because of it. D: Seriously, the halfway point in the game is you inadvertently triggering a cataclysm that you were trying very hard not to trigger, and after you get a ship, you can go back to some of the cities you visited earlier in the game to find out that everyone there has died if they weren't able to get to safety. The streets are littered with bodies, I'm not kidding! And the new Mind Read Psynergy (Spirit Sense) allows you to communicate with their ghosts, so you can listen to their regrets and get a front-row seat to all of the fear they experienced in their last moments. I'm not kidding when I say this was depressing as hell. The cataclysm isn't even your fault, technically, but I just couldn't shake the feeling of, "My God, all these people are dead and it's my fault." At least when you light the goddamn Lighthouses in the first two games, nobody fucking dies except the bad guys.
That aside, let's talk game mechanics. They did a really weird job on the Djinn. Some of them are repeats from the first two games; some are the same thing but with a different name. Only a couple are entirely original. One neat little thing is that every Djinn (and there are 72 now) has its own sprite. I really liked that. :D Unfortunately, there are only three Djinn that create the "you take half damage this round" effect, down from four in the second game. This sucks, believe me. :/ But making up for it are the UNSPEAKABLY AWESOME summon cutscenes. These are seriously incredible. All the summons from the second game are back, along with a few new ones. Some of the characters have changed completely (Boreas is an armored horse, what? At least he isn't a giant snowcone machine anymore...), and they all have completely new attacks that are really freaking cool to watch. And on that note, whereas in the previous games you could hold down B to fast-forward through battle instead of hitting A constantly every time something takes damage (a feature I discovered ONLY WHILE PLAYING THESE GAMES THROUGH THE THIRD TIME), now when you hold B, it also fast-forwards through summons and unleashes, which is very time-saving when you've seen them already.
On that other note, THEY FIXED THE COMBAT. :D Your characters are smart now! They know that if their assigned target is dead, they should attack the next guy in line! And there are a ton of little changes that I can't even remember, but pretty much nothing in the actual gameplay itself was not improved. THERE IS ONE EXCEPTION: the inventory! Again! It's down from 18 items to 16. >:( The upside to this is that it's really not a problem, because like the previous games, almost all healing items are irrelevant. Seriously, there's no reason to conserve PP after you hit a certain level, because it comes back so goddamn fast! I didn't ever use healing items past the first point of no return, beyond the resurrection item. And unless you want to make sure that everyone's got access to every healing item (unnecessary!), you'll have enough room that you won't be constantly running out of dungeons and back to town to sell stuff.
I was kind of disappointed that you never get to go to Tolbi. Or Lemuria. I wanted to throw some coins, dammit! >:| In fact, the world has changed so much in 30 years that it's kind of ridiculous. What started as a cluster of independent city-states have become full-fledged nations with big enough armies to wage war against one another. An entire new species has arisen. New cities appear where there never were any, and landforms are totally different. What the fuck happened to the Apojii Islands? Why is Crossbone Isle on the other side of the fucking world from where it belongs? Where's Osenia? One funny thing is that it is absolutely certain that you're on a flat Earth; you get that feeling from some of the continents in the second game, but once you see what happened to Izumo, all doubt will be erased. Angara is Eurasia, Gondowan is Africa. But back to the changes in thirty years thing... I know the Golden Sun event, as they call it, is this big, magical, world-changing thing and so a lot of shit can happen, like people turning into Beastmen, but I really don't think the creators of this game have any idea of what can happen in 30 years. Nations? Sure. Entire societal shifts? Not so much. That said, it's very exciting to see what happened to some of the incidental characters you met in the second game (especially when their kids join your party! On that note, all of the second-half characters in your party are royalty; isn't that weird? I mean, the one guy isn't technically 'royal', he's not a prince or anything, but his dad is the ruler of their nation, so it's basically the same thing), and I liked that Obaba become the forging person. :3 But oh god, so much time spent sailing off to Champa to turn my shit into better shit. D: And no one's made a decent walkthrough to show where all the dark spots in the water are, so I never did find all the rusted weapons, ARGH. Can't blame the game for that, though.
There are four (count'em!) secret dungeons this time, which is cool, except that one is only accessible after you've beaten the game. And two are only accessible just before you beat the game. So, having beaten the last super-secret boss, I'm just going to go back and beat the game again, and it should be easy. Seriously, saving time by Djinn-rushing (readying all your Djinn before entering a boss fight so you can summon right off the bat) is such a broken strategy it's unfair. I beat that super-secret-harder-than-the-final-boss boss in FOUR ROUNDS. D: Unreal. And on that note, this game needed more boss fights! Secret bosses aside, there are a grand total of maybe ten boss fights in this game. It's pathetic. Every dungeon should have had one, it's just common sense. Every time you got a new Psynergy item, you should have had to break something's skull open and dig it out. Needless to say, this is yet another thing that does not endear the game to me. The ending is one more thing; so unsatisfying, resolves nothing, everyone gets to go home and reflect that neither the titular "Dark Dawn", the ominous "Mourning Moon" mentioned in the beginning, or even the goddamn Psynergy Vortexes play any kidn of role in the plot! There's probably going to be another game, and goddamned if I'm not going to play it.
I should probably bring this to some kind of conclusion now. c.c I think I've covered everything I wanted to. Dark Dawn is by far the weakest of the three games to date, but all the things it fixes make it worth playing, at least to those of us who've followed the series. I really do wish it had been better, though. It wasn't worth a seven year wait for this. That said, I will definitely play the fourth game, if it ever happens.
Goddamn, that took me like an hour to write. D:
Golden Sun is a JRPG series that started in 2001 with the game of the same title. It encompasses three games, the latest having just come out in December of last year. The main game mechanic centers around collecting and using elemental Djinn, which are little bugeyed doodads that give you certain powers. Equipping them increases your stats and changes your class; then in battle, you can 'unleash' them for cool attacks, and once you've unleashed enough Djinn, you can summon them. So there's a balancing dynamic between having the increased stats and better spells afforded to you by being a higher class, and doing shittons of damage to everything on the field. On top of this, you have magic called Psynergy, that can sometimes to be used on the overworld to do things like move statues, uncover hidden doors, etc.
Golden Sun
The first game starts us off with a neat setup, your three party members being friends who all experienced family tragedies three years ago. Furthermore, they're all magic-users who live in a town populated by magic-users, in a world where magic-users are unknown and feared, and as such, their town is meant to protect magic from the nonmagical. From there, they get entangled in a plot that spans two continents and shakes the foundation of their very way of life. There's a bad group that wants to unleash some kind of awful power upon the world by lighting the Elemental Lighthouses, and it's up to you to stop them.
The first game is pretty simple and clean, although it does feature a hidden dungeon (which appears in the third game, much to my surprise!) with a super-hard boss (who doesn't, sadly). There were something like 28 Djinn for your four party members, and it introduced other things like weapon unleashes. It did have some failings, notably a severely limited inventory (18 items per character, which includes whatever they have equipped at the moment), the fact that assigning someone to attack an enemy meant that they did nothing if they enemy died before their turn, and the disappointing fact that you only get to go to two lighthouses. But you get to go all kinds of places, there are some elements of non-linearity to the game, there are a couple minigames but not so many that they get overwhelming, and you get to meet lots of interesting people and witness crazy things happen. Like people turning into trees.
Overall, it set everything up for the games that followed to build upon, and build they did. Taken in retrospect with the rest of the series, the original Golden Sun is almost bare-bones in comparison.
Golden Sun: The Lost Age
The second game is my favorite, despite the fact that that it's FUCKING HUGE and TAKES FOREVER to get through. Though, the last time I played through it, I was hurrying to finish up so I could play the third game, while trying to get everything, so it all got a little annoying after a while.
What can I say? From the start of one continent, you eventually get to sail the entire world, a total of seven continents and a dozen crappy little islands. The amount of Psynergy increases threefold; the Djinn at least double, and you get eight party members instead of two. The truth behind the Elemental Lighthouses is revealed. The best part was that you could create save data at the end of the first game and input it into the second game so that you can have all the stuff you had from Golden Sun available. (Without the save data, there are many, many Djinn and weapons you'll never be able to get.) The plot is vast, and many times you'll lose sight of what's actually going on as you quest to find all the piddly Psynergy items. (This isn't always a good thing; the main bad guys show up maybe four times, and mostly towards the second half of the game.) You got introduced to Summon tablets that held multi-element summons, which were way awesome and really made the battles fun. The ending was really satisfying, though, as is the whole joining of the two parties from two games.
Again, some of the problems with the first game exist, though at least with eight characters, the inventory limit isn't as big a worry. Of course, like the first game, in fact even worse than the first game, getting your fourth party member TAKES FUCKING FOREVER! D:<
There's another problem with both these games, especially the second one, and while I won't say it wasn't a problem in the third, I'm going to talk it about it now. The Psynergy you get is very linear in use. If you see a pile of leaves, you Whirlwind it to find whatever's behind it. If there's an empty pillar, you know you're going to have to get a flame near it somehow so you can use Blaze. Almost all the Psynergies have a very specific use, so that Psynergy-based puzzles are fairly straightforward. It would have been nice if there were multiple ways to get through a given situation, depending on which Psynergy you have available or would like to use. Sure, there were numerous places in the game where you could get to something hidden much later on when you found the right Psynergy (Grind itself opens up half the world to you!), but there was never really a situation where, say, you could Move a pillar to take the long way around an area you have to travel through frequently, and then near the end of the game, Burst something in that same area so that you could take a shortcut. And any Psynergy you got near the end of the game you would most assuredly only be using a few times, like the aforementioned Blaze. Numerous Psynergies are usable only in one or two areas. In the third game, the number of situations in which you can use a Psynergy (Whirlwind especially!) has increased significantly, but the other problems still remain to an extent.
Golden Sun: Dark Dawn
Which brings us to Dark Dawn. Seven years elapsed between Lost Age and this. Seven! It was thought that a third Golden Sun would never happen, but lo and behold, here it is! And, I kind of want to say I'm disappointed with it, but I do still like it and I do still think it's worth playing. Let's go through this little by little. There may be incidental spoilers.
The game starts thirty years after the last game, and yes, all your party members (well, most of them) are the children of the first two games' party members, which is kind of cheesy until you realize they handle the passage of time very well, like how Tron: Legacy did, oddly enough. It's a weird comparison. But what starts out as three friends screwing around and trying to fix something that got broke quickly turns into, "Oh shit we can't go home", and from there into, "Oh shit, time to save teh wurld!"
The plot's pretty okay, I guess. There are numerous convolutions that are fun to figure out... except that nothing ever gets resolves. This is a big reason to hate this game, honestly. The big bad guy from the first two games (this isn't a spoiler, by the way, IT IS OBVIOUSLY HIM) is back and up to his old tricks, but he never really explains why or does anything. He even ends up helping you. In fact, there's pretty much only one or two things that actually happens during the course of the game, aside from the main characters getting to know each other.
The main thing that happens? EVERYONE FUCKING DIES! This game is depressing as shit because of it. D: Seriously, the halfway point in the game is you inadvertently triggering a cataclysm that you were trying very hard not to trigger, and after you get a ship, you can go back to some of the cities you visited earlier in the game to find out that everyone there has died if they weren't able to get to safety. The streets are littered with bodies, I'm not kidding! And the new Mind Read Psynergy (Spirit Sense) allows you to communicate with their ghosts, so you can listen to their regrets and get a front-row seat to all of the fear they experienced in their last moments. I'm not kidding when I say this was depressing as hell. The cataclysm isn't even your fault, technically, but I just couldn't shake the feeling of, "My God, all these people are dead and it's my fault." At least when you light the goddamn Lighthouses in the first two games, nobody fucking dies except the bad guys.
That aside, let's talk game mechanics. They did a really weird job on the Djinn. Some of them are repeats from the first two games; some are the same thing but with a different name. Only a couple are entirely original. One neat little thing is that every Djinn (and there are 72 now) has its own sprite. I really liked that. :D Unfortunately, there are only three Djinn that create the "you take half damage this round" effect, down from four in the second game. This sucks, believe me. :/ But making up for it are the UNSPEAKABLY AWESOME summon cutscenes. These are seriously incredible. All the summons from the second game are back, along with a few new ones. Some of the characters have changed completely (Boreas is an armored horse, what? At least he isn't a giant snowcone machine anymore...), and they all have completely new attacks that are really freaking cool to watch. And on that note, whereas in the previous games you could hold down B to fast-forward through battle instead of hitting A constantly every time something takes damage (a feature I discovered ONLY WHILE PLAYING THESE GAMES THROUGH THE THIRD TIME), now when you hold B, it also fast-forwards through summons and unleashes, which is very time-saving when you've seen them already.
On that other note, THEY FIXED THE COMBAT. :D Your characters are smart now! They know that if their assigned target is dead, they should attack the next guy in line! And there are a ton of little changes that I can't even remember, but pretty much nothing in the actual gameplay itself was not improved. THERE IS ONE EXCEPTION: the inventory! Again! It's down from 18 items to 16. >:( The upside to this is that it's really not a problem, because like the previous games, almost all healing items are irrelevant. Seriously, there's no reason to conserve PP after you hit a certain level, because it comes back so goddamn fast! I didn't ever use healing items past the first point of no return, beyond the resurrection item. And unless you want to make sure that everyone's got access to every healing item (unnecessary!), you'll have enough room that you won't be constantly running out of dungeons and back to town to sell stuff.
I was kind of disappointed that you never get to go to Tolbi. Or Lemuria. I wanted to throw some coins, dammit! >:| In fact, the world has changed so much in 30 years that it's kind of ridiculous. What started as a cluster of independent city-states have become full-fledged nations with big enough armies to wage war against one another. An entire new species has arisen. New cities appear where there never were any, and landforms are totally different. What the fuck happened to the Apojii Islands? Why is Crossbone Isle on the other side of the fucking world from where it belongs? Where's Osenia? One funny thing is that it is absolutely certain that you're on a flat Earth; you get that feeling from some of the continents in the second game, but once you see what happened to Izumo, all doubt will be erased. Angara is Eurasia, Gondowan is Africa. But back to the changes in thirty years thing... I know the Golden Sun event, as they call it, is this big, magical, world-changing thing and so a lot of shit can happen, like people turning into Beastmen, but I really don't think the creators of this game have any idea of what can happen in 30 years. Nations? Sure. Entire societal shifts? Not so much. That said, it's very exciting to see what happened to some of the incidental characters you met in the second game (especially when their kids join your party! On that note, all of the second-half characters in your party are royalty; isn't that weird? I mean, the one guy isn't technically 'royal', he's not a prince or anything, but his dad is the ruler of their nation, so it's basically the same thing), and I liked that Obaba become the forging person. :3 But oh god, so much time spent sailing off to Champa to turn my shit into better shit. D: And no one's made a decent walkthrough to show where all the dark spots in the water are, so I never did find all the rusted weapons, ARGH. Can't blame the game for that, though.
There are four (count'em!) secret dungeons this time, which is cool, except that one is only accessible after you've beaten the game. And two are only accessible just before you beat the game. So, having beaten the last super-secret boss, I'm just going to go back and beat the game again, and it should be easy. Seriously, saving time by Djinn-rushing (readying all your Djinn before entering a boss fight so you can summon right off the bat) is such a broken strategy it's unfair. I beat that super-secret-harder-than-the-final-boss boss in FOUR ROUNDS. D: Unreal. And on that note, this game needed more boss fights! Secret bosses aside, there are a grand total of maybe ten boss fights in this game. It's pathetic. Every dungeon should have had one, it's just common sense. Every time you got a new Psynergy item, you should have had to break something's skull open and dig it out. Needless to say, this is yet another thing that does not endear the game to me. The ending is one more thing; so unsatisfying, resolves nothing, everyone gets to go home and reflect that neither the titular "Dark Dawn", the ominous "Mourning Moon" mentioned in the beginning, or even the goddamn Psynergy Vortexes play any kidn of role in the plot! There's probably going to be another game, and goddamned if I'm not going to play it.
I should probably bring this to some kind of conclusion now. c.c I think I've covered everything I wanted to. Dark Dawn is by far the weakest of the three games to date, but all the things it fixes make it worth playing, at least to those of us who've followed the series. I really do wish it had been better, though. It wasn't worth a seven year wait for this. That said, I will definitely play the fourth game, if it ever happens.
Goddamn, that took me like an hour to write. D:
I didn't even remember some of the cool parts, like the greatest puzzle ever (you solve four puzzles by pushing huge wheels with the four elemental symbols so that the symbols cast shadows on a wall, then push them all together to cast a shadow of a woman's face), or the furry party member. :B There's a lot good about that game, and I think the good outweighs the bad, but only just.
I will definitely play the fourth game, though. No question about it.