Golden Sun was a good game overall, there's nothing extremely bad about
it or extremely great, but it does everything right and hardly anything
wrong, does that make sense? Well I enjoyed it for the most part, it's
far from being original, it took alot of elements from Dragon Warrior
and a ton from Wild Arms, but that's hardly a bad thing. You had to
keep taping the A button to scroll through each message during battle,
the game was short and the dialog scenes were long, that's about the
only major complaints I have. The compliments however is the dungeons
had a ton of fun puzzles to figure out, the graphics were top notch for
the most part, and it pretty much felt like a classic SNES RPG down to
the bone.
----------Battle System----------
Golden Sun is a traditional turn-based RPG with random encounters.
Your turns are set in rounds, so you set your party members moves all
at once and watch the round unfold, the person or enemy with the
highest agility goes first. Your party is a total of four, once you get
your characters they'll stay with you until the end, with the exception
of one character at the very beginning of the game.
Your party will get the help of Djinni, which are elemental
monsters that can change your stats or gain new abilities when
equipped. You can use these Djinni in battle aswell as a Summon that
can cause massive elemental damage to the enemy but only if they're
unattached to your characters, after a set amount of turns he'll return
to your character.. You can also unset them during battle and cause a
various of status effects or attacks to enemies, but you'll lose
whatever stat boosts the Djinni gives you. You can then use the Djinni
as a Summon, since he's not equipped to a person anymore.
Each character will gain Psynergy, some are unique, some go with
which Djinni you equip. The Psynergy is used as magic in this game. You
can use it during battle like any other magic spells in any RPG, with
status effects, elemental attacks or healing effects. The best part
about Psynergy is you can use special ones outside of battle that can
be used to solve puzzles. For example, you can use a "Move" spell that
will push a pillar you couldn't reach, or a "Force" spell that can
knock an old tree stump into the water so you can hop on it and cross a
river. There's a ton of Psynergy spells you can learn with a ton of fun
dungeons to try them out on. The coolest thing about this game is you
can assign hotkeys for 2 spells at a time with the L and R button, so
if you're primarily going to use a "Lift" spell, then you should hotkey
it. Each spell will of course cost magic points, called PP in this
game. When your characters runs they will slowly regain PP, I think
this was added so you couldn't get stuck by running out of PP, but it
does make the game a little easy if you can heal your self after each
battle with little penalty.
Each party member can only hold 15 items, which includes their
equipments or special crystals that enable them to use Psynergy powers.
There's no special inventory to store items, so that only leaves 60
spaces in total for items, which is mostly used for equipment and
healing items. You'll often come to times where you have to drop stuff
or endless rearranging to fit new items into your inventory. This was
the most annoying thing about the game.
----------Characters / Story----------
You play as a silent hero name Issac an Adept that can use
Psycnegery. With his friend Garet and Jenna they go on a small
adventure to learn more about Psycngery but find a secret dimension
that unleashed more than they bargained for. They run into the thugs of
the game in this area, along with Felix, a long lost friend. This is
where the bad guys steal the special crystals that they need to
re-light the Lighthouses and gain extreme power. Jenna is kidnaped and
Issac and Garet go on the main adventure to save her and stop the bad
guys from lighting the four Lighthouses.
The story started off really interesting, but then you fall into a
pattern of going to a town, finding out what’s wrong (which usually
doesn't have anything to do with you) and fixing it. The first 10 hours
had me hooked, then the repetitive nature of the game finally hit me
and it slowed everything down for me. The dialog scenes are looong,
with little said, for a handheld game to play on the go, it can get a
little annoying. For the most part this game just feels like a set up
for Golden Sun 2, which was alot more fleshed out and interesting.
----------Graphics----------
For an early GBA title the graphics are very solid. The towns,
dungeons, and character designs are bright and colorful with a ton of
variation. The game gets a little shady when you're on the world map,
because it has this faux-3D look to it that just makes it look
extremely pixilated and ugly at times. The battle system has a similar
pixilated feel to it, I think they're pushing the hardware a little
hard on this, but the enemies look pretty cool for the most part,
they're always in motion, some were huge.. it's just they're really
pixilated and the game zooms in on them when you attack and shows ever
little pixel. Some special moves are really big and over the top,
nothing to long, which is pretty much perfect. During the dialog scenes
the characters have an avatar bubble next to your text, and an emotion
bubble at times, which every game without voice work just have by now.
----------Sound----------
The music is pretty good, similar to Dragon Warrior, the text
bubbles have that annoying text sound Nintendo likes to throw in, but
you can easily remove that.
----------World Map----------
The map is a standard Final Fantasy-esque overhead view map. You
can walk to town to dungeon and even find Djinni hiding in special
areas. You can zoom out to get a better view of the area, and even get
a picture of the world map displaying each town and your current
location. There's no warps or flying ships or anything to speed up
transportation.
You can save anywhere in the game aslong as you're not talking or in a battle.
----------Time to Complete Game (save before final boss)----------
19:31
It felt like I missed some stuff, but I got all the Djinni and did
all the sidequests I could find. The game saves after you beat it, but
you can't really do anything else with your data until you get Golden
Sun 2 and transfer your data over, either with a cable hookup and 2
GBAs or with a long and complicated password system.
