Golden Sun

[JechtShotMK9]

Today I'd like to talk about my all-time favorite old-school JRPG.

For those of you not in the know, this started out as a two-part game produced by Camelot and released on the GBA in the early 2000's. It's got all the standard JRPG touches: lot's of dialogue, turn based battles, a world map, summon monsters with huge cinematic attacks, and a villain who is manipulating the heroes so that he will be able to absorb infinite power and become God.

You know, the usual stuff.

What sets these games apart is their unique mechanic, Psynergy. Psynergy is essentially a catch-all term for the utilization of magic in the game, which is called Alchemy. Psynergy can be used in battle as spells, such as Quake, Fireball, Frost, etc., but, more interestingly, is also used outside battles to solve puzzles. To give an example, there is one moment where you have to use the Frost psynergy to freeze puddles on the ground into ice pillars, that you push into place with the Move psynergy, so that you can use them to traverse across the gap between two cliffs, using the Whirlwind Psynergy to clear the entrance to a cave.

That's a pretty basic example, and they get much, much more complex later on. The 4 main dungeons of the series are the Elemental Lighthouses (one for each element: Venus=Earth, Mars=Fire, Mercury=Water, Jupiter=Wind), and, in my not so humble opinion, each of these rivals the very best of any dungeon in the Final Fantasy series. They are massive multi-tiered towers with dozens of puzzles themed around whatever element they represent.

Aside from gameplay, the game also shines in the music department. I'll just leave a few examples.

The Elemental Stars
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7pBcKlONnA

Venus Lighthouse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5d1rrbNo3o

Golden Sun Main Theme
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrbPftHQJNM

Final Boss Theme from Golden Sun the Lost Age
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hsQDpCqxIg

Moving on, another thing these games do fantastically is provide an interesting world. Weyard is a flat world (as in, the edge of the world consists of endless waterfalls where the seas just end) with many various environments. Deserts, forests, grasslands, tundra, mountains, etc, are all featured here. But the big draw is the towns. More so than just about any JRPG I've played, you can tell that there are multiple cultures at work here. The games have their own equivalents to the Far East, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, Northern Europe, Western Europe, and even Atlantis. The different regions actually feel like whole new countries, and each has it's own unique music to reflect that.

These are older games, but I'd definitely recommend them to anyone who is new to the genre. If you are a fan of the older Final Fantasies, or just like JRPGs in general, give these a try. You won't regret it!

 

[ForceStealer]

A friend of mine LOVED this game and was always encouraging me to play it. I didn't have a GBA at the time and got several hours in on an emulator. But I was distracted and never revisited it.

I did really like the out-of-battle applications of magic. The battle window graphics were also very impressive for a GBA.

 

[Shademp]

I enjoyed the battle system greatly but I hated the dialogue scenes. They went on for so long, with conversations taking forever to get anywhere, that even with the frame-skipping feature on the GBA emulator I was using didn't help matters all that much.

That's what I mostly remember from Golden Sun: Enjoying the battles but being mad and frustrated at everything else. I played through the first game, started a playthrough of the second one game but then gave up because I got so fed up with the meandering conversations of the main characters. XP

 

[Cthulhu]

I played both the original titles on an emulator, they're both rather good games, and shit

 

[HylianMogget]

Oh man, I played the GBA games a ton when I was in middle school and high school. The first one was my first JRPG (not counting Pokemon). I really liked the dungeons/puzzles and using psynergy out of battle. The battle graphics were seriously impressive for the GBA and the way the game ties stats, spells, and summons was pretty neat (I don't remember either game being that difficult, but the final boss in TLA did give me lots of trouble, especially since the boss messes with your djinn). Even though the story isn't overly groundbreaking it's got quite a bit of charm and it puts some interesting twists on typical collect-crystals-to-save-the-world deal - most notably with the perspective switch in the second game (also the fact that you never

Spoiler

fight Alex

is kind of atypical). It was a bit weird having Felix go from speaking character to silent protagonist (and vice-versa for Isaac), though . The music rocks. The world map music from the first game is one of my favorite world map themes.

I never got into the DS game all that much. I played a bit of it and sort of lost interest. From what I played I remember not liking it as much as the original two.

Weyard is a flat world (as in, the edge of the world consists of endless waterfalls where the seas just end)

I always thought this was a really nice touch since, IIRC,

Spoiler

the falls at the edges of the world had to do with beacons not being lit and that, unlit, the falls would eat away at the world or something. That plus the dark edges at Prox made the world being in danger actually tangible.