Sometimes, it is difficult to describe why a game is fun or what makes it worth playing. You can enjoy your time with it, but putting the game features into words makes it sound like the most basic and boring game ever designed. Teenagers with magic powers who set out to save the world? Yeah, I’ve done that before. Turn-based combat with a scrolling text box announcing damage numbers? I played that decades ago. Block puzzles? They were once so prevalent that everyone is bored of them now; I should probably lower the review score any time a game has even one.
Golden Sun has all these outdated features in abundance, but something about it just made me want to keep playing.
It could have been the graphics, which are stunning for a Game Boy Advance game. Golden Sun is full of incredible pixel art. It could have been the music; the battle theme is so catchy it made it into Super Smash Bros. (even though the main character, Isaac, still isn’t playable).
But, most likely, I may have enjoyed Golden Sun because of nostalgia. I played the game when it was new, in 2001. I decided to play it again, for only the second time, when it came to Nintendo Switch earlier this year. I expected to enjoy it. I had hours of fun revisiting a game I enjoyed as a kid, but the cracks started to show as I played more. Golden Sun is still fun but has not aged well. It may only appeal to a limited RPG fanbase as time passes.
Golden Sun follows the story of Isaac and Garet. In a slight twist, the heroes of this story are chasing the villains, and they are generally one step behind. Early in the adventure, you meet Ivan and Mia, who round out your traditional party of four. The heroes exist in a world where some people, called Adepts, have magical abilities. Of course, your party consists of four Adepts with different specialties to give you a variety of spells.
A mostly traditional battle system supports this traditional RPG story setup. Battles are turn-based with basic attack, magic, and defense options. There are battle animations, but all the damage numbers and status effects appear in a scrolling text box. Enemy encounters occur randomly in the overworld and in dungeons, and there are a lot of them — also very common in these types of RPGs.
You explore a reasonably large overworld and make stops at towns to purchase new equipment and enter dungeons to fight monsters and solve puzzles. The puzzles are where Golden Sun starts to break away from some of its more traditional trappings. You have very few options to directly interact with the world. Instead, you use your magic spells, called Psynergy, to manipulate objects. A very common puzzle type requires making stepping stones out of stone pillars; you rearrange the stone pillars into a path using the “Move” spell. You can also make plants grow into vines, make boulders levitate, and read the thoughts of NPCs for clues.
Golden Sun presents many intriguing ideas with the different Psynergy abilities, but none are explored to their full potential except for the basic “Move” spell — which you use all the time for what feels like every puzzle in the game. The prevalence of block puzzles that are easily solved by simply moving some pillars around cannot be overstated. Very few puzzles feel like they make good use of your other abilities, and there may be a good (if not unfortunate) reason for it. Most of the Psynergy abilities are optional.
You obtain Psynergy in three ways. A few basic spells, like Move and Mind Read, are default spells for specific characters. Those abilities come up most because you always have them. Equipping certain items grants some others; whichever character has the item will have the ability. These also play a role with puzzles because you earn them at specific parts of the main quest. The last type is learned by equipping specific Djinn, and these are rarely (if ever) used for required puzzles because there is no guarantee you will have them.
Djinn are magical creatures hidden around the world that you can collect to power up your team with new abilities. There are Djinn of four types — Earth, Fire, Wind, Water — to equip to your team and learn new abilities. This is one of my favorite systems in the game, though I believe it’s mostly pointless. You want to collect every Djinn, but there is no real benefit to experimenting with choosing weird combinations; it’s usually easiest to give all the Fire Djinn to your Fire-aligned fighter to get the best fire spells. You need to swap them around to learn specific overworld puzzle-solving abilities, but there is no penalty for swapping them, solving a puzzle, and swapping them back. It’s a cool idea, but I don’t think the implementation is particularly compelling.
Furthermore, finding the Djinn themselves is a stressful endeavor. Golden Sun wants you to think of the Djinn as bonus power-ups for your characters that you can find at your own pace. In reality, they feel more like essential parts of your team. Thankfully, you can’t permanently miss any of them, but even completing a single dungeon without a Djinn you could/should have can make a huge difference in that game’s difficulty and completion. Aside from making the game harder than it could have been, you must also backtrack to old dungeons and towns to find any that you might have missed. I knew all this before I started the game this time, so I just followed the guide from start to finish to ensure I had everything, and I recommend everyone do the same. The game is more fun if you have the Djinn.
By the end of Golden Sun, I felt like I had played a full game, and I was ready for the adventure to be over. Unfortunately, the story was not over. Golden Sun, perhaps infamously, ends on a cliffhanger. When the game first released, the sequel was already on the way. I would argue that the sequel, Golden Sun: The Lost Age, is not a sequel at all. It’s just the missing second half of Golden Sun. I enjoy the existing story, but it’s incomplete. Playing the first game without the second game feels awful.
Despite my criticism, I still recommend playing Golden Sun. Something about it is endearing if you like traditional RPGs. It is not a complicated game and works well as a side game to play between bigger releases. If you need something lighter to try before the next serious endeavor, spend a few hours with Golden Sun. The nostalgia might grab you too.
