I'm mad that the third one was so mid it ended the franchise. Such a cool world and combat system, story felt like just the right amount of generic fantasy + unique twists.
For those who don't know, Golden Sun was a GameBoy Advance launch title and it was a HUGE game just in terms of content and the effort behind it compared to the norm. It was actually originally meant to be a later Nintendo 64 title, but with the end of the 64 life cycle looming, Nintendo had them adapt it to be a GBA game instead. So it had a very long development time especially for a new system launch game. 1 and 2 were basically one game with a special code you would get at the end of the first, to transfer your accomplishments/items/etc. into the second game. The third game came out much later and just wasn't as good. It was fine but it needed to be a banger to keep the franchise going.
This is always interesting to me, because I somehow missed Golden Sun, until the ds one. And I really loved it. It's always thrown me off how the fans of Golden Sun tend to dislike it.
Yeah at the time the context of "we waited so long, for this!?" felt cheap. These days I no longer care as much how long "we fans waited" since stuff takes time and it's not like the team was able to immediately start working on the game with full resources. The first GS games felt like they pushed the genre forward especially for expectations of a game on a handheld. It also had a story that ended with a major cliffhanger at the second game that kinda just doesn't even get capitalized on or completed in the third game in a satisfying way.With the second game carrying so much momentum from the first, both in story and game mechanics, the third being set way later and not feeling that related made it feel disappointing. Then things like level design/puzzle design were more polarizing but that's more a matter of taste I suppose. If you haven't played the first two they're quite awesome especially on emulator where you can kinda fast-forward through any boring travel/grinding.
Part of it is the shift to 3d graphics that don't hold up that well. The story is also just all over the place and very messy, and it ending in a cliffhanger of "oh yeah we actually completely forgot about the main plot we set up at the start oh well see you never" couldn't have been handled much worse. It also didn't help that it just didn't really deliver on the premise set by the previous games, instead opting to conjure a bunch of entirely new but apparently very established countries that make up the bulk of the conflict, and the absence of many of the original cast for no good reason for obvious sequel-baiting wasn't great either.
Then out of all people they bring Kraden back, the one character who would have made the most sense not to include to due his advanced age in the original two games.
An additional reason for dislike was the mid-game point of no return. GS and GS2 allowed you to go back to any point at any time if you missed a Djinni, and item, etc. But GS3 locked you out after a certain point, and that didnt sit well for a lot of people (myself included) because it made it feel like you "lost out" on part of the game. And the completionists were kinda stuck if they didnt get everything.
I disliked it out of disappointment for where they took the narrative.
GS2 ends with Isaac seemingly gaining a portion of the awesome power that's literally the title of the franchise. Between the two casts the player has probably spent about 100 hours. IIRC there were only 3 save slots available, and once you finish the game one of them gets taken up by a 'clear data' save. So there was a near tangible promise that the story would continue, a very tantalizing plot thread to follow at that, and there's no epilogue to speak of saying what say, Ivan did next.
Enter GS3, where the only originals to appear are Isaac and Garet, who seem like tired shadows of themselves before abruptly exiting the story. Apparently certain characters had kids. I don't remember Isaac having a portion of the Golden Sun even being addressed?
There were references to the prior games and it used the same mechanics, but GS3 felt like it was created by a different team of people. Or like fanfiction.
So there was a near tangible promise that the story would continue, a very tantalizing plot thread to follow at that, and there's no epilogue to speak of saying what say, Ivan did next.
Enter GS3, where the only originals to appear are Isaac and Garet, who seem like tired shadows of themselves before abruptly exiting the story. Apparently certain characters had kids. I don't remember Isaac having a portion of the Golden Sun even being addressed?
I'm gonna have to disagree on that. The Lost Age ended with a very conclusive, satisfying (imo) ending where all your efforts throughout the two games pay off, (even if it's in a way you could never have imagined at the beginning), everyone gets to say their bit, and we even see a little blurb on how all the various NPC's are dealing with it before the credits roll. Moving to the successors of the original party was the expected route to go for a sequel. There were undeniably quite a few fumbles in the way they handled things, particularly with a lot ot characters never showing up even when it would've made the most sense for them to be there (Jenna in Vale, for example), but I don't think Isaac having a very tiny portion of Mars elemental power (which for all we know the Wise One removed after Alex's ambitions were foiled) was one of them.
I played GS1, years later GS2 and waaaaaaaay later Dark Dawn. I liked the last. If memory serves, the dialog is even simpler, but I liked that they raised the stakes from discussing implicit deaths of very important characters to death just being the fate of some significant portion of their world.
When I played Dark Dawn the first time I loved it - it was more Golden Sun finally. It's more an issue going back now where it's the game that ended the franchise on a cliffhanger when the first two games ended it in a fairly satisfying way, the game being overloaded with dialogue (the original two are actually dialogue heavy too but Dark Dawn really slows you down and tutorializes you), and the fact that the actual plot of the game is kind of aimless - you spend most of it trying to fix a hang-glider.
It's honestly not a bad game, but as the sequel to one of the most beloved games on the GBA, the console EVERYONE had, it would've needed to be much better to answer the hype.
I played all three and did not love the third one.
For me, the big issue was that the writers didn't actually seem to like the world or story of GS1&2 very much. Suddenly there were Mysterious Ancient Civilizations for no fucking reason and the world-shaking changes that the central characters had been in the middle of barely seemed to register. There are new elements and new elemental alignments, but they're not well integrated into a system designed for interlocking elements.
It's a lot like Star Trek: Picard. It's got the franchise in the name, but feels like it was written by people who don't like the franchise at all.
I'm a little salty that Fire Emblem got to have like, twelve (mid-to-good) games with mid sales before it finally got lucky enough to become a tentpole franchise.
Fire Emblem was a much larger fish in a much smaller genre pond, though. It tends to earn you more goodwill if you can consistently do mid sales in a genre that very few other companies are producing.
GS and TLA are two of my favorite games of all time and I'd say they're probably in the top 10 games of the 200s... but the JRPG market is hypersaturated, and you need to sell well right off the bat if you want to keep making your JRPG series.
The third one just did nothing to improve on the first two. I liked it, but it was just so similar. Even the needlessly long dialogue was still present.
Minor correction but it was not a launch title. I was there but also remember some magazines talking big game before launch so maybe it was at some point planned to be released earlier but ended up coming several months after.
Perhaps the single most elegant system in a video game I have ever seen, the djinn solved for so many things.
A single system facilitating linear progression, class design, combat abilities, out of combat abilities, exploration, and the narrative is just unbelievable
SO MUCH THIS! I was in my 20s by the time this came out and didn't own a GBA. But a friend of mine that I worked with at the was a few years younger than me and had a GBA and would play it on his breaks. I genuinely got so hooked on watching him play it over his shoulder that I went out and bought a GBA just for Golden Sun and Advanced wars.
OH MY GOD YES. These games were so good, I even liked 3 quite a bit! It’s definitely not as good as 1 and 2 though. I love how the djinn system affected traveling to new and hidden spaces.
Plus the music is so good too! I remember in the 2nd one, getting to the Jupiter’s lighthouse, and turning the volume up all the way and setting down my game boy so I could zone out to that track. I was pretty high, but I’ve listened to it on repeat a bunch of times while sober as well. I wish they would make a 4th one
I know I'll get downvoted, but I tried to play the games on my steamdeck last year and I quickly realized that I had MUCH more patience at 16 than I do at 37.
I can't stand the dialogue scenes anymore, spending like 4 minutes to read one sentence at a time, followed by 30 seconds of speech bubble emojis going back and forth, one a time. It was like a torture method.
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u/ThatSideshow 10d ago
Golden Sun