Golden Sun

[Only One In All]

I'm taking the discussion about it from the Riveria thread to here. I must sixth that I do not like this game either. It is nice graphically, but the dialouge is so sliming slimy and sliming slimed up some slimer's sliming slime, that there's no way I could consider it playable. The gameplay is decent, but I simply can't look past the dialouge because to me, it's a very important aspect of RPG's that if you mess up, the game just isn't worth playing really. This applies to both the first and second one.

[JSH357]

I enjoyed it, but it isn't a stellar game. Kind of like a popcorn movie. The Djinni system is really nice in theory, but it's too abusable to have any real depth. Also, none of the characters are interesting except Felix, who becomes a mute in GS2. >:( The size of the overworld in GS2 amazed me, though, and I loved the Psynergy puzzles. If the battles had matched up to those things, the game would have been much better.

Also, worst dialogue ever.

[Twinconclusive]

I didn't even bother reading most of the dialogue. There was just too much!
My skipping the textboxes is one of the main contributing factors to why my GBA's A-key is jammed.

The puzzles are all repetitive, as they almost always either require you to use some clever combination of 'push' or some psynergy move. This got terrible in the second one, as some psynergy skills were only necessary for a handful of areas.
And they took so long! Having a dull puzzle is one thing, but stretching it out to force the player to spend up into half an hour just to get to the next room is madness!

The magic system was also quite bad. Whenever you learned a new skill, it was most likely a stronger version of a spell you already had.
However, I really enjoyed the Djinni-swapping system. If they had explored this a bit more, I'm sure battles would've been much better.

Exploration in the second game was hell.
The boat was so damn slow until you got wings, and even then!
It took forever to get to a specified continent.

Looking back into it, I can't really understand why I played through the whole thing (Maybe because it was one of the only RPGs available on the GBA at the time?). Yeah, that's most likely it.

[Newbie Newtype]

Golden Sun had a lot of right ideas, but tended to fall short.

I think the pre-rendered tiles and backgrounds as well as the special effects look quite nice, but the sprites look very subpar compared to hand pixeled graphics.

I think the turn based battles had a lot of potential, but because of a lot of abuse you can do, and the fact that you are running around so much, trying to find where to go next in your slow arse boat and triggering random battles before figuring out that you need to get a psy energy from across the world, causing it to be easy to power level because there really isn't anything else to do while feeling like a total moron. Otherwise, some of the more difficult battles would indeed actually be pretty difficult, so the smarter you are at solving puzzles and gathering information, the harder the game will be.

The Djinn system was fun. Good way to customize characters. I think more emphasis on learning abilities should have been placed in the number of Djinn and combinations rather than leveling up alone (as you can get through the games without ever giving the Djinn to different people).

Golden Sun's story is incredibly geared toward being as technical as possible to explain why characters are doing stuff instead of character relationships. I honestly didn't mind this, but it did leave a lot of characters empty once they are sitting in your party.

The game is obviously in two parts, but the original Golden Sun is very incomplete compared to the Lost Age, especially when you take sidequests into account. It's as if there were two Final Fantasy games, where one was the portion of the game where you start in Corneria and play up to defeating Astos, but the second game is where you use a password to get your old party then play through the rest of the game and explore the world map.

Don't get me wrong, I liked Golden Sun, but it is a very annoying game to play without a strategy guide of some sort.

P.S. There's a "hard mode" with is actually New Game+ in disguise.

[The Wobbler]

All of the Smash Bros. talk has been split and moved to the new Smash Bros. Brawl thread so as not to clutter this one.