Andrew's Game Review: Golden Sun

Game Review:
Golden Sun
&
Golden Sun 2: The Lost Age

published by Camelot and Nintendo for the GameBoy Advance
Game Review by Andrew Glassner
August 20, 2003

Introduction

Brian Wilson, songwriter for The Beach Boys, once described his masterpiece "Good Vibrations" as a "pocket symphony." The comparison works: at under four minutes, his pop song has all the elements that are traditionally associated with a symphony. In the same way, "Golden Sun" is a pocket role-playing game. Like its bigger brothers, such as Final Fantasy X (which I reviewed in March 2002), this game has everything one expects from the genre, though on a uniformly smaller palette.

"Golden Sun" and its sequel, "Golden Sun 2: The Lost Age" are really the first and second halves of the same game, so I'll treat them here as a single game, which I'll call GS.
GS is a huge game. I probably spent about 110 hours playing it. It's fun and interesting from start to finish. You're given a wide range of tools to shape the game the way you like, and the variety they provide, coupled with the rich and imaginative artwork and excellent sound, makes for a mostly entertaining experience. I played it all the way through because I enjoyed it all the way through. Because the game has some unique, interesting elements, this review is a little longer than usual so that I can briefly cover them all.

The technology of Golden Sun is important because it shapes the entire experience. It was created for the GameBoy Advance (GBA), a handheld gaming machine with a small built-in display, tiny speaker, and little buttons designed for little thumbs. I bought a GBA a few years ago, but eventually had to abandon it: the case was uncomfortable for my adult hands, the sound was tinny and annoying, and the screen was too small and dark. A few months ago Nintendo came out with an adapter that lets you play GBA games on your home GameCube console. So now you can plug GBA games into the adapter, and play them with the much larger GameCube controller on your home TV and stereo. I bought one, and it makes all the difference in the world. I strongly recommend playing GBA games on the GameCube with this adapter.

GS is in a genre known as "Role-Playing Games", or RPG. These all have the same basic form: you play a character who wanders the world with some friends in pursuit of some vague, ultimate quest. That quest really doesn't matter much; like Hitchcock's theoretical "McGuffin", it's simply the generic thing that's out there to motivate the action. Along the way, you fight monsters, explore towns and dungeons, and solve puzzles.

The world of GS is huge. There are fields, forests, deserts, and oceans. In and on them are hidden islands, underground caves, rivers, mountain ranges, and more. There are a dozen or more villages and camps to visit, each one offering people to talk to, shops selling weapons and armor, and places to heal your wounds. Often someone in the town will tell you about a problem they're having with a local monster, and you volunteer to help. This gives you a reason to explore the next scary dungeon, fighting its monsters and solving its puzzles, ultimately to find and slay the troublesome beast.

GS is, with rare exception, a game of strategy and not one of reflexes. Monster battles are very gentlemanly and proceed in rounds. You can take as long as you like to choose what each member of your party should do for the upcoming round (e.g. strike with a weapon, cast a spell, or summon a spirit). When you're done giving instructions, the game then executes the round, with your characters and the monsters taking turns lashing out at each other. Rounds continue until the monsters are all dead, your group is all dead, or either group runs away from the fight.

One of the most interesting elements of GS are the Djinn (plural Djinni). These are magical little creatures that you encounter who will join your party. For most of the game there are four people in your party, and each person can carry up to 9 Djinn. Near the end of the game, you'll have a party of 8 people, carrying up to 72 Djinn in total (if you're able to find and capture them all).

Djinn come in four flavors: earth, fire, wind, and water. Each Djinn has a name, and an associated magic ability. Some can attack foes, some can cast a protective shield to protect you, others can revive a fallen comrade, and so on. Once you've unleashed a Djinn, it's then available to be summoned as part of a larger attack. For example, four fire Djinn summoned together make up the Meteor attack, which casts a devastating meteor from space onto your opponents. After a summons, participating Djinni become unavailable for several turns as they recuperate. Timing when you want to unleash your Djinni, and deciding when you want to start building them up to enable a bigger summons, is an important part of the game's strategy.

But Djinni have another quality that is novel in my experience. As each character collects one or more Djinni, that particular collection gives that character a specific bunch of magical spells. There appear to be hundreds of spells in the game, each with its own name and icon, its own animation, and of course its own effects. If you have three fire Djinni, for example, then you have one set of spells. If you add a fourth fire Djinn, those spells go away and you get a different set. If instead you add an earth Djinn, your spells change but to a potentially completely different set, and so on. Djinni that are ready to be summoned, or in recovery, don't count. So you might have a great set of spells when you go into battle, but if you unleash a Djinn to make an attack, you'll find yourself with a new and very different set of spells.

The set of spells you get for each group of Djinni is not random: it's deterministic and repeatable, but completely undocumented. To make things even more complicated, the spells depend on the character, so if Felix (who has strong Earth power) is holding 5 Earth Djinni, he gets one set of spells, but if Jenna (who has strong Fire power) has those same Djinni assigned to her, she gets a different set of spells. So each time you find a new Djinn you frequently spend some time reassigning them all to see which new mix of Djinni creates the kind of spells you'd like each member of your party to have.

A little math reveals that there are 715 possible Djinn combinations for each character. When there are four characters, finding a good set of assignments of the Djinni is a big challenge. When there are eight, it's overwhelming.

This has had the fascinating side-effect of giving rise to a large online community of people who are collectively building up a massive database of Djinn combinations and their associated spells for for each character. Many people are posting their favorite combinations that emphasize attack, or defensiveness, or the prettiest magic spells, and so on. The sheer scope of this enterprise is staggering. Finding a combination that suits you, and then tweaking it through the game as you discover new Djinn to add to your collection, is like opening a box of Legos. Once you start messing around with the Djinn system, either you will be instantly hooked or bored silly. I was hooked.

There are many nice things about this game. The graphics are terrific; it's hard to believe that something designed for such a small screen can look so good on a big TV. The sound is also wonderful, and the quality of the instruments is much better than the music provided on many console games. The game is huge, and has plenty of visual variety. There are lots of different kinds of armor and weapons, and plenty of little side quests you can go off on if you feel like adventuring off the main path. The battle system works great, and fights even take place in what feels like 3D environments, thanks to clever visuals.

With only a couple of exceptions, the game is about thinking and planning, not reflexes and twitching.

The story of Golden Sun is sweeping in scope, rich in detail, and incomprehensible. It's common for games like this to involve saving the world in some way, but this game is like a Russian novel: characters appear randomly and briefly, and then are not heard of again for a very long time. Long after you've forgotten who they are and what they're about, they pop back up again and it seems very important somehow but you have no idea who's who or what they're talking about, or why. This happened so many times I just gave up trying to follow. And it makes no difference, ultimately - at no point does any of this story information affect how you play the game.

Although most of the puzzles are fair, like most RPG games GS sometimes presents you with challenges that you can't yet solve, because you lack necessary skills or items. The idea is that you'll come back later when you're equipped. That's fine, except the I often couldn't tell if a given problem was unsolvable at the moment, or if I just need to work harder to find a solution. I wasted some time trying to solve puzzles that weren't soluble at that point.

The in-game characters in GS are constantly telling you to hurry: the monster's going to eat them all, the volcano will explode, the world will fall apart, etc. In fact, there's no real-time clock on this game, so there's no time pressure at all. You can leave it running for a month and come back and it will be exactly as you left it. I found the constant reminders of urgency to be annoying, though, because I wasn't positive that they could be safely ignored until well into the game.

The final battle in this game is perplexing. Like most RPG games, at the very end is the biggest, baddest monster of them all. Fair enough. So you save the game, arm yourself to the teeth, assign your Djinn as best you can to be flexible and strong, cross your fingers and enter the fray. The first few times you're quickly pulverized, until you learn how the monster behaves and cook up a strategy. That's typical. But here's the odd thing: you discover this way that the final monster in GS is so big and so strong that you need to spend almost all of your time healing your party from the damage they receive and just trying to stay alive. You just can't attack very often, and when you do it's a relatively minor blow, so fighting this guy becomes a process of attrition. So okay, you hunker down for a long battle and hope you get him before he gets you. Even that's okay, except for two things.

First, the attrition takes forever. And ever. And ever. I beat the monster the second time I tried. I actually used a great strategy that I found online, and even with that help, it took over an hour and half. No, I didn't mistype: this one battle took over an hour and a half of sitting there and fighting in order to win.

And why did it take two tries? That's the second problem. This monster has some devastating attacks. Every now and then it hits you with a couple of these in a row in a way that basically leaves your party without any remaining offensive or defensive weapons. In other words, you're dead. It just happens. You can't guard against it. This happened to me the first time. I spent an hour battling the monster, and was getting close to finishing it off, and some random number generator decided that now was a good time for the beast to pulverize my group. And he did. And we all died. The end. I was doing everything right, I was well prepared, and I'd put in over an HOUR waging this endless war of attrition. And then out of nowhere, whomp, you're dead. If you think I was ready to tie this game cartridge to a rock and hurl it into Puget Sound, you'd be right. I was furious. If this had happened halfway through the game, I'd have stopped playing right then and there, and I'd have written a scathing review. But it happened only here, at the very final battle of the game. So after I let off some steam I tried again, improved my strategy by checking online, and this time I was luckier, and managed to kill the monster and win the game.

With the exception mentioned above, the two games that make up Golden Age are a lot of fun. The graphics are great, particularly given that they were designed for a handheld unit, and the sound is great by any standard. The monsters are usually fair but challenging, the puzzles are interesting and fun to solve, and the Djinni system is innovative and fun to fool around with.

This is a big effort designed for a small canvas: truly a pocket symphony of role-playing games.

At the conclusion of Golden Sun, you have the chance to write down some passwords which let you take your characters into the sequel. The passwords encode your character's level, their equipment, their Djinn, and so on, so they're unique to each game. If you start with the sequel, you may want to use my passwords so that your imported characters will have some oomph to them. And since I collected all the Djinn in the first game, this also gives you the option to enter a cave with a few extra bosses and big summons commands.