Nintendo recently released 'Golden Sun' on Nintendo Switch Online, offering people who missed out on its initial release on Nintendo's GameBoy Advance another opportunity to play this beloved RPG classic.

After playing ‘Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth’ with its copious amount of systems, it was nice to play an older RPG with a lot simpler mechanics. Unfortunately though, the one mechanic it does have is vast and can be very confusing. I have started ‘Golden Sun’ on numerous occasions but never got past the first area due to the slow pacing and lack of interest.

You start in a town called ‘Vale’, home to Isaac, Felix, Jenna and Garet. They are your starting party members. The town is being bombarded with falling boulders as the nearby volcano is erupting. Boulders block your path meaning you need to find alternative routes around town. This can make the starting area feel like a bit of a maze as you get used to the game’s traversal mechanics.

Some time after the eruption, Isaac and the others discover elemental stars located in a sanctum. As they retrieve them, the antagonists of the game, Saturos and Menardi, ambush them and steal most of the stars. Isaac, Garet, Ivan, and Mia pursue the antagonists to retrieve the stolen stars, prevent them from lighting the 4 lighthouses with the stars, and save their friends who have been taken by Saturos and Menardi. What sets this game apart is that the antagonists don’t all share the same views; in the scenes where they appear, they often argue with one another about what should be done with the stars and their prisoners.

The beginning of the game sets up all the basics, movement, fighting and using Psynergy. Psynergy is the magic that your team can use either in battle or on the field. While on the field you can use Psynergy to interact with the landscape, clearing or creating obstacles.

Psynergy is very much like the items found in the Zelda games where you can backtrack to a previous area and unlock passages previously blocked to reveal items. The bad thing about this fun gameplay mechanic is having to perfectly place Isaac in front of the obstacle to successfully use the magic. Sometimes this could get quite frustrating as I couldn’t find the right placement or I would interact with the object normally rather than using psynergy due to the GameBoy Advance’s limited buttons. The game does allow you to hotkey the moves to the devices shoulder buttons which can be a godsend.
The battle mechanics are pretty standard for an RPG: attack, magic (attack, status effects and healing), summons and items. The elements do matter as some enemies are weak to some elements and stronger against others.

As mentioned earlier, Golden Sun debuted in 2001 for the GameBoy Advance, embodying the characteristics of a classic RPG from that era. Compared to RPG games nowadays with upgrade and unlock systems galore, ‘Golden Sun’ has Djinn, equippable summons much like ‘Final Fantasy VIII’ with your usual battle levelling and armour/weapon shops. Those are the only 3 ways to improve your character and I like it that way. However, akin to older RPG games, Golden Sun lacks a quest tracker and fails to effectively remind players of their objectives and where to proceed next. If you have a few days gap between play time you may completely forget what you were doing and why.

For my playthrough I opted to use guides for parts where I was absolutely clueless what was going on. I did love the equipment shops in this game where it tells you how each weapon affects each character. Then you can buy and sell your old equipment in a quick series of prompts to save you wasting time going in and out of menus.
For character levelling, ‘Golden Sun’ does not require much grinding, fortunately. Just fight every battle, seek out additional areas, collect Djinns, upgrade weapons and you’ll be good as gold for the end game.

The Djinn summon system may be one of few mechanics in the game but the game does not do a great job of explaining it so players may figure out its full potential. So I will try to explain the Djinn system as short and concisely as possible. Each one of your 4 party members has an elemental affinity. There are 4 elemental Djinns corresponding to each party member. You can just stick Djinn on their respective party member based on the elements but if you experiment with mixing and matching you will be provided with different character classes and abilities. To fully understand the potential of your characters you will need to do a lot of research online to figure out how to allocate the Djinn for the best outcomes.

Once assigned to each character, you can opt to allocate the Djinn to be ready for summoning in battle or to be "set," granting the owner of the Djinn a significant stat boost. For 90% of my playthrough I opted for this method over summoning to help strengthen my team. Most of my battles were basic attacks or spells for the boss battles.
Players can collect Djinns akin to Pokémon; however, each elemental type only has four distinct designs available. You can either find Djinns in secret areas or out on the world map. Some will come with you without a fight but some require battling and may even run leaving you out of pocket for a wasted time battle. You can leave the area and come back to try again.

For a GameBoy Advance game the Graphics of Golden Sun are incredible. The game features a pseudo-3D effect, with the camera panning around the battlefield during attacks. The summon cutscenes are awesome too. The environments are vibrant and well detailed. ‘Golden Sun’ has such a wonderful design style.

The music isn’t much to write home about, the most memorable song is the battle music which you will hear very often. The game has fantastic background sound effects which can make the game feel atmospheric, much like “The Legend of Zelda: Link of the Past’. I felt that the music didn't effectively convey the emotions of the characters during dialogue scenes. The game relies on speech bubble sounds, and emotive faces appearing above the characters to let the player know the attitude of each character in a scene. I found the speech bubble sounds irritating so I turned them off immediately after I started the game.

The dialogue in this game is one of its biggest downfalls. Too often conversations will be lengthy and go around in circles without progressing the story much. ‘Golden Sun’ has a dialogue selection feature like all other RPG games where you can select ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. However, your choices ultimately hold no significance, giving the impression that the choice system was merely included as a checkbox requirement for RPGs. I can imagine that if there were ever a remake, this would be a feature greatly improved upon.

Playing this via Nintendo’s Online GameBoy Advance emulator allows for rewinding gameplay. This will make the game more palatable for modern gamers. Full disclosure, I used this feature from time to time if I made a poor decision in battle or messed up a puzzle. This is because I have a massive backlog and want to complete & review games within a reasonable timeframe.

Golden Sun is actually part one of a two part game. 'Golden Sun: The Lost Age' has also been released on NSO, offering players the chance to delve into the conclusion of the story initiated in 'Golden Sun,' akin to the two-part finale of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

I enjoyed my time with Golden Sun. The stunning gameplay design, smart puzzles with satisfying outcomes. Casting epic attacks or summons on enemies in battles is thrilling and as your team gets stronger you feel invincible. However on a downside, from the midpoint of the game I felt it started to drag a bit. The last two areas felt long and complicated as you need to unlock certain areas in each of them to progress. These areas are frequently concealed, requiring players to utilise a Psynergy called "Reveal" to uncover the secret passages. The game isn’t always clear when you need to do this. Even after consulting two online guides and a YouTube video, I remained lost about what to do next, as none of them offered consistent guidance.

‘Golden Sun’ is an iconic game and worth the time spent playing it that’s for sure. While I wouldn’t recommend this to someone who is new to RPG games as the game doesn’t do a great job of explaining itself but the game doesn’t sting you for making bad decisions. It's certainly one to play for gamers who are RPG fans and already have a few franchises under their belt. The game has become much more accessible with its availability on Nintendo Switch's Online service. I hope we see a remake of this game one day because it definitely deserves it.

For every cool aspect of this game, there's something that takes it away. The djinn and the combinations of spells can be cool in theory, but it seems it's optimal to just have one element tied to a corresponding character.

The set up for the narrative and the world is cool in theory, but then there's a lot of events that don't seem to tie in to the overall story and are just there to pad out the game.

Even with the virtual console rewind feature, random encounters are such a pain to work around. I hit walls multiple times and I was just losing my enjoyment of it as I tried to press on. I knew recently I wouldn't do the sequel because I feel that aside from the story, the gameplay experience seems to be relatively the same. I wanted to like this, and I think if I had played this when I was younger, I would have loved it and I totally get why this is a beloved and underrated game in the GBA's library for some, but ultimately it shows its age.

Golden Sun was such a huge part of my childhood, and after not touching it for many years, I'm really happy I was able to come back and still really enjoy it.

Golden Sun's class and Djinn system is easily the game's greatest strength. There's so many different builds to experiment with for each playable character, and since it is so easy to swap classes, you have basically the entire game to experiment and find a style you like. Even once you've picked a class, you need to think about whether to use the Djinn in battle since their abilities are very powerful but come at the cost of your character's stats. Golden Sun isn't very difficult, so just about everything is viable and it's up to the player to decide what they enjoy most.

I wish there wasn't as much backtracking, and I wish the cast of characters were more interesting and memorable. I also found the dialogue to be pretty jank at times, especially since Isaac can only ever react with a 'yes' or 'no'. Overall, Golden Sun is a flawed but great JRPG and I'm really glad I can still enjoy it today. Onto The Lost Age!

This is a really impressive RPG for the GBA that I played through all the way something like 5 times. It's a great game for a portable system and the way you change character's classes by giving them different combinations of summons is neat... but I will say that the story is pretty dull and the amount of dialogue they use to tell it is pretty absurd. The cutscenes can really drag on due to the amount of times you have to watch a little character sprite bounce while they have a little sad face bubble appear over their head.

(calling this 100% because i got all the djinn but i didnt get every item or whatever)

It's very hard for me to separate my feelings about this game from my nostalgia for it. This was the first GBA game I owned and I played the shit out of it, I was awful at it, I could barely get past the Mercury lighthouse even with guides. But I loved it! And I still do.

There's definitely flaws, like the random encounters. At the time it felt like, sure, how else would you do this, but nowadays random encounters feel dated and only get in the way. But the combat itself is very fun. I'm someone who does like turn based combat but even someone who doesn't could probably find something to like in this game's fast paced slick combat system. It never feels like it's dragging (except when you're mashing to try to run again).

But it really shines in the overworld stuff. The Psynergy puzzles are used so well, there's nothing like arriving in a new town and just exploring to see what there is to do with your powers. And the dungeons manage to keep it fresh every time too. The solutions are usually pretty obvious but using combat abilities in the overworld is always cool and it's baked into the design of this game.

I don't know, it's definitely fun, but it does drag on a bit near the end, at least with the random encounters. If it wasn't for those it would be perfect easily. But they're just a little bit too annoying throughout the whole game and by the time you get to the home stretch I think most people would just want it to be over. (Which is probably more of an indictment than it seems considering this is really only the first half of the game, but... whatever, it was released as one game so it gets a pass.)