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.

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.

This is a pretty good entry level handheld RPG with some good systems design and enjoyable dungeons, clearly riffing on Zelda, but it's doing more than your typical RPG dungeons. The real flaw with the game is how bland the main cast are and how simple the story is, despite the games abundance of text to tell it. It can just get absurd how long some scenes are when what's actually communicated to the player could be boiled down in a fraction of the words used. Overall its a decent RPG, but kind of the epitome of a comfort food game that doesn't ask terribly much from the player nor challenge them in its mechanics or writing.

This one took time to grow on me. If someone played this like a standard rpg, I think they may be bored to tears. The main cast mostly has nothing going on. Like there's enough there to distinguish them, but outside of that they're more like lightly toasted white bread. What makes it for me is the sense of world. It feels like this place has stuff going on. Little rivalries and discussions amongst the towns and cities. The characters acknowledge you when you come back home and they respond to changes in the world. The puzzles seem like they're working towards something more. Feels like they're figuring it out, but I like how psynergy is grounded in interactions with the environment. Like the fact that you can read everyone's mind is fantastic.

Outside of that the combat initially felt very standard rpg, but when the tough battles came the djinn really shined. You need to balance the stat drops it takes to use them while prepping summons, while also making sure you don't take too many that important psynergies drop off. When it works, it really works, but unfortunately it was just for a handful of good bosses. Outside of that it's the general standard rpg encounter affairs. This didn't grate on me though, mostly because I'm playing it the way it was originally intended, while commuting to work and on my lunch breaks. When taken in small chunks, it's a very cozy game. I can't remember, but someone said something similar of DQ11. This is one of those that should be taken piecemeal and casually. I'm very excited to finally give Lost Age a shot. According to everyone that's where this series really shines and if it's anything like this, it should be great.

Decent Garrett representation, although it’s ugh, spelled wrong! Guys, it’s with two R’s and two T’s. “Garet,” for crying out loud. “Hello, my name is Garet, and these are my friends ‘Mikel’ and ‘Bilee.’” You see, it sucks when I do it to your name, doesn’t it? Garet, sheesh. It doesn’t even compute for my phone, even my keyboard is trying to autocorrect it to “Harry.” I know, Tim Apple, how do you think I feel about it? Oh god, what if they pronounce it in some weird way, some stupid high-fantasy inflection? Oh no, oh dear me, oh my word, oh fuck ass and shit, even. I hope there’s no voice acting in the DS sequel, if I hear one of them call out to Gah-rotte or some shit I just don’t think I could bear it. All that aside, I do like that the Garet here is a major himbo.

What’s that, the game? Oh, it’s pretty good! I love the little react faces they give to the characters whenever they are angry, sad, happy, etc. It’s maybe not as good as Mario pantomiming dialogue while transforming into other characters in Super Mario RPG, but it’s close! At the very least it shows that someone understood the limitations of a cute SD top-down JRPG and then did something about it. How do we convey the party’s disappointment at this series of unfortunate events? Give them dialogue bubbles with cute frowny faces.

Also the fighting system is uh, something. I’d call it neat if I were in a good mood, and goddam deranged if I wasn’t. You get a handful of pokemon who give you super spells, except when you use them your stats and available normal spells go down temporarily, which sucks except the pokemon spells and super summons are strong enough to knock out the bosses in one or two turns, except when maybe it might be better to use your normal stats and spells? It’s also totally playable if you assign the Pokémons to the matching character by element, but if you mix and match elements they create thousands of permutations of different character classes which take years of scholarship to master. I don’t get it, and I just got done playing it. I’m the Argentinian calculating weird math lady meme right now.

It also has one of the silliest bad endings I’ve seen since “attack lavos at level one” in chrono trigger. You can literally refuse the Joseph Campbell call to adventure, which will earn you a screen that says “and then the world ended. Try again, dummy!” People complain about the Dragon Quest series asking the player questions that force you to answer yes, and I respond, what’s the alternative, shit like this?

Aside from that, it has a story that I’d call “a smidge better than Secret of Mana,” which, as a known JRPG liker, is really all I’m asking for when I boot up one of these things. Not to mention I’d also call it “only half done.” Coincidentally the second one just came out for switch online, I just might give it a spin on there

Update: I’m being told that there is indeed no voice acting in the DS golden sun, and that the Garet in that one also has an excellent dad mustache

I'm a sucker for a classic turn-based RPG and Golden Sun certainly provided an experience which scratched that itch. It's got some neat twists to the formula with the Djinn system and Psynergy, but the combat overall isn't terribly engaging and is more just serviceable. The dungeon design is more notable with some genuinely awesome puzzles and generally well laid out maps. Story is, in classic RPG fashion, barely present, mostly serving to shuffle our heroes from location to location. I enjoyed Golden Sun for what it offers, but it's definitely not an all-time great, more of just a solid all-around game.