A fun disappointment. Let's get this out of the way; this game is much worse than Golden Sun 1 and 2. I know it and you know it. Yet I had a lot of fun with it.
A lot of the charm from previous entries is still here; music, artstyle, sound effects, the clever level design and specially the gameplay, which has been improved from the previous entries. The jump to 3d is a welcome change, all animations have been re-hauled to be flashier than ever. The flow or finding and re-equipping your party is still just as good, now improved with the weapon mastery feature, allowing you to stack multiple unleashes on one weapon.
I never really played with the class system in previous entries. While viable I never experimented outside of using mono-elemental classes. Boy was I missing out; The strongest classes in the game are available by fooling around with djinn swapping, which only improved the experience.
However, not every aspect shines. Golden Sun has never been a pillar of well written characters, but it's almost as if Camelot went out of its way to write the most bland and uninteresting characters imaginable (Sveta is cool tho). Seriously, your last party member comes in so late into the game that they barely have any dialogue whatsoever. The decision to adopt an 8-party member system, similar to The Lost Age (where your characters developed over the course of two games), feels unnecessary and hinders character development. It doesn't help also that having 8 party members is unnecessary, as this is the easiest Golden Sun so far.
Dark Dawn's weakest aspect is the plot. Many writing decisions caused detrimental effects in the gameplay. Most controversial of all was to add FOUR points of no return, all which don't truly have a good reason to be. This writing choice locks you out of summons and several much needed djinn.
Part of the setup in this game is that the Golden Sun event caused severe continental shifts throughout the world, attempting to fool the player into thinking several new towns and cultures have been around for centuries despite never being mentioned in the past. This leaves you yearning what happened to all the places and characters from past adventures, but worst of all I only met Isaac and Garet from the main old cast. I imagine they expected to explore this in future games as this one ends on a gargantuan cliff-hanger. To my infinite disappointment, it's been nearly 14 years without any news of a sequel as Camelot seems infatuated with making Mario sports games.
Despite these issues Dark Dawn is still an alright game, offering a fun entry for fans of the series
A lot of the charm from previous entries is still here; music, artstyle, sound effects, the clever level design and specially the gameplay, which has been improved from the previous entries. The jump to 3d is a welcome change, all animations have been re-hauled to be flashier than ever. The flow or finding and re-equipping your party is still just as good, now improved with the weapon mastery feature, allowing you to stack multiple unleashes on one weapon.
I never really played with the class system in previous entries. While viable I never experimented outside of using mono-elemental classes. Boy was I missing out; The strongest classes in the game are available by fooling around with djinn swapping, which only improved the experience.
However, not every aspect shines. Golden Sun has never been a pillar of well written characters, but it's almost as if Camelot went out of its way to write the most bland and uninteresting characters imaginable (Sveta is cool tho). Seriously, your last party member comes in so late into the game that they barely have any dialogue whatsoever. The decision to adopt an 8-party member system, similar to The Lost Age (where your characters developed over the course of two games), feels unnecessary and hinders character development. It doesn't help also that having 8 party members is unnecessary, as this is the easiest Golden Sun so far.
Dark Dawn's weakest aspect is the plot. Many writing decisions caused detrimental effects in the gameplay. Most controversial of all was to add FOUR points of no return, all which don't truly have a good reason to be. This writing choice locks you out of summons and several much needed djinn.
Part of the setup in this game is that the Golden Sun event caused severe continental shifts throughout the world, attempting to fool the player into thinking several new towns and cultures have been around for centuries despite never being mentioned in the past. This leaves you yearning what happened to all the places and characters from past adventures, but worst of all I only met Isaac and Garet from the main old cast. I imagine they expected to explore this in future games as this one ends on a gargantuan cliff-hanger. To my infinite disappointment, it's been nearly 14 years without any news of a sequel as Camelot seems infatuated with making Mario sports games.
Despite these issues Dark Dawn is still an alright game, offering a fun entry for fans of the series