Golden Sun starts with a tragedy. Before you even really know who you’re playing as, or what kind of game this is, you kind of only know two things: your village is under siege, and a bunch of people around you are casting magic spells to stop it. They do their best. Not everyone makes it.

The narrative cuts forward a few years, and you and your friends are sneaking into a forbidden temple on the edge of town because you’re RPG protagonists. Plot happens, and before you know it, you’re on the road trip with your buddies to save the world.

Golden Sun feels very standard, except you keep running into obvious puzzle choke points. There’s a puddle of water near a door. There’s a giant boulder in the way. People in the new town aren’t talking. This is when you realize you’re playing as a bunch of wizards in a world where most people are not wizards. It feels obvious to say “you use magic in the world because you’re a roaming gang of teenage wizards,” but most RPGs limit the applications of magic to battles. In Golden Sun, there’s a wizard power menu that works anywhere in the game. Other characters react to the fact that you have wizard powers and they don’t.

The best of these wizard powers feel like cheats, like “reveal”, which tells you where there’s hidden treasure alongside lighting your way in dark passages. “Mind read” adds another line of writing for nearly every character. It’s wild.

Golden Sun’s battle system is pretty simple if you’ve played one Final Fantasy and one Pokemon game, and it doesn’t matter which. Along the way, you collect little pocket monsters that give you more stuff to do in battles. The battles are fun enough, but it’s a 23-year-old game, so expect grinding and repetition.

The game borrows from Zelda here, by placing these little monsters just out of reach all over the place. It’s a clever bit of spatial design, and you’ll probably enjoy solving these puzzles.

The protagonists are pretty thin. They’re almost just the vehicle through which you play the game. You spend most of your time dealing with issues that come up in new towns. You show up, notice a problem, explore a dungeon, restore the town to normalcy, and move on. This isn’t bad. It feels episodic and classic. The game remembers its “A” plot just in time.

What gives this game its life, I think, are the tiny animations. The sprites bounce and stretch as they talk. The battles are over-animated for the GBA, with rotating cameras and insane effects. Watching a scene with a dozen sprites all bickering at one another becomes delightful thanks to these little moves and emojis.

I know it’s just a part 1 of a larger story, but Golden Sun holds up. I can see why so many people still speak so highly of it.

Screenshots: https://parosilience.tumblr.com/tagged/Golden%20Sun

I’ve played more Stardew Valley than anything else. It obliterates the concept of a $15 game, because its deeper and more charming than everything else. Maybe Minecraft is deeper, who knows.

Stardew is easy enough to get into without realizing what you’re getting into, which is a bottomless pit of stuff. Its graphical simplicity is a lie for how complex things are underneath, proven by how many spreadsheets you’ll find online. And you will go online, because there’ll be one object in a quest you can’t find anywhere, so you’ll google it. And google will give you a spreadsheet of stuff you didn’t know the game even had. And then you need to get that stuff too.

If this sounds stressful, it really isn’t. Stardew is the cornerstone cozy game, actively lowering my heartrate every time I play it. I’ve been playing it on and off for three years now. It’s the game I play when I’m not playing other games. But when I get really into it, like I have been lately, no other game seems to do.