Golden Sun

[Psych]

I was feeling nostalgic and just finished a run of Dark Dawn and decided to go back and do a GS1 transfer to Lost Age so i'm working on that right now. Just kind of wanted a little discussion and to see what people were thinking. Is a fourth game ever coming?

Let's also talk about how DD was disappointing.

[Elieson]

Considering I got the game, immediately had the dog that my ex just had to have promptly eat it, and don't have a PC strong enough to run an emulation of it

I despise DD even without actually playing it.

GS1+2 still a Gold medal game (no pun intended).

[Knife]

I freaking hate all the points of no return.

[Lord of Gabriel Knight]

I love Dark Dawn, it's my favorite in the series. I think the story was nice, but it reads as an obvious Part 1, considering how they introduce a lot of plot points and don't expand on them. I think Dark Dawn would have done better if they released its second part soon after.

Edited May 6, 2014 by GabrielKnight

[j00]

It's exaggerated how bad DD was, it was a solid game, but a disappointing GS game.

It had points of no return and very little new stuff, one single new summon and two characters that had new class trees, and the new field psynergy wasn't well utilized. Too much reliance on grip, too much psynergy that was almost never used, insight was dumb and no mind read most of the game.

That said I liked Sveta's classes, nice to have a buff wind adept. Himi could've been interesting but she was tacked on so late there was little incentive to ever use her.

I would like a fourth game where they actually have new stuff and proved they've learned from DD where the whole thing wasn't a big fetch quest.

[Lord of Gabriel Knight]

I do agree that DD didn't add enough content. I'd like improved gameplay for the next installment. Himi was totally pointless. It did have points of no returns, the cave where Blados and Chalis force you to abandon the machine.

I think the next game will give more insight into Eoleo and Himi's characters. I want to know more about this Dark Adept nation, too. Maybe their planet is Pluto?

[Psych]

Actually if there was a 4th Golden Sun, I'd actually say none of the second adepts from DD would be in the party. Nowell and Takeru would likely be your Venus + Mercury adepts, but I want Himi back if only cause a mage Venus is cool. And I kind of want a mage Mars like Jenna, but I'm hoping for some sort of Proxian dragon that plays like Sveta did with the transformation. That would be really cool.

And I'd actually wager for it to be a party of 12, 2 for each element and 2 Light and 2 Dark.

[j00]

Jenna was so much better than Eoleo, but Piers/Amiti's class bothers me because it's basically a more offensive Mage class, Piers at least had the problem that he was supposed to be a physical fighter but was definitely the worst of them. Also only access to Mage classes. Amiti was an offensive Mage like Jenna so he came off better, in my opinion.

Basically water needs better physical fighters/classes

[Samias]

DD had some pretty nice dungeons, but honestly there was just too much plot that went nowhere. Considering we have no signs of a part 4 anytime soon, it was foolish not to wrap up everything in one game. So this game left me incredibly angry but I would still buy a sequel considering I hate all the loose ends.

Sveta is easily the best wind adept, and possibly the most broken character overall. I really liked her class. Eoleo and Tyrell were a little too samey for Mars adepts. Himi would be cool if she weren't so boring, as the game doesn't really do anything with her. Never really used Rief though, as I like Amiti so much more than him. But because you have 8 brand new characters in one game, it's hard to feel attached to them the same way I did with the first two games. It doesn't help that the game keeps hinting at cameos but then never pulls through! I really wanted to see Piers again.

[Elieson]

Jenna was so much better than Eoleo, but Piers/Amiti's class bothers me because it's basically a more offensive Mage class, Piers at least had the problem that he was supposed to be a physical fighter but was definitely the worst of them. Also only access to Mage classes. Amiti was an offensive Mage like Jenna so he came off better, in my opinion.

Basically water needs better physical fighters/classes

As far as GS2 goes, the cast was well intermixed, but there was definately a tiers list of Phys/Mag combatants, and Piers was towards the bottom. Though, that's like setting up your pokemon team with substandard pokemon typing...it's just gonna happen.

Still, <3 Jenna 4ever

[j00]

Jenna even had the best battle theme, the only thing I want for the next game would be for her to show up and wreck shit alongside your pathetic, weak characters like Isaac and Garet did.

[Psych]

Honestly yeah the party for DD did run a bit bland in terms of combat. Matthew is too good not to use with the Sol Blade, and while Sveta is good, I personally flip between using her or not just because I don't like the Djinn form thing.

You basically never got Rief since Amiti came an hour after getting him and was just more interesting and better especially since Rief is supposed to play the Healer and is just considered redundant due to Amiti's Ply, Matthew's Cure, and the idea to give Karis a weaker Wish at level 8 before you may even meet Rief. Eoleo and Tyrell are basically copies and I don't really like Mars adepts except Jenna since her being a Mage is a lot more interesting.

Himi's really fragile but Miko and Curse Mage are interesting. I just wish she had a bit more AoE damage spells in Curse Mage, since status effects basically become useless when you can kill normal enemies fast and they don't affect bosses.

The first time I played through GS and LA I did mono-type classes so I'm gonna be looking forward to trying them with other classes.

Did I mention I hate Rief and use him to permanently warm my bench?

[Lord of Gabriel Knight]

I think the characters need more uniqueness. The game was far too easy. Not enough was done to make the characters interesting, though.

How do you know that Light is going to be an element?

I don't mind the loose ends, since the game obviously was set up as a a dualogy, like Golden Sun 1 and 2. I just hope Golden Sun 4 comes out soon, I want to see Matthew in better graphics!

Edited May 6, 2014 by GabrielKnight

[BrightBow]

Oh boy, Dark Dawn.

I am quite frankly amazed how they bothered to make an entirely knew engine just to take the flawed mechanics 1 to 1 from the GBA games without fixing anything. So Psynergy is as useless as ever.

Also, did anybody really want the "savescum until you get the item you want" forge mechanic back? The game got all the wrong ideas when it comes to appealing to nostalgia. But hey, this time the town is on fire.

We start the game by introducing all these interesting stuff about the Sanctury on Mt Aleph, the howling moon and Psynergy Vortexes and then the game just completely drops it in favor of a glorified side quest that takes the whole game.

And the titular "Dark Dawn" is totally wasted. It's such an awesome concept. But rather then actually fighting against those creatures and protecting the people, the rest of the game is just a boring hunt for Mac Guffins because the cities are already protected through devices that the party already activated back when doing so wasn't the least bit exiting.

And there are two new PCs between the Dark Dawn and the finale but not a single boss. It's just such a boring and tedious part. Also, it's cruel to give the boat wings and then not allow the player to fly. Funny how nobody ever notices the wings but I don't want to complain about any specific bits of the story.

Putting Points of no Return into the game is just such a stupid idea. You cannot let people permanently miss out on the sort of power ups that Dshinns provide. And it's such a pain in the ass to keep track of which of them you still have to get because the numbers are so uneven unlike in the previous games. It also forces you to get them all immediately, ensuring that the enemies are always even more outclassed then they already are.

Speaking of easier, I was actually for a moment afraid to fight somebody who was a Werewolf like Sveta but...

Sveta attacks Chaos Hound.

Chaos Hound takes 562 damage.

Chaos Hound attacks Sveta.

Sveta takes 1 damage.

Yeah...

I know Golden Sun is extremely easy but this game offers so little resistance that the final boss feels downright out of place. Nothing in the game compares to that. I mean, I felt like a bully when I fought the Card Ninjas. Did somebody forget to give them attack moves or something? And then the Final Boss shows up and throws out several devastating attacks in a single round.

Edited May 6, 2014 by BrightBow

[ClevelandSteve]

I freaking hate all the points of no return.

That was my main complaint. Other things I found wrong with Dark Dawn:

1. All sorts of new civilizations popped up following the revival of Alchemy in TLA. I don't have any problem with that (especially since we all knew since TLA that Alchemy's revival would bring a lot of changes to the world), but then all of these places that didn't exist a few decades before the game are acting like they have some sort of history going back hundreds of years. Maybe I missed something, since it's been a few years since I've played Dark Dawn. Was this ever explained?

2. I wanted to see more of the old party members from the original two games. Instead, the plot kind of got hijacked by furries from one of those out-of-nowhere civilizations I mentioned in my last point. I mean, other than Isaac and Garet at the very beginning of the game, you don't even see any of the party from the first two games at all (unless you count Kraden).

3. You still don't get to fight Alex. Not even a curb-stomp hopeless boss fight to show off how tough he is for the sequel.

Maybe I'm just being too hard on Dark Dawn because of all the fond memories I have of the first two games. I mean, I don't think Dark Dawn is a bad game per se, just really disappointing.

[Psych]

I think the characters need more uniqueness. The game was far too easy. Not enough was done to make the characters interesting, though.

How do you know that Light is going to be an element?

I don't mind the loose ends, since the game obviously was set up as a a dualogy, like Golden Sun 1 and 2. I just hope Golden Sun 4 comes out soon, I want to see Matthew in better graphics!

If you talk to the residents of Belinsk in the Epilogue they mention how they now have light powers. Dark psynegy is revealed by Blados and Chalid so having Dark adepts in the party might not happen but who knows.

They do talk about there being ancient people before the surpressing of alchemy who made the machines, but why you don't see them during GS is not mentioned. Presumably they were inaccessible by mountains before the Golden Sun event.

Since they wanted to mirror the first two games, I'm willing to bet the second game will open with a Nowell part like how Lost Age did with Jenna. That would let them show Piers or even Mia, but as for the others, idk. Jenna and Ivan could show up in Tolbi or Kalay but honest I don't think they would should Felix and Sheba if they have to. Sheba is hardly mentioned.

Also I don't know if you'd even fight Alex. DD sets things up for the High Empyeror and the Tuaparagn as well as another sup set after the last two arcana so you'll at least fight those three. It might be like Lost Age where you don't fight Alex but he could end up dying somehow idk

[Book Bro]

I agree with the first two points ClevelandSteve makes. They completely put aside the lore they set up in the first two games and just put a ton of 30 year old civilizations with traditions and cultures that seem way older. We didn't really learn how Alchemy had changed the places we already knew, except Kolima, Izumo, and (somewhat) the area around Mt Aleph. It didn't help that they kept teasing us with references to Bilibin, Imil, Lemuria, etc. but didn't actually take us there. Even when they first released art of Sveta, I assumed she was one of the werewolves from Garoh... There was just so much potential with stuff that was already established, but they ignored almost everything.

I feel like they sort of screwed themselves by waiting so long to release the game and letting expectations build, which I hope doesn't happen again if/when GS4 is made. That being said, I still liked DD, it just didn't feel like it lived up to what it could have been.

[Lord of Gabriel Knight]

If you talk to the residents of Belinsk in the Epilogue they mention how they now have light powers. Dark psynegy is revealed by Blados and Chalid so having Dark adepts in the party might not happen but who knows.

Well, duh! I can't believe I forgot the light summon. Cool, Light Adepts. I knew about dark psyenergy though.

I wonder if Tuaparang is located beyond the void...

I think Alex should be fought in a long, story-driven sidequest in which he's the game's superboss.

Edited May 7, 2014 by GabrielKnight

[Elieson]

Didn't Alex die in tla?

[Lord of Gabriel Knight]

No, he's in Dark Dawn.

[Lord Glenn]

I think the characters need more uniqueness. The game was far too easy. Not enough was done to make the characters interesting, though.

How do you know that Light is going to be an element?

I don't mind the loose ends, since the game obviously was set up as a a dualogy, like Golden Sun 1 and 2. I just hope Golden Sun 4 comes out soon, I want to see Matthew in better graphics!

Well, when the "main" characters are all just expies of their parents, it's very hard to have unique characters, especially when the game does nothing substantive to actually give any of them meaningful development...

And, I don't know how much I'd agree with the game being "set up as a duology", if an interview with one of Camelot's studio heads is any indication. To quote the important part, "But of course, if there are enough people saying that we really must create another game, then we may just have to listen to them. Still, you would need to give me a bit of time to work on ideas for the story before we could release a fourth game in the series."

...

......

This does not instill a significant amount of belief and hope in me, given the direction of Dark Dawn's story. How can you have the opening several hours (up through, say, after leaving Konpa Cave) and quest line, completely ignore it until the midpoint of the game for one plot point and then ignore it again until the final closing seconds (all the while padding out the stupidest fetch quest of all time to take up the course of an ENTIRE GAME), and then not have the story for a potential sequel already planned out?!?

Oh boy, Dark Dawn.

I am quite frankly amazed how they bothered to make an entirely knew engine just to take the flawed mechanics 1 to 1 from the GBA games without fixing anything. So Psynergy is as useless as ever.

Also, did anybody really want the "savescum until you get the item you want" forge mechanic back? The game got all the wrong ideas when it comes to appealing to nostalgia. But hey, this time the town is on fire.

We start the game by introducing all these interesting stuff about the Sanctury on Mt Aleph, the howling moon and Psynergy Vortexes and then the game just completely drops it in favor of a glorified side quest that takes the whole game.

And the titular "Dark Dawn" is totally wasted. It's such an awesome concept. But rather then actually fighting against those creatures and protecting the people, the rest of the game is just a boring hunt for Mac Guffins because the cities are already protected through devices that the party already activated back when doing so wasn't the least bit exiting.

And there are two new PCs between the Dark Dawn and the finale but not a single boss. It's just such a boring and tedious part. Also, it's cruel to give the boat wings and then not allow the player to fly. Funny how nobody ever notices the wings but I don't want to complain about any specific bits of the story.

Putting Points of no Return into the game is just such a stupid idea. You cannot let people permanently miss out on the sort of power ups that Dshinns provide. And it's such a pain in the ass to keep track of which of them you still have to get because the numbers are so uneven unlike in the previous games. It also forces you to get them all immediately, ensuring that the enemies are always even more outclassed then they already are.

Speaking of easier, I was actually for a moment afraid to fight somebody who was a Werewolf like Sveta but...

Sveta attacks Chaos Hound.

Chaos Hound takes 562 damage.

Chaos Hound attacks Sveta.

Sveta takes 1 damage.

Yeah...

I know Golden Sun is extremely easy but this game offers so little resistance that the final boss feels downright out of place. Nothing in the game compares to that. I mean, I felt like a bully when I fought the Card Ninjas. Did somebody forget to give them attack moves or something? And then the Final Boss shows up and throws out several devastating attacks in a single round.

Would also have to add to this that the new weapon unleash mechanics invalidate attacking Psynergy even more (outside of using it to control damage output in order to use Djinn to attempt to get rare drops).

And, did anyone even like said unleash mechanics and having to gain "mastery"? Multiple unleashes per weapon basically killed most of the uniqueness of (most of) the Artifacts, and it basically forced grinding if you were using all 8 party members, since you'd get to the next town or find an upgrade before you finished getting the mastery to use all of the unleashes... (Plus, it made it a crapshoot as to which unleash you'd get, making some weapons far too inconsistent to be of use.)

(And, you have to give them a little credit; they got rid of the RNG manipulation that let you walk off with Riot Gloves after every battle with a Minos Knight!)

That was my main complaint. Other things I found wrong with Dark Dawn:

1. All sorts of new civilizations popped up following the revival of Alchemy in TLA. I don't have any problem with that (especially since we all knew since TLA that Alchemy's revival would bring a lot of changes to the world), but then all of these places that didn't exist a few decades before the game are acting like they have some sort of history going back hundreds of years. Maybe I missed something, since it's been a few years since I've played Dark Dawn. Was this ever explained?

2. I wanted to see more of the old party members from the original two games. Instead, the plot kind of got hijacked by furries from one of those out-of-nowhere civilizations I mentioned in my last point. I mean, other than Isaac and Garet at the very beginning of the game, you don't even see any of the party from the first two games at all (unless you count Kraden).

3. You still don't get to fight Alex. Not even a curb-stomp hopeless boss fight to show off how tough he is for the sequel.

Maybe I'm just being too hard on Dark Dawn because of all the fond memories I have of the first two games. I mean, I don't think Dark Dawn is a bad game per se, just really disappointing.

1) From what I inferred, a bunch of the towns in Dark Dawn were "technically" in Angara during the events of Golden Sun and The Lost Age, but simply not visible on the map and not visitable. And, conversely, some of the towns from the first two games aren't visitable or on the map, but are still in Angara during the events of the game (Imil and Kalay, for example).

2) I think you can honestly attribute that to the whole plot hijack after Konpa Cave where the entire story up to that point is neglected for most of the last 2/3s of the game.

-----------------

If you can't tell, I'm not overly fond of Dark Dawn. As a successor to the first two games, it's sorely lacking, and if it's the best effort that Camelot can come up with to continue the series, despite the ridiculous cliffhanger, I'm not sure I want a fourth game. Hell, I'd rather have a fangame that continued the story than whatever drivel Camelot might spew out. (Granted, you'd have to slog through all of the bad fanfic-level fangames to find an actual solid successor, but there probably would be one out there that was worthy of the name.)

If we're going to be hypothetical though, as much as I hate to say it, Matthew, Tyrell, Karis, and Amiti are pretty much a shoe-in to return. (Please not as playable characters though!) Given the cliffhanger, it's obvious that they would need to show up to tie up those loose ends. (Perhaps in the role that Isaac, Garet, Ivan, and Mia had in The Lost Age - as "NPCs" up to a certain point?)

I can't see Camelot not having Piers, Nowell, and Takeru all together at some point - Piers perhaps in the same vein as Isaac and Garet from Dark Dawn, maybe crossed with a little bit of Kraden? I would like to see more diversity and unique characters outside of them, though. We got Eoleo in Dark Dawn, so we still have Ahri (and/or Contigo in general) to account for (not saying she needs to be an ally though!). The Proxeans, the werewolves of Garoh, the village near Aqua Rock on the Apojii Islands, and even the remains of Lemuria are also important enough areas to revisit and feature characters from, too.

Heck, Akafubu, Feizhi, Donpa/Dodonpa, the McCoy family, and even Hama, Megan, and Justin are probably important enough for a revisit. (We know that Hama returned to Contigo, so Hama mentoring Ahri is entirely possible...?) And that's not even touching on any potential expy characters related to Felix and Sheba, either. (Would even say Piers too, but Amiti's basically his expy - even though there's the whole thing with Piers and Nowell, that doesn't necessarily mean that Piers didn't previously have a kid, though.)

(Please, though, for the love of god, we don't need expies for every character from the first two games. And we certainly don't need them all to match their predecessors' alignments; just because the character that they're modeled after or descended from was an ally / neutral-but-helpful NPC / enemy shouldn't automatically make them that way too. In a believable world, children can act differently from their parents, especially teenage-aged ones - rebellious phases, etc.)

EDIT - Also, in terms of party size, since I completely forgot, I honestly think that 8-12 (if they were to expand to 6 slots in battle instead of 4) is the maximum that really works without clutter - there would presumably be no data transfer between Dark Dawn and a potential successor (though, if they can make an app that reads data for Pokémon to go from DS to 3DS, anything might be possible), so that would be a massive undertaking in terms of Djinn finding if you had much more than that.

I imagine that what would happen would be a bunch of characters only temporarily joining the "main" focused party and swapping back and forth, or in a perfect world, maybe something like multiple "routes" to increase replayability so that you could follow a different group's journey for part of the story (after they would split up to tackle different tasks) and use those characters instead or even a divergent point later in the game where you chose which characters you wanted to have come with you for combat purposes and the remainder would simply chime in during story portions. That way, Matthew and company's story could still resolve, and yet, if you don't want to use them in combat (me!), then you wouldn't be forced to.

Edited May 7, 2014 by Lord Glenn

[sirmola]

Didn't Alex die in tla?

The wise one did something to him that would probably be fatal, then there was a cut back to the main characters(so of course it didn't take, because does that kind of thing ever actually succeed in killing someone?).

I think this game shows the danger of marketing a new product to nostalgia. By definition, the new product is not old and this can only capture bits of nostalgia from whatever it is mimicking. Often this is not enough to cover the fact that it has little else to bring to the table. Then everyone starts complaining about how it let the originals down.

As for things like the insight psynergy(which tells you obvious things) and the trivial difficulty, i suspect that this game was supposed to be "baby's first RPG" in addition to appealing to nostalgia. If so, the points of no return and difficult final boss are even worse design choices. Also, why does this game not copy TLA's "hard mode"? The golden sun battle system is actually decently strategic and interesting if the fights have actual difficulty.

Honestly, i doubt that there will be a sequel for a very long time because dark dawn sold pretty poorly.

[Lord of Gabriel Knight]

This does not instill a significant amount of belief and hope in me, given the direction of Dark Dawn's story. How can you have the opening several hours (up through, say, after leaving Konpa Cave) and quest line, completely ignore it until the midpoint of the game for one plot point and then ignore it again until the final closing seconds (all the while padding out the stupidest fetch quest of all time to take up the course of an ENTIRE GAME), and then not have the story for a potential sequel already planned out?!?

It's obviously set up as a dualogy due the fact the story blatantly leaves many things hanging, just like Golden Sun 1 did. Having enough people want the sequel enough to warrant it being developed is a different story altogether.

[Lord Glenn]

If it was intentionally planned as a duology, wouldn't you think that Camelot would have an idea as to what the second part would be and that they wouldn't need to "work on ideas"? Maybe I'm just different, but if I'm planning something and amount of content is such that it requires two individual chunks, I tend to have a solid outline that at least knows where everything is going to go; I don't just fly by the seat of my pants and come up with the stuff later as I go along - that's just poor planning.

Yes, the game starts several plot points and then promptly doesn't answer them and leaves the game on a giant cliffhanger, but what does that end up saying then? Camelot's writers and scenario planners weren't on top of their game? They didn't have faith in the game's ability to sell and didn't bother planning ahead for where their story would go after the cliffhanger? They got so distracted and off-topic with all of the stuff that drew the group off of their actual quest that they forgot where they were going with the story? They ran out of time and were forced to cut content or meet a deadline and, thus, had to put cliffhangers in instead? (Or something else entirely?)

Just because Dark Dawn ended up leading the player towards a sequel doesn't mean that that's how it was originally envisioned or planned. (Of course, it very well could have been planned that way and Camelot really, really has some internal issues that they need to take care of...)

(Also, Golden Sun and The Lost Age only ended up as a duology because they couldn't do all of the things they wanted to do on the GBA and have the amount of content that they wanted, forcing the content to be split into two.)

[Lord of Gabriel Knight]

That excuse of 'not having a story' is complete bullshit. The story is pretty much set up already. The problem is demand, Camelot doesn't think there's profit in making the game, or else they would have done it. It is, without a doubt, set up to provide at least one sequel.