When two games are so closely related in style, story and gameplay, it's hard for me to make an appropriate differentiation between them; same thing with Bravely Default/Second. Anyways.

While my first turn-based game was Pokémon Yellow, it was Golden Sun that introduced me to JRPGs proper, and boy, what an impact (just look at me now)! The simple premise of rowdy adventurers with elemental powers traversing the land, righting wrongs and growing stronger, really shines when you are limited by the GameBoy Advance's hardware and not capable of devolving into animu drama. Not to mention the experience of handling a whole team of characters that can use both melee weapons AND magic. Spellswords galore, baby!

Turn-based combat in Golden Sun is pretty standard, but how you develop your abilities is the interesting part: leveling up unlocks access to Psynergy (the game's magic) up to a point; it's by finding and gathering Djinn, critters with a specific elemental affinity, then assigning them to party members, that determines what Psynergy each character can use. It's also with Djinn that you alter your character stats and gain acess to Summon abilities, very stylish super magic that come at a heavy cost to prepare for, by placing assigned Djinn into Standby in or out of combat.

As I've mentioned prior, a game's world can really make or break the experience for me, and Golden Sun 1 and 2 shine in this front. Psynergy isn't just limited to magic utilized in combat; it's also used to interact with various aspects of the world, so as to solve puzzles, or locate hidden treasure (and Djinn!). This means a natural reason to explore and revisit locations after you gain access to new Psynergy, generally with quests and bits of additional story that help flesh out the world of Weyard (on occasion taking direct inspiration from real world locations and cultures).

They're not without faults, obviously. The technical limitations really show, making it aggravating to go back to, such as attacks not following through if in combat your main target's been killed, the best gear in either game only being attained by overtly-convoluted drop mechanics (praise be given to exploitable RNG), and how there's no follow-through on your own level threshold, meaning that there's no real reason to keep going after a certain point in your team's progression. Issues of its time, to be sure, but issues that nonetheless sour the revisits.

You might've noticed that I've not made a distinction between Golden Sun and Golden Sun: The Lost Age so far; that's exactly why I start this one out with that initial observation. The Lost Age is definitely an improvement upon the original, since it gives you a bigger world to explore, equipment crafting, more sidequests, and the balancing of two four-man teams; and the ever-lovely save export mechanic so that everything you attained in Golden Sun can be passed on to The Lost Age, making the experience more your own.

But the games are so similar otherwise (to the point that you can easily play them back-to-back without feeling unprepared or exhausted), that there's not much of a point to think of them as different entries, given both games are fantastic and best experienced together. If you REALLY forced me, I'd pick The Lost Age as my favorite, for the reasons stated above, me prefering Felix as the player avatar rather than Isaac, and that I actually owned the sequel as a kid. The contrast of the original story with what you get in The Lost Age truly flips your expectations upside-down, giving you pause to consider what exactly is happening in a way that most JRPGs, including Final Fantasy titles, have lacked in regards to subtlety.

I truly love these games. Maybe it's nostalgia, but there's just something there that does it for me. Such a shame that we only ever gotten two games in this series. Yup. A real shame.


Illustration now on my Redbubble page(https://www.redbubble.com/people/henlp/shop?asc=u). Or consider supporting me through SubscribeStar(https://www.subscribestar.com/qoh).