This is a review of Golden Sun: Dark Dawn for the Nintendo DS. You don't care about this game. You didn't when it was released, and you don't now. Even if you liked the previous two entries in the series, so much time passed before this one was released that you questioned whether or not you even wanted to revisit the series. Ultimately you did not revisit the series, and you didn't lose any sleep over it. So read this long review instead, and dream of what might've been.....
Golden Sun: Dark Dawn is a competent RPG. I use the word competent as an insult, the savvy reader immediately notes. Competent here means that it is generic and unspectacular. That doesn’t mean that it is bad; it isn’t. I played through it rather quickly and was rarely bored. But when you don’t aspire to do anything new, you better have the best battle system out there or boast the greatest story in the history of RPGs if you wanna make a splash. The garbage bin of RPG obscurity is littered with titles that added refinement but little else to a formula that has evoked cries of stagnation from even its most devout followers. Add Golden Sun to that bin.
I must make this clear, for the five of you who actually listen to my opinion- this is not a shitty game we are talking about. I used the word competent and mean it, both in the positive and negative sense. I can’t find within many faults that don’t involve a deconstruction of the laziness….. or “safety” of the game’s design. But for the jaded gamer, those faults loom ever the larger, and truly I’d rather play a game that swung for the fences and whiffed than one that was content bunting weakly for a base hit. If you didn’t understand that sports analogy, I’ll make it somewhat clearer- Golden Sun is a game that might blow the mind of a fledgling RPG addict, but will do very little for those who think they’ve seen it all. They’ve seen all of this, anyway.
Golden Sun does make a decent case for nostalgia over innovation, however. I say I’d rather play the game that strives for greatness than the one that is satisfied with goodness, but GS comes close to maximizing the potential of the generic game. I might say that it is the perfect generic game, if that sort of thing had any meaning. It looks (more on that later) okay and sounds okay. Nothing offensive and nothing groundbreaking. It has a turn-based battle system with tiny things that set it apart from the Dragon Quests of the world. You have these djinn equipped to each character, and they serve as magical stock, parameter boosters, and potential summons. You have to decide whether to lower your stats to have these djinn ready for the summoning, or forgo the big spells for the boost in attack and defense that they grant. There isn’t much strategy to it, but it’s something a little different.
One nice thing that is retained from the previous Golden Sun games is that you spend a lot of your time on the overworld map and exploring towns looking for those djinn. They can be hidden anywhere- in an out of the way forest or down somebody’s chimney in a capital city. Djinn are all over the place, and seeking them out to overpower your characters is not something that is likely to ever get boring. Some of them are out there in plain sight, and some require more esoteric means to acquire. Your characters are granted various abilities based on their elemental affinity, and these abilities can be used to manipulate environmental hazards. Finding a djinn often requires clever use of these abilities to uncover hidden areas. The two greatest pleasures this game offers is use of special magic spells to search the world for rare items and extra djinn.
They are sort of cute.....
I’ll say a little bit more about this exploration. I think GS: DD, like the earlier entries in the series, are the Zelda of handheld JRPGs. You will often enter a town or a dungeon and face some obstacle that looks as though it might be easily traversed, but after repeated attempts at casting various spells at the thing, you will find that you do not yet possess the item or skill that can finish the job. You waste some time futzing with the thing before finally giving up and moving forward, regretting that lone unopened treasure chest, or that smirking djinn sitting there just out of reach. You get to the next town, advance the story a bit, and acquire some ability that is so clearly the solution to your previous problem. You race back to the dungeon and access those areas you could not before, just like Zelda. Get new items, use them to further explore the world. It’s a compelling hook for a game, and one that Golden Sun uses to good effect. Like I said, I played through it really quickly for a game that has one of the more generic stories I’ve encountered in years.
And I play a lot of RPGs, you know by now. If I say a story is generic by RPG standards, it is GENERIC. Four elements: wind, earth, water, fire generic. Enemies manipulating you into opening seals for them so they can unlock a great evil generic. Parents who were former heroes and kids who have to live up to those ideals of heroism generic. Fiery, sarcastic and naïve warrior characters and wise, tempered healer mage girl characters generic. Actually, Golden Sun reminds me of Final Fantasy VII in a way- in both games I feel like you want to accomplish one damn thing (in FFVII it was catch some guy named Sephiroth) and end up traveling the entire world by accident along the way. Games with a coherent, justifiably strong story give you a reason for visiting the places you visit- it should never be, “…..I want to rescue the princess in the tower but the bridge is collapsed so I gotta travel over the mountains to some fire town but then I gotta find a ship but in order to do that I hafta free the king’s son from a prison in the ice castle…..” Your one goal is to rescue a princess. If you have no motivation beyond that, and are only walking the earth because of superficial inconveniences that arose on the way, then your story is weak. Golden Sun, like many RPGs, suffers from a story without much meat. Sure there are party members to pick up in far-off places and sneering villains to remind you what’s at stake, but your quest to save the world is neither well-outlined nor particularly compelling. Honestly, it takes fifteen hours to meet with the wise old man your parents send you off to meet in the first fifteen minutes of the game, and by then your travels have pretty much spanned the globe.
You can tell the writers thought the story was evolving as you went, but really, nothing much is happening. You learn about synergy, the world’s magic system. You witness a vast array of wildly different cultures, but not really. You see how the effects of the first two games shaped the world of the third. There are warring nations and masked villains who probably look like some character you encountered or played as in the first two games, but damned if you can remember who they are since its been over ten years. Cookie cutter, run of the mill stuff. There was another issue I had with the game, and maybe I’m showing some sort of innate racism by even mentioning it, but here goes. You reach a point about six hours in when you traverse a series of towns that based on Asian archetypes- pagodas instead of American-style homes, tea houses featuring local cuisine, etc. Now this happens in many RPGs- a nod by our Japanese developers to their native customs. Name one game where your character isn’t cooking Curry or Miso soup between battles and I’ll name a game not worth its RPG salt. Just kidding, but hopefully you get the point. Japanese, or Asian culture in general, is prevalent in many role-playing games, and I am happy to partake in those little diversions to the east. Gold Sun, however, bases a good deal of its plot in towns and characters that have indistinct Chinese names such as Fou Zhou, Zan Lou, Ke Jou, etc etc. Because you guys don’t know me beyond my ramblings and my silly avatar, I feel the need to explain away my casual culturism….. I can’t keep these names straight! Honestly, maybe I’m old, but I could not tell the difference between many of the characters, and if their cute little anime faces didn’t pop up every time they spoke, I’d have no idea who was delivering what line. Flipping through the in-game encyclopedia revealed over forty of these Asian-themed names, and while, to deliver the famous line, there’s nothing wrong with that, I just had trouble figuring out who was who.
Seriously, a fuedal Japanese town sprouted up in this fantasy world?
But is that really a flaw? I don’t know if it’s so much of a flaw than a turn-off for me personally. I’d probably have trouble keeping track of twenty robots named DR-572 Alpha, but I’d rather spend my time in outer space than in feudal Japan. To each his own, mileage obviously varies depending on your likes and dislikes. Regardless, it was an inordinate amount of time I felt I spent with these characters in these places, and I felt that their place in the overall plot of the game was insignificant enough that it could have been pared down without affecting the story. But again, perhaps if the story or world-building were stronger I might’ve been able to juggle those alien names more easily. God knows I’ve read and enjoyed the Romance of the Three Kingdom novels, and can keep track (even to this day) or many of the characteristics of the generals in Koei’s long-running strategy series or Capcom’s Destiny of an Emperor. Zhao Yun is the all-around guy, Zhang Fei likes to fight, Taici Ci looks like he is screaming at somebody, and Cao Cao is an asshole wherever you go. Stop making me feel racist, Golden Sun!
Then there are the graphics. I said earlier that they are “not bad”, but the truth is that I don’t find them so pleasant to look at. They are in the same faux-polygon style of the Final Fantasy III remake for DS, and I have the same disdain for both. The characters are all blocky and jagged, and I don’t like looking at them. I remember reading reviews for FFIII DS when it first came out, and everyone was very pleased with the modern graphical update. I played it and my eyes wanted to vomit. Golden Sun was released well after the FF remake and thus has cleaned up some of the rougher edges present in that graphical style, but still, why couldn’t they just have drawn a bunch of cartoon characters for me to play with? Seriously, everyone has a humongous head and alien looking facial features. There are all sorts of points and edges in the character models that are unnatural. This is considered an improvement over 16-bit character graphics?
Every RPG anime trope is alive and well in Golden Sun.
Anyway, I harp on the bad, because that’s what I do. But I’ve mentioned the Zelda-type backtracking and the overworld exploration, which were what kept me going. What I haven’t mentioned is just how elaborate some of the environmental puzzles get. In this respect, Golden Sun is pretty inventive, and deserves note. There are sprawling dungeons that are connected by winding, shifting passages and gigantic golems that must be activated by using synergy at various critical points of the creature’s body. Here are some typical Golden Sun puzzles: You enter a chamber filled with water that you must drain. After draining the basin, you push some blocks around, using your vine growth spell to create passages. You then refill the basin, and those blocks rise to become platforms that will allow you to cross the water. Another one- You enter a stone chamber with synergy symbols etched all over the place. There is a giant machine in the center of a room that rises at least four floors above the ground. You enter the side rooms and manipulate various doohickeys to start the device moving so that you can use it to climb to the next level. Once on the upper level, you create further paths by running along the machine and using your synergy to open new areas. When the process works, it works well enough to let you forget about how drab everything else is.
I liked the puzzles, which were only marred by a hand-holding hint feature that comes in the form of the “insight” spell. Insight, which costs 1 MP, tells you the exact synergy that needs to be used on whatever object is in the area. It neuters many of the more clever puzzles, and although the spell is optional, you may have trouble not using it. I don’t need the game telling me to cast growth on a conspicuous seed sitting at the bottom of an un-climbable ledge, thanks.
The insight feature is one that I wasn't enamored of..... and now that I think about it, the game was too hand-holdy in general. Every time you enter a town or dungeon, the camera scrolls lazily around your environs to warn you of possible traps/puzzles. Conversations often consist of your stock chartacters repeating their objectives over and over again in the most tedious way possible. The dialogue in general is rather clunky, alternating between obvious plot exposition and forced banter between people who barely seem to know each other. Many games are guilty of this transgression, and I suppose it's important to remember that these game writers aren't writing Oscar-winning screenplays. Playing a game like Golden Sun might make you appreciate those rare games that are actually well-written.
Finally, I’d like to mention the random encounter rate. It’s weird, and not in the way you think. Sure, there are some people who want to banish random encounters from our RPGs forever, but I am not one of them. I think they have their place, and serve their purpose. Golden Sun has random encounters, but they are completely inconsistent from dungeon to dungeon. On the worldmap you might end running from one town to the next without facing a single foe, or you could fight some enemies every couple of steps. Dungeons are even stranger. I went one stretch of gameplay that lasted two hours, took me through three dungeons and three towns, during which I fought FIVE random battles. There was one dungeon that I thought contained no enemies, but I was proven wrong when I fought some goblins in the room before the boss. It was very strange, to say the least, and I wonder if the game has some “smart battle” feature that scales the number of enemies to your character levels. I often felt that I was way more powerful than most of the foes I faced; when I finally caught up to the main bad guys (or they caught up to me, as fate would have it) I crushed them in three rounds without having to heal. And I never sought out battles- I just never ran from them. So the game is sorta easy in that regard- you won’t have to grind for levels, and you won’t face much of a challenge from the game’s foes. Maybe that’s a dream come true for you, but it was kinda odd for me.
And so Golden Sun: Dark Dawn is a very mixed bag for me. It is so reminiscent of the previous titles that I could barely tell that it was a new game. As a matter of fact, nearly every single cutscene references the heroes from the first two games, as though the audience needs to be constantly reminded of how cool Golden Sun: The Lost Years actually was. There are fun things to do within- I like games that are heavy on exploration and discovery….. but even that’s deceptive. There were several points where I thought I was sequence-breaking by going off the beaten path, but it always turned out that these new areas were one cutscene away from being my next destination. My week with the game was pretty much completely forgettable; if I hadn’t brought my 3DS to school to play while administering final exams, I might not have ever started this game. But I did, and while I don’t exactly regret it, I’m ready to move onto something with more substance. Pretty much any RPG will fit the bill.
Look, let's be honest here. Golden Sun: Dark Dawn is one of those titles that you might've cared about for roughly two months after it was released, but now? Three years later? It isn't obscure enough to warrant a "what the hell is this game all about?", and it isn't popular enough to engender any loyaty from those who've beaten it. Nobody is reading this to see if they should plunk down the fifteen bucks for a purchase, either. If you are reading this right now, it's only because you are VERY bored. There's no way you read this entire review. You either immediately scrolled down to see the score, or fell asleep after the first paragraph and after waking up, mistakenly believed there would be some porn later in the article. When your quick glance at the rest of this post revealed no pictures of naked women, you got pissed off, and decided to see if I offered an explanation. Here's my explanation- why are you always looking at porn, when you could be reading reviews of RPGs nobody gives a shit about?
So…..to put it in perspective….. Golden Sun: Dark Dawn- the 110th best RPG of all time. Hey- that means it cracked the top half!
OVERALL SCORE: (27/40) Same old, same old
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