So some videogame designers from Camelot were sitting around one day, and one of them brought in some facts on the soon to come out Gameboy Advance. "Wow," they said, "We should make a game for that system. But what game to port?" Then some guy, let's call him Ben, said, "No, let's not port some bad game we made in the past, let's make a whole NEW game!" "Alright!" said everyone. So they did. And called it Golden Sun. And it looked and played quite like all the other games they had made, aka Shining the Holy Ark.

Luckily for us, the game developers looked into at least a few reasons why their other games were so terrible, and decided to fix a few of them in Golden Sun. No longer a first person dungeon crawler like Shining, it was a standard rpg. It featured everything you would expect in a normal rpg as well. 4 characters, 2 mages and 2 fighters, although magic is a big part of this game, so the fighters are actually pretty good at magic too.

One of the things I hate in rpgs is when enemies can still hurt you good after you've gained a few levels above them. That makes backtracking and such painful, for you still have to heal and rest at inns. While this rpg contains these things, it presents something nice and different to help counter the running out of magic from healing when going back to earlier levels problem. Your magic slowly returns. I never found out if it only works when you are moving, or if you can stand still, but it does return. So as long as you conserve magic, you will always have enough. This made me extremely happy.

The game gives you many, many pokemon-esque creatures called djinn that "attach" to your characters, upgrading their magic and stats. There are 4 types of these djinn, fire, water, earth and air, who woulda thought? When combined differently they create different combination magic and such. This is cool to play around with, to create the most powerful characters, but usually I just equip them on the character that has that attribute. The fire djinn on the fire character, water on water, and so on. Since there are 4 characters and 4 djinn, this works fine. Like I said, there are a lot of ways to mess with this, but I never really tried.

Another "cool" feature is that some of your magic can be used outside of battle, from simply moving rocks to reading people's minds to find out the truth, and making plants grow. While this is cool cause it is different, it gets annoying. The djinn are put all throughout the world in easy to see, but hard to reach places, and thus I missed a lot of djinn, not figuring out what magic to use to get them. Should I use reach or grab? They need to clarify the magic just a bit in my personal opinion. Not that it isa big deal, it just bothered me some.

What liked: The story has some funny moments, the graphics are better than the Sega Saturn game the same company made, the summons, when you combine multiple djinn of the same element together look really cool. The plot is very basic, you follow around these guys who captured your friend and brainwashed another, and do a whole lot of side quests along the way. Standard RPG. But was I asking for more on a GameBoy Advance? No. I don't want another Final Fantasy X, with all the cutscenes every five minutes. I wanted a fun game to play. And that is what they gave me.

What disliked: The only thing that really got on my nerves would have to be that in the battle system, if you wimp out, which everyone does, and click the a button a bunch to hurry up the battle, once the characters kill the enemy chosen, the other characters don't automatically target the next enemy. They instead defend. This annoys the heck out of me. Since I like to go back to old areas and charge up and stuff in my rpgs, this became annoying, cause I had to pay attention and decide who would attack what enemy each fight. I would have loved this game a lot more if I could just hit the a button and charge up while playing another game on a home system, but the game makes you pay attention all the time. Which you must admit can get annoying quickly.

What to expect: An average, snes quality, but with better sprites, rpg. Looks like what you would see on snes, or first generation playstation-sprite-rpg. Which is not a bad thing at all. It's a great game for the first rpg for the advance.

What not to expect: The best plot ever, sorry this game isn't Vagrant Story. But for a portable rpg, this game is brilliant. Just next time Camelot, fix that battle system so they auto target the next character. Thanks.

Ratings on:

Control: 6 - The characters move well, but the other thing I hated about this game was that the action button, a, also pulls up the menu. So if you don't click on the person pefectly, it would pull up the menu. This was a-nnoy-ing.

Graphics: 8 - Looks better than a Sega Saturn game. That's enough, right?

Sound: 7 - Decent. I never listen to portable game music, and hardly listen to home system music, but I did put up with this music some, so that's a good sign.

Style: 4 - Don't look for anything that hasn't, in some form or another, been done before. But for a handheld, it's all new I guess, so I won't give it a 0.

1st hour: 7 - Best part of the plot here, although the opening is a tad long for my taste.

5th hour: 8 - Fun in the sun.

1st week: 7 - Enjoyable. Just don't get distracted by a prettier game for a home system, like I did.

5th week: 7 - Same as it ever is. Fun, but nothing so great to hold you there away from the pretty games like FFX and Arc. Oh well, play it in your spare time, or on a trip with your.. ugh... family. The horrors.

#1 reason why I hate this game: The no-auto-target-the-next-enemy feature that has always been in games since, what FF2? Why go back to something that has been proven as crappy?

Pic1 and Pic2.

by Hawke