Upon booting up a new game, the first thing it does is ask us to name our hero, but via button-pressing Easter Egg you can also rename the other members of the party that we’ll be meeting, as well as a few other NPCs if you wish. I’ll naturally be sticking with the defaults.
Our story begins, like many an RPG, with the hero being told to get out of bed. However, it’s not because our protagonist is late for school or heading to the local fair, and it’s not actually the morning. Instead it’s the middle of the night, a storm is raging outside, and Isaac’s mother Dora is dragging him out of bed because they’re evacuating: the storm has apparently triggered a large rock slide on neighboring Mt. Aleph, and a giant boulder is threatening to crash right through their village. And we’re also magic people, evidenced by the giant floating hand Dora summons to grab her son’s poncho off the wall. After asking if we have everything (in the form of a yes/no question; they’re ubiquitous across all the games, and 99% of the time are completely inconsequential) Isaac and Dora head downstairs where they meet up with his father Kyle before stepping out into the driving rain. Kyle wants his wife and son to evacuate to the village plaza while he goes off to help the other villagers in stopping the boulder, but Dora talks him into letting her come along to help, while Isaac can make his way to the plaza without his parents. He’s a big boy after all. Kyle agrees, and the two head off, leaving us in complete control of Isaac.
Controls are pretty much what you would expect: the D-pad moves Isaac around, he can run if you hold down the B button, and hitting A brings up the menu, while Select pauses the game so you can save it or access the options menu for changing text speed and the like. From the regular menu we can look at character stats and so forth, which I’ll talk about more in depth when they become more relevant. For now, Isaac’s starting out at the very bottom: Lv. 1, and he’s equipped with bottom-tier gear and a few Herbs for band-aid-level healing. Perhaps to compensate, his younger self’s mugshot has him scowling like he’s tougher than he actually is, something I’ve always been amused by.
Heading directly south towards the plaza as instructed turns out to be impossible, as attempting to do so results in an Insurmountable Waist-High Fence springing into existence in the form of some boulders tumbling downhill and conveniently blocking off the path. So north it is, where we encounter a red-haired kid, Isaac’s friend Garet, struggling to drag a trunk away from his house. He joins Isaac’s party after being convinced that yeah, saving his own life is more important than his possessions, and was we head past a path leading up towards Mt. Aleph we see a scene of several men struggling to telekinetically hold in place the giant boulder that Dora and Kyle were talking about, and one of them urges us to continue evacuating towards the plaza. But after crossing the bridge over the river running through this area of houses the way’s blocked by yet another small boulder, forcing us to take a detour into a side area in order to loop around the obstacle. On the path here we find a fallen man who warns us that the rock slide’s destroyed the fence around the village, letting in monsters, then asks if we think he’s going to die. Answering yes has him tell us to save ourselves before going silent, but answering in the negative instead has the guy jump to his feet, realize that he’s actually completely unhurt, then evacuate himself. Go figure.
But he wasn’t lying about the monsters, as from this point on we’ll be running into them at scripted intervals, and sure enough there’s a Fight Woosh just past where the guy was. Though we have no access to spells at the moment, the battle system is where the Golden Sun series’ famous visual flair come from, and it’s achieved through some clever art direction. The battle screen consists of character and monster sprites pitted across from each other in classic turn-based style over top a piece of 2D background scenery, at a camera angle that gives the whole thing a pseudo-3D look. Isaac and Garet’s HP and PP are displayed at the top of the screen, and the commands we normally have are to attack, defend, cast a Psynergy spell, use items, check party stats, and flee battle under most circumstances. We’re facing only a single Vermin, a fat Marill-looking mouse armed with a dinner fork, so all we need to do is swing away with our Machetes and we’ll win, earning ourselves a minuscule amount of EXP and coins. The other monsters we encounter - bats and sentient mushrooms - are similarly pushovers.
Anyway, once we complete our detour and are back on the road towards the plaza the two boys come across another sight: a boy named Felix has fallen into the swollen and raging river, holding on to a wooden post for dear life while his sister Jenna, their parents, and Dora and Kyle are trying desperately to save him. Felix is too far away from the dock for their rope to reach, and the four adults have apparently used up all their mana, er, Psynergy already so they can’t magick him out of the jam. Dora and the kids are sent out to find people who can help, and once we finally do reach the plaza, an open area containing the town hall and the RPG staples of an inn etc., we see that Jenna’s found some strongmen who have just juiced themselves up by touching the giant “Psynergy Stone” crystal at the plaza’s center, and they’re all willing to lend their aid. Everyone walks into Isaac, but they don’t actually “join” the party.
But alas, we are too late. No sooner do we return to the raging river are a series of crashes overheard and we see the giant boulder from before merrily bouncing down the hillside, the four guys from before having clearly failed to hold it back. And through a series of still images it pulverizes the dock and part of the house attached to it, and when it’s over Felix, his parents, and Kyle are nowhere to be seen. We’re supposed to have Isaac run away by himself after this back towards the plaza, presumably in a state of shellshock like the others who are still present, but once we exit the screen Garet recovers enough to say to himself that it’s times like these that guys need to be there for each other, and runs after his friend.
As soon as the scene shifts back to Isaac, however, he stops and overhears someone commenting that “Only the two of us survived...” and the camera pans to show an exotic-looking man and woman who are clearly not from Vale talking amongst themselves nearby, and going by the music that’s playing they’re clearly bad news. The takeaway from their conversation is that they somehow triggered the storm by tripping a switch of some sort inside “Sol Sanctum”, and that they plan to “challenge [it]” again. Then Garet blows Isaac’s cover by calling out his name, and alerted to our presence the duo decides that they need to make us forget everything we’ve heard. What follows is a Hopeless Boss Fight against “Mystery Man” and “Mystery Woman” that’s so hopeless that I’m not even going to bother giving it one of my usual boss entries because our dinky little Machetes can barely even inflict Scratch Damage on the strange warriors and they can and will down us in a single attack each. You can get a preview of the game’s great visual effects if they decide to use their flashy AOE skills though. Once the scene returns to the overworld we see Isaac and Garet sprawled out on the ground, and once the man and woman are satisfied that we’ve been sufficiently roughed up they make their escape without another word into the night.
...
...
...
And so we pick back up by jumping forward in time - it’s now a normal, peaceful day in Vale three years later as we watch a now-teenaged Jenna
◊ making her way up the hillside to where Garet is behind his house, conjuring another giant white hand to move a big post around. Jenna’s here to pick him up, and it’s established through their conversation that the incident with the storm three years ago motivated he and Isaac to train their Psynergy, though apparently the mystery duo’s beating did succeed in beating the memories of their encounter out of their minds. Jenna would rather everyone forget the whole thing and just move on. They head over to Isaac’s house together, where he’s using his Psynergy abilities to patch up some holes in the roof and Dora takes the opportunity to gush a little over how reliable Isaac is now and how much like his late father he is, which must be especially awkward for him given that his friends are right there several feet away.
Jenna gets Dora’s attention, saving her son from further embarrassment, and we learn that the three of them, as part of their studies of Alchemy, the source of Psynergy, are scheduled to go climbing Mt. Aleph with a scholar named Kraden who’s living in the village. Dora tells them to get going after displaying some typical motherly worrywartedness in wishing that Isaac would have a normal, safe life, and then we’re off with Garet and Jenna officially joining the party...but not before Garet undoes most of Isaac’s repair work through his harebrained clumsiness.
Now that we have full control again we can explore the menus in earnest. Despite training for three years Isaac and Garet (and Jenna for that matter) are still only at Lv. 1, though their HP and PP are a little higher than in the prologue, and they’ve swapped their Machetes out for slightly more powerful Short Swords. Each character has a separate fifteen-item inventory and since the max party size is four that means the most you can have at any time are sixty unique items (consumables stack, however). They’ve also gained some Psynergy abilities that can be used, and you can quickly see that Psynergy is categorized by element. Isaac wields Earth Psynergy and can use Cure, the basic healing spell that does exactly what it says and restores around 70 HP to one character, and two “utility Psynergy” that are only meant to be used on the overworld: Retreat which is basically a shortcut for leaving dungeons as it warps you to the entrance of whatever location you’re in, and Move, the giant hand ability Garet was using earlier on that post. Naturally he knows that too, and both he and Jenna know Flare, which in Golden Sun is the most rudimentary Fire spell rather than the nuke it is in the Final Fantasy games. Utility Psynergy can be assigned to the shoulder buttons as shortcuts.
We can head straight to Kraden’s cottage to advance the plot, but first we might as well wander around Vale, which despite being a hidden village sequestered in the mountains is one of the largest towns in the game. We can pick up on bits and pieces of the setting through NPC chat and the perusal of people’s bookshelves, such as how those who can use Psynergy are called Adepts, and that Vale’s very insular in that the villagers cannot leave without permission from the elders, and whenever outsiders are in town everyone must hide their powers. Speaking of outsiders, there’s apparently some in town right now, a group of three here to see Kraden too, and apparently ill-mannered ones as they haven’t even bothered introducing themselves to the mayor (who happens to be Garet’s grandfather, incidentally) which is apparently something of a faux pas in Weyard. We can even meet with one of them if we choose to visit the inn, a masked man who basically tells us to sod off. Lovely. Also, you might wanna Always Check Behind the Chair and scour as many pots, crates, jars, etc. as you can when you’re indoors since there’re usually hidden items to find scattered all over. Generally nothing too big, mostly minor healing stuff or coins, but occasionally there’s something juicier squirreled away.
Once we’ve wandered around to our heart’s content it’s time to get on with it and head for Kraden’s cottage. He actually lives in that little side area where we encountered the “dying” man in the prologue, and there we immediately encounter two unwelcome, familiar faces: the Mystery Man and Mystery Woman who so thoroughly cleaned Isaac and Garet’s clocks three years earlier out in broad daylight. The two of them have apparently already met with Kraden and have determined that he doesn’t know much about Sol Sanctum, but perhaps they can still use him for whatever devious plan they’ve got. Then they spot the trio of Adepts and rush over demanding to know what we’re doing here, and strangely enough neither party seems to recognize each other at all. Isaac and Garet I guess really are suffering from (physical) Trauma-Induced Amnesia, while for this pair, whom we learn here are named Saturos and Menardi, I suppose for them it was a case of But for Me, It Was Tuesday. Saturos eventually decides that we’re just not worth it and the two step aside to allow the unnerved party through.
Anyway, up a little flight of steps carved in the cliff is Kraden’s cottage, and the elderly scholar is pacing around outside, muttering to himself about how Saturos and Menardi seem to know a lot about Sol Sanctum and Alchemy, more than even Vale’s elders, and apparently they have the idea of using something called the Elemental Stars to set the four elements of Alchemy, earth, fire, wind, and water, into motion. This thinking aloud is basically an excuse to toss some exposition at the player, and that word sums up 95% of Kraden’s role in the series. Need an infodump? He’ll be there to provide it! In fact I’m pretty sure he has like the most lines of dialogue out of all the characters in the entire trilogy, and given how much characters in this story talk, that’s quite an accomplishment.
The party greets him and asks what’s going on to make him so agitated and once he tells them about how Saturos and Menardi spoke of Sol Sanctum like they’d seen it with their own eyes Jenna and Garet think that they might be thieves and so they should hurry and warn the townspeople, but Kraden holds them back by saying that he thinks they should check out the forbidden Sanctum themselves first, just to see if the duo were actually telling the truth.Yeah, uh, sure. Well, let it never be said that Kraden’s eagerness to study Alchemy and the mysteries of the world leading to him and his companions doing stupid stuff weren’t entirely within character. He convinces the kids to go along with this and naturally Isaac is appointed the leader of this little ill-conceived expedition.
Well, we all break taboos someday, right?
Soundtrack
- The First Book
- The very-recognizable and triumphant main theme of the series. I don't think the games have ever had an official OST release, so I don't think any of these track names are official, FYI.
- Page One
- The theme for the main menu. It does on for fairly long even though you only spend an average of a few seconds on it at a time. Quite nice if you wait.
- Battle! Isaac ver.
- It's good for an RPG's main battle theme to be upbeat and energetic since it's what you're going to be hearing the most. The second loop's actually got a different verse from the first, but random battles generally aren't long enough for the player to hear it much.
- Victory!
- This manages to stick around for all three games.
- On That Night Three Years Ago
- Very tense.
- Fallen Heroes
- Hopefully the prologue is the only time you hear this. This is actually the slightly-tweaked version that appears in the second game - this game's version doesn't seem to be on the sound test.
- Prelude
- Not like the Final Fantasy Prelude. Given the context where this track plays, it's almost like a "Fission Mailed" theme.
- An Adept's Home
- One idyllic RPG hometown theme coming right up!
- Saturos and Menardi
- Hope you like that pseudo midi-choir, since that's one of the trademarks of Golden Sun's musical style.
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