So to get to Mt. Aleph we need to head to the same path just north of Garet’s house where we saw the guys trying to hold the boulder back in the prologue, just past a small, nondescript building called a sanctum (more on those later). If we try to head past it a guy literally jumps out of the bushes to tell us off for trying to do something forbidden before pacing the area, so once we’re out of his line of sight we have to stealth past him. One screen north and we’re at the entrance to Sol Sanctum, marked by an ornate set of doors and statues carved into the mountainside, including the classic astronomical sign for the sun set into the ground. Being the very first dungeon of the game Sol Sanctum is pretty simple as a lot of it is simply long, linear corridors with the occasional branching path. Occasionally we’ll need to hop on stepping stones to cross bodies of water or find jewels to put into bullhead statues in order to uncover a hidden door. And we also use Move a few times to slide knight statues out of the way in order to proceed.
There are Random Encounters to be had in Sol Sanctum, and the monsters are mainly stuff we’ve already seen with the addition of Slimes (unremarkable other than their penchant for running away) and ghostly Amazes, who pack the first unique enemy spell Rumble. Monsters here can come in numbers as low as one or as high as five and many of them are weak to Fire spells, so Jenna will end up doing the bulk of the casting in this dungeon since she has a fair bit more PP than Garet, and Isaac can join the party as well once he learns Quake at Lv. 2. Most spells in Golden Sun are AOE and specifically target one enemy while doing slightly lesser splash damage to adjacent ones. Spent PP gradually regenerates as you walk around outside of battle, though there are pieces of gear out there that’ll let you do so in battle as well.
Oh yes, do you know that Golden Sun has an Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors system? It’s quite downplayed though. Each unit, including Isaac and co., has an elemental affinity stat for each of the four elements, and whichever one’s the lowest is the one they’re weak to. Isaac’s weak to Fire while Garet and Jenna are weak to Earth in turn. Hitting weaknesses isn’t as crucial as it is in say, Pokemon and Megami Tensei though, you just inflict a little more damage than normal and that’s it. In fact, the only way to tell how effective the hit is at all outside of pure numbers is to pay attention to the “(unit) took X damage” message; if a character or monster is neutral towards whatever you’re hitting it with the message ends in a regular exclamation mark, if they’re weak it’ll end in three, and if it’s resistant it’ll end in an unexcited period. Not something you’re really going to notice at first.
As far as stats go, there’s Attack which determines mainly physical attack power (though there are a few Psynergy abilities that run off of it), Defense, Agility, Luck which I think only concerns resistance to status ailments, Elemental Power for Psynergy spells, and Elemental Resistance. Concerning our three characters, Isaac is basically your Jack-of-All-Stats: he’s got high attack power, decent everything else and can heal too so he doubles as a Combat Medic and will be the second-fastest of the final party. Garet’s got slightly lower Attack and elemental power, he’s slow (both Isaac and Jenna have at least double his Agility), but he has high HP and defense so he’s a tank. Being the sole girl Jenna is physically the weakest of the three, but is the fastest and has pretty good elemental power.
Incidentally, there’re some Anti-Grinding measures in place here: once the trio hit Lv. 5 monsters will simply stop showing up, though if you kill off one of your party members you can loophole your way out of that. So, it is possible to leave this dungeon at Lv. 99, but I can’t imagine why anyone would be insane enough to do so - you don’t even need to be a third of that to comfortably beat the game.
Anyway, eventually we’ll reach a room that has a glowing sun emblem on the floor, and Kraden will exclaim that it looks like so far everything that Saturos and Menardi said about Sol Sanctum has turned out to be true, which the kids take as confirmation that they’re thieves who’ve been here before but once again Kraden stops them from running back to the village to spread the word. He argues from the perspective of the Sunk Cost Fallacy, and the kids are easily swayed, curious as to what else the Sanctum hides. Well, heading to an adjoining room to the right reveals a moon emblem, leading Kraden to suspect there’s some sort of relationship between the two rooms, and he stays behind to observe while we continue to investigate ahead. There’s a flight of stairs that take us to another floor past that, were we can enter a crystalline room containing a purple Psynergy Stone shard on the ground that we can pick up. These shards fully restore the team’s PP like the larger one in Vale’s plaza, though they’re one-use-only unless you respawn them by exiting and reentering the dungeon. Thus you can use these points sort of like field tents: using healing Psynergy to restore everyone’s HP to 100%, then grab the Stone to top everyone off.
The main attraction on this new floor, however, is another double room with sun and moon emblems. There are four statues around each including push plates, so pushing one of the statues surrounding the moon emblem onto its plate results in it shining a light on one of its four quadrants. We then cut back to where Kraden is to see the same quadrant of its emblem change from the moon to the sun, but it’s accompanied by an ominous rumbling and bursts of electricity, causing him to hurry ahead, shouting that we’re about to make a big mistake. It looks like we were about to trip a trap, he says, and I bet it’s the same one that Saturos and Menardi were talking about. We don’t want another storm on our hands, so we’re going to have to be a bit more careful than they evidently were, and Kraden suggests that light may be the key. As added incentive, he concludes that perhaps this trap is guarding the key to Alchemy itself before he turns to the other room.
So solving this puzzle is easy, we simply have to go over to the sun side of the room and push two statues onto designated plates so that they each shine a light on a single spot, which causes a hole to open in the floor that we can drop a third statue into with Move. Something clicks, then we can safely finish shining all the other lights on the moon emblem, causing the two emblems downstairs to switch places. There’s a new beam of light emanating from the new moon emblem, and examining it leads to a mysterious portal appearing on the wall, so in we go!
And where we come out is in a large, ethereal chamber filled with water and spires of stone. The kids are amazed at the sight, and Kraden at first thinks that this is the ocean (Garet’s apparently never seen it before, and Kraden describes it to him as “an endless thing of water at the end of the world”) before realizing that this is the chamber that contains the four Elemental Stars, the pure quintessence of each of the four elements. He points out four statues scattered around the chamber, each one holding a round gem in their cupped hands: the yellow Venus Star, essence of earth, the blue Mercury Star, essence of water, the red Mars Star, essence of flame, and finally the purple Jupiter Star, essence of wind. He excited explains to the kids that these gems are said to contain so much power that even having one in your possession could let you conquer the world, and with all four of them you could create the legendary Stone of Sages, IE the classic Philosopher’s Stone, and obtain eternal life. He really wants to examine these things, but since the terrain is so slippery Jenna makes Isaac and Garet retrieve the Stars instead, and Kraden gives us some mythril bags he brought along from his cottage for that purpose. So, for all the talk about Saturos and Menardi being thieves, I guess we’re the true thieves in the end...
So now we need to retrieve the Stars, and we’re railroaded into getting them in a certain order since upon retrieving the first one we can reach there’s an ominous rumble and several spires will rise up out of the water, allowing to reach the next Star and so on. After we get the third Star, the Jupiter Star, however Isaac and Garet seem to realize that their companions have suddenly gone uncharacteristically quiet, and upon looking back are shocked to see that Saturos and Menardi have appeared in the chamber and taken Jenna and Kraden hostage. Good going guys, in your haste to explore forbidden territory you just blithely allowed these guys access to the sanctum. Naturally the duo wants us to hand over the Stars in exchange for our friends’ safety, but Kraden fears that they’re just going to kill them anyway once they’ve retrieved their prize. A voice says no, they won’t be harmed, and the masked man from the inn enters the chamber through the portal, bringing our troubles up to three. Kraden and Jenna still aren’t convinced though, so Menardi decides to give them a guarantee and tells the man to remove his mask. Reluctantly he does so, revealing himself to be...Felix, thought dead in the storm three years ago!
His miraculous reappearance is quickly explained by Saturos and Menardi having saved him from being washed away in the river, but Saturos preempts any sort of emotional reunion between brother and sister or questions as to what exactly he and his partner were doing in the vicinity of Vale at that time by again demanding the Stars, saying that Felix would never allow them to harm Jenna or Kraden. So Garet takes the Stars from Isaac but before he can get over to where the others are now congregated the fourth member of our antagonistic band pops up out of nowhere to intercept him. Literally, as he simply teleports in. This fellow with the long blue hair introduces himself as Alex, a name who carries with him a certain degree of notoriety for those who’re familiar with these games, I’d wager. He takes the three Stars from Garet and then tells us to bring them the final one as well, which is rather lazy of him given how he could simply teleport or even just fly like he does to rejoin his companions over there to get it himself. At least if you talk to Kraden on your way over to the final statue he recognizes that this mess is all his fault.
Once we retrieve the Mars Star however the chamber is suddenly rocked by an enormous tremor and the water drains away as magma begins to seep out from the floor and rubble starts falling from the ceiling. Yeeeah...can’t really say I’m feeling bad for our pack of boobs at the moment: I mean, if you mess around with artifacts that channel the foundations of nature itself you shouldn’t be surprised when things get destabilized, as Alex helpfully points out is what’s happening right now. Then everyone proceeds to freak further out at the sight of a giant floating boulder that’s suddenly appeared in the chamber, one with an organic, cyclopean eye. Kraden gapes that this is “the Wise One”, the legendary guardian of the Elemental Stars, and Felix suggests that they should probably leave, since they’d be no match for something like that. Menardi protests that they still don’t have the Mars Star though, but Alex suggests alternative: they were going to kidnap Kraden anyway, why not take Jenna along with them too, so that Isaac and Garet will have to bring the Mars Star to them if they want her back. This naturally angers Felix, but he’s overruled and Saturos’s group quickly exits the chamber with their new captives in tow.
After they vanish Isaac and Garet peek out from behind the Mars Star statue and now that they’re alone and things aren’t quite moving at a mile a minute any more they take the time to commiserate over how far south the day’s gotten before Garet says that they really need to leave. Before they can make good on that however the two teens are startled by the Wise One appearing before them again, and this time he actually speaks to them, questioning why they aren’t escaping (gee, maybe it’s because they’re transfixed by the sight of a giant floating, one-eyed boulder?). The chamber starts to tremble again but the Wise One uses some Psynergy to temporarily calm it as he mutters to himself as lights fly out of each of the four statues that the “Elemental Djinn” are leaving and that there will be no chamber for the Elemental Stars to return to, and that if the four elemental lighthouses are lit and Alchemy is unleashed and misused the entire world might be endangered. He tells Isaac to take out the Mars Star and once he does he uses some Psynergy on it before telling Isaac to put it back in the bag, and that since he can’t hold the magma back forever the two boys must flee.
To that end he warps Isaac and Garet out of the chamber and we have to run all the way back to the entrance of Sol Sanctum and back to Vale, where we can see the villagers, including Dora and the mayor, watching the eruption of Mt. Aleph with dismay by the generic sanctum. They are glad to see that Isaac and Garet are okay though, but they are confused as to what happened to Jenna and Kraden. In we go to see a skit of the boys trying to explain everything that happened to the mayor, Dora, the sanctum’s Great Healer (who I suppose is Vale’s final authority when it comes to matters of mysticism) and a few others through mime and the emoticons that the series is known for. The Great Healer confirms that Isaac and Garet have not gone and completely lost their minds to hysterics by claiming that he’s aware of who the Wise One is, in fact while they were spilling their guts he spoke to him in his mind just now. The others anxiously ask if Vale’s going to be destroyed but thankfully the Wise One is trying to divert the lava flow so that the village will be spared, so we can nix out that fantasy cliche of the hero’s journey being triggered by the destruction of his peaceful, idyllic hometown.
However, there is something more serious brewing, and that’s the potential destruction of the world when the four lighthouses are lit. The Great Healer says that their inaction may doom them all, so naturally it’ll be other people’s action that’ll get back the Stars and save the day, namely Isaac and Garet’s. Well, I guess it only makes sense that it’ll fall on their shoulders given that they share responsibility for this mess. Dora and the mayor protest that the two can’t handle the fate of the entire world being on their shoulders, but even so we’re given the opportunity to accept this quest or not once Garet decides to give up the responsibility for deciding to his friend. Thus we are asked, “Isaac, will you accept responsibility for the fate of the land?” and the yes/no questions actually matters here: if we answer “no”, and continue to do so when urged to recant, those present basically go “oh well, I guess it was too much to expect of you after all” and we get a Non-Standard Game Over in the form of a message stating the world indeed ended up drifting to its destined destruction.
...but that would make for a ridiculously short game and liveblog, so instead we accept, and after Garet’s initial surprise that we did so fades away the Great Healer calls out to the Wise One for a sign, and the dude obliges by briefly showing up in front of everyone present to commend us on our courage and to wish us luck. Once he disappears the mayor asks if there’s anything else and the Healer mumbles stuff about searching for the lighthouses, finding the Djinn, and something about Felix unlocking some sort of power before taking his leave. The mayor seems a little beside himself that the Healer/Wise One seems happy with just throwing Isaac and Garet into the wind with barely any hint of direction or anything, but Dora decides that things sound fairly urgent anyway, so they’ll be off tomorrow, bright and early!
Thus after a quick scene change we see Isaac and Garet at the town gates, with almost the entire village there to see them off, wishing them good luck in their travels while Garet’s brother Aaron and sister Kay rib him a little on the side. Dora’s nowhere to be seen, however, and Garet’s mother speculates that she just can’t bear to see her son leave the village and her all alone. That’s not to say that she won’t have some presence here though, since Aaron gives us a parting gift on her behalf, the Catch Beads item. The Catch Beads are the first of a series of items that bestow utility Psynergy to whoever equips them even if it’s not the same type as the Adept, in this case the power we saw Dora using in the prologue. Catch will let us snag stuff from afar, mainly stray healing items and such. Anyway, the mayor says that if everyone keeps standing around like this then the two are never going to leave, and all the villagers present below out a final “Farewell!” and so, with heavy hearts and minds, Isaac and Garet take the steps of their great quest to retrieve the Elemental Stars, rescue Jenna and Kraden, and save the world.
Soundtrack
- Sol Sanctum
- It's too bad that we're not in Sol Sanctum for very long since I do quite like this track, and it doesn't play anywhere else in the game.
- The Elemental Stars
- Nicely atmospheric.
- Sol Sanctum Erupts
- The choir makes this sound like a much more frantic version of Saturos and Menardi's theme.
- Hopelessness
- You hear this more towards the beginning of the game it feels like and less as you move on. It's a "troubled town" theme, pretty much.
