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  • Alternative Character Interpretation: Being a tradition of Golden Sun, this is no surprise to fans.
    • Volechek - Easily Forgiven despot or desperate ruler pushed to the edge by unrestrained Fantastic Racism? You be the judge.
      Despot 
      Desperate 
    • Not quite as drastic, but there are some who think Amiti is a lot sharper than he lets on.
  • Angst? What Angst?: Amiti gets over learning he wasn't born thanks to his mother being an incredibly powerful Adept giving herself a virgin birth (she had no powers whatsover, his father was the Adept) very fast. The only thing to imply any issues at all is his sudden urge to go adventuring after learning the truth about his conception.
  • Annoying Video Game Helper:
    • Isaac, when he joins your party for a while in Tanglewood, will very frequently tell you use Djinn and summons to get an advantage over your enemies. While this can be helpful for players new to the Golden Sun series, veteran players or people who are playing through the game again will find Isaac's constant nagging on what to do in battle annoying since almost every enemy at that point can be killed in a few hits with weapons or Psynergy.
    • Garet's AI is known to get rather trigger-happy with the summons if you have any Djinn on standby. Even against minor enemies.
    • The game also has quite a few points where the characters have whole conversations about what to do next, when the answer should be patently obvious.
    • There are instances where Amiti is scripted to use Insight to point out a puzzle you've already solved. Most annoying is the one to unlock the secret entrance to the Ouroboros, which is the same "empty the basin" puzzle you solved in every other room in Barai Temple, when Amiti was accompanying you as an NPC (so he's seen you solve that one already!).
  • Anti-Climax Boss: The Dual Boss of the Belinsk Ruins. For all they're built up in the story, Blados and Chalis aren't nearly as hard as Saturos and Menardi, or even Agatio and Karst. You are also given a powerful party member moments after entering said dungeon, making the fight a lot easier.
  • Awesome: Video Game Levels: Can anyone deny that the Belinsk Ruins and Apollo Sanctum are pretty amazing? Especially the astronomy-themed portion of the Belinsk Ruins where you align the planet spheres and slapping the Sun.
  • Breather Boss: As far as a Superboss goes, the Ogre Titans are pathetic. They are weak to Mars, the element of the Sol Blade needed to unlock the place, start the battle slowly to give you ample buff time, no annoying gimmick and only use physical attacks (easily reduced to minimal damage with a defense buff). Thanks to the game's system of resetting a buff's expiration based on the last cast (even if the cast did nothing because you already hit the increase cap), the battle is largely one sided (though long, as they have a massive HP pool between the 5 of them).
  • Broken Base:
  • Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
    • Dark Dawn really went its way to promote Sveta, who lacks a connection to the original titles, as highlight of the gameplay to the point of making many many enemies and bosses weak to Jupiter, giving her a physical attack that targets multiple enemies, at least three powerful Sol Blade-tier weapons long before said sword can be obtained and rendering non-EPA offensive Psynergies obsolete once again, so that players will use her.
    • As with the previous games, you could interact with the Class and Level System and experiment with different combinations of elemental djinni on different characters... or you could just give every new djinn to a character that already matches their starting element and call it a day, and nineteen times out of twenty it'll work just as well.
  • Complete Monster: Blados and Chalis are agents of the military country Tuaparang, who partake in a scheme to activate the Grave Eclipse, shrouding most of the continent in darkness and unleashing dark beasts on the innocent populace, leading to the death of thousands. Betraying Alex to seize the Apollo Lens for themselves, Blados and Chalis proceed to turn Volechek, the brother of heroine Sveta, into a horrific beast and attempt to use him to fire the Apollo Lens on their own allies, killing Volechek in the process. Cunning, manipulative, and seeing the deaths of thousands as a mere side effect of their plan, Blados and Chalis are two of the vilest villains Golden Sun has.
  • Contested Sequel: While Golden Sun: Dark Dawn is definitely a decent game in its own right and their shipping fanbase is still strong, the plot railroading, many points of no return (leading to many things becoming Permanently Missable if the player is not careful) and the controversial difficulty (or lack thereof) makes it difficult to live up to the second game's successes.
  • Crack Pairing: Part of the reason why Karis and Chalis are shipped together in fanfiction is because their names sound too similar to each other (only applies in the English versions though).
  • Crosses the Line Twice: It is the perfect time to test out your kids' knowledge of Psynergy when your best friend's son is in danger of dying. Sure, let's drag the kids along through the deadly forest, and keep making them do all the work despite how dangerous this could get! Also who cares if you didn't actually have anything to do with breaking the glider, get out of the house and don't come back until you can fix it. Adventures build character! Lampshaded thoroughly by Garet, Karis, and Matthew himself, none of whom think Isaac has hit the second line yet... Of course, depending on your decisions, Matthew has no qualms with it whatsoever.
  • Demonic Spiders: After the Grave Eclipse is activated, players can start encountering shadow monsters whenever they venture into the shadow of the eclipse. If you haven't been leveling properly, these things can knock you senseless within a few turns. They also have a much higher Random Encounter rate compared to non shadow enemies of the same strength until you start leveling up past the 40s, and like to hit you with annoying status effects. Some even have One-Hit Kill moves. On the other hand, if you're high enough level to deal with them, they're quite good for Level Grinding, as they give the second highest experience for randomly encountered monsters (the highest experience monsters don't appear until right before the final boss).
  • Difficulty Spike: The final boss is much harder than the rest of the game, and that's not even considering the Superbosses...
  • Draco in Leather Pants: Averted in the case of Blados and Chalis, thanks to a kill count easily in the thousands, including at least one well-beloved character, via the Eclipse, played straight for Arcanus.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse: Rief's sister Nowell enjoys a good fanbase for a One-Scene Wonder.
  • Fan-Preferred Couple: Just like the first two games, the Ship Tease at the end of the game is loved by the majority of the fanbase, this time involving Matthew and Sveta on the peak of the Apollo Sanctum. While fan reception towards Matthew is typically tepid, his role as Sveta's pair is surprisingly well-received.
  • Game-Breaker:
    • The shadow soldiers you fight as a Random Encounter before the Final Boss. They give between 20,000 to 50,000 EXP points per fight, which is enough to level up the party in a very short amount of time in order to make the final fight less difficult. On top of this, they ALWAYS drop a Water of Life (an item that revives downed allies). If you fight these guys for several minutes, your levels will be so high and you will have so many Water of Life that you can't lose the Final Battle.
    • Karis's cheap multiheal, the Fresh Breeze series, is often seen this way because it doesn't require any set Djinn and only a relatively small amount of PP to cast. To the point of making Rief, a pure healer, basically useless.
    • Sveta herself is this, especially in her beast form. Since the game's difficulty is low for some people and she dishes a lot of damage due to the game's battle system favoring physical attackers, some players are not using her to ramp up the difficulty. Not to mention she's of the Wind element, which is strong against everything in the game.
    • Himi, who is usually underpowered, has one absolutely filthy trick. An attack buff, single target, that increases the attack stat by four times as much as a normal attack buff. And she can stack it twice like any other single target attack buff. Add that one to Sveta and she turns into a monster.
    • Any of the damage reducing djinn are game breakers, even in the original Golden Sun duology, but they're more notable here - purely because you don't have to wait for most of the game to get them. Chasm can be found in the Belinsk Ruins, which while it is near the end of the second third of the game, it completely trivializes anything past that, due to its effect. Chasm reduces all damage to the party by 90%, and will always go first in the battle unless another priority move is used. This doesn't seem too bad, until you realize that there are two other djinn, Bark & Shell which reduce damage by 50% and 60% respectively. You can remove all remaining difficulty from the game by having one character use Chasm on the first turn, then set it on the second, with another character using Shell/Bark on the second turn. You can then repeat this for the whole fight, which predictably turns the game into a joke.
  • Good Bad Bugs: Warning: This becomes a Game-Breaking Bug if saved over your main file, unless you can use it to get back to Tonfon, because the trip from the Endless Wall is one-way. Use a spare file. Anyway, there's a bug accessible very late in the game (look up "Endless Wall glitch" on YouTube; it's better to see how it's done because it's hard to describe) that involves saving the game at the part of the Endless Wall where it forks between the entrance to Apollo Sanctum and and a dead end that basically functions as a one-way walk-through-walls code without an GameShark or similar device needed. The beginning parts of the game and Morgal can be accessed with it as well as... Bilibin? Well, only the Bilibin side of the Border Town can be accessed (and bizarrely enough, going into it from the Bilibin side results in Matthew entering that side instead of defaulting to the Morgal side accessible during normal gameplay; could Camelot have Dummied Out a Bilibin plotline involving Border Town?); nothing else in Bilibin is in the game, and the Bilibin side of Border Town is devoid of NPCs. Still, it's nice to be able to say, "Screw you, Point of No Return!" for once.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • Many characters in the first game think Isaac's party are a bunch of muscle bound bearded warriors. Now they (or at least Isaac and Garet) are.
    • One of the Encyclopedia entries mentions a Warden of the North.
    • An utterly strange variation happened with Rief and Amiti. Prior to release they both became somewhat infamous for the large amount of Viewer Gender Confusion they received, then once the game was out it was heavily implied and later confirmed by Word of God that Amiti is Alex's son, making Rief and Amiti second-cousins, making their shared androgyny a case of Strong Family Resemblance.
  • Ho Yay:
  • Iron Woobie: Lost your parents in the war? Surrounded by paranoid warmongers on all sides? Brother got manipulated into destroying the country? If you're Sveta, your response to this is about ten minutes of angsting, then rallying a bunch of teenagers, a surly murderous criminal, and Kraden to save the day. Then comes the ending...
  • It's Easy, So It Sucks!: Many of the reviews made mention of the game's relatively low difficulty level, and the absence of a Hard Mode like TLA had didn't help.
    • To put this into perspective, the Grave Eclipse and its sudden swarm of shadow monsters are a noticeable Difficulty Spike from what you encounter prior — but all that really means is they've stopped scratching you for negligible damage and bothered stepping up to what the first two games considered par for the course throughout. Unfortunately, realizing this can kill the moment's tension somewhat. This doesn't apply to the first encounter with the Tuaparang soldiers and the bonus dungeon, however.
    • In general, the game's difficulty seems to be on par with the previous games up to the Konpa Ruins and the aforementioned battle with the Tuaparang. After that, both the puzzles and the battles take a nosedive in difficulty until the Belinsk ruins and the Grave Eclipse bring it back up.
  • It's the Same, Now It Sucks!:
    • Nothing has changed in the battle system, mages still suffer in the attacking department, the classes are still unbalanced (Mercury adepts gets this the worst) while warriors are broken and Jupiter is still on the top of the elemental tier no matter what the game tried to convince you.
    • Regarding Matthew, he is a Suspiciously Similar Substitute of his father, and since the main protagonists in Golden Sun are always neglected in terms of characterizationnote  most fans resent or even hate him for this.
  • Memetic Badass:
    • Isaac's beard.
    • Kraden's badass status has apparently leaked into canon, according to some characters. Rief and Karis remark that if Kraden has to get somewhere, he will make it there, no matter what is in his way. Considering the Random Encounters and puzzles/traps in the game franchise and the fact that he travels through the apparent war zone between Bilibin and Morgal to join you...
    • Dullahan, who is even harder in Dark Dawn than in The Lost Age.
  • Moe: Sveta. Amiti as well.
  • Moral Event Horizon: Blados and Chalis soared right over it when they orchestrate the activation of Eclipse Tower, starting a Grave Eclipse that would lead to thousands of innocent people's deaths. And even in the fickle fandom of Golden Sun, it doesn't look like there's anybody ready to forgive them for it anytime soon (being Obviously Evil probably helps, though).
  • Nightmare Fuel:
    • In the third quarter of the game, after you trigger the Grave Eclipse, you start seeing dead bodies in plain sight. This is especially jarring when you visit Kaocho and Champa, where the bodies are decaying, especially in the former where you visited it in the past even talked to several of the now-dead people. To make matters worse, Spirit Sense can be used to read the minds of these corpses, so you can see what their last thoughts were before they died.
    • And the music in a certain way doesn't help either. In the affected parts by the Grave Eclipse in the overworld, the music is very somber, as if a monster would attack to you in any moment (the only part that has a different music is when you walk across the Endless Wall), the battle music indicates that you're fighting with evil monsters that appear from the nothing (but it's an awesome track, by the way), and even worse, the music used in Kaocho is really dark and depressing (the karma by their actions really affected them), and all that complemented by the things previously mentioned. The only possible exception is the music used in the affected cities ( other than Kaocho), which evokes a sad feeling instead. Motoi Sakuraba really showed his musical abilities there.
    • What about the preceding scene, where Arcanus and Ryu Kou activate the Alchemy Dynamo, causing the Eclipse to occur? An alarm starts sounding, and Matthew’s party is prompted to get the blazes out of there, as the Luna Tower is ascending and the Eclipse is about to happen. The music, placed in conjunction with the alarm sounds, adds to the sheer terror.
    • If you head to the top of Luna Tower during the escape sequence, you can obtain a summon known as Eclipse.
    • While not nearly as bad as the Eclipse-related horrors, this one deserves a mention: you know the Djinn? Those cute little things that help you out in battle and otherwise seem to be silly, adorable cuckoolanders (although that might just be Flint and Pewter)? Some of them are, quite honestly, terrifying. Like Chasm, for instance, a Venus Djinni with a miniature black hole in the middle of its horribly gaping, misshapen mouth that takes up almost the entire front of its body. Which it sucks enemies into. Another one is Fury, who looks fairly normal and cute... until you read its description and realize that it attacks enemies by summoning up the souls of those who died in anger.
  • Nightmare Retardant: The dead bodies you can read the spirits of lampshade everything and seem more or less okay.
  • One True Threesome: Karis, Matthew and Sveta are quite popular, and canonly shown to get along like a house on fire.
  • Replacement Scrappy: A common criticism aimed at Matthew, Tyrell, and Rief is that, due to the Generation Xerox, they come off as less interesting knockoffs of their parents. Karis has mostly avoided it, probably due to being more markedly different from her parent than the others, both in design and personality.
  • Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: In The Lost Age, Levatine is a strong weapon but often ignored for weapons with stronger unleashes such as the Excalibur and Tisiphone Edge. Here, due to the changes to the unleash system Levatine has skyrocketed into the second-best weapon after the Sol Blade due to Radiant Fire now hitting multiple enemies at once as well as getting Centurion (a Jupiter-aligned unleash with x2.4 damage multiplier, in a game where many tough bosses are weak to Jupiter). As if that isn't enough, both unleashes may ignore half of the target's defense. It also has only three unleashes while most end-game weapons get four, making it more likely to get its best unleashes. Other weapons with Centurion (Sol Blade and Phaeton's Blade) are also made better because of it.
  • Scrappy Mechanic:
    • God DAMMIT, Djinn are STILL hiding on the overworld.
    • And let's not get into the whole problem people are having with the points of no return, which permanently block off a fair number of Djinn and summons if you didn't get them already. The official Nintendo-backed game guide explicitly reminds players to "go back and get all the Djinn" before they hit the final dungeons.
  • Shipping: Golden Sun fandom's always been notorious for shipping and Ship-to-Ship Combat, and just got a bunch of new characters to play with. So, yeah.
  • So Okay, It's Average: The general reaction to the game. It plays to a large extent like if both original Golden Sun titles were welded together, while not really managing to fully capture the charm of either of them.
  • Squick: When your party defeats the Mountain Roc, you enter its corpse to retrieve the magma orb and exit out the back end...ew.
  • Strawman Has a Point: Amiti's thoughts on piracy are pretty understandable even before you consider how close Ayuthay is to Champa.
  • That One Attack: Djinn Burp from Dim Dragon Plus comes way too early to be a threat, but it's the first in a line of Djinn screws. The Chaos Chimera can use Djinn Blast, and it's lost no power since its last incarnation, while the Star Magician's Ghoul Balls can deny recovery by eating your Djinn, by the way, they're gluttons, too. And let's not forget that Dullahan can use Djinn Storm, the souped version of Djinn Blast.
    • The Ancient Devil has a power called Demon Sign that forces one of your party members to fight alongside him—and the only way to snap them out of it is to KO them (in fact, beating the Devil will cause anyone under Demon Sign's influence to be downed). Making matters worse is the fact that they can use any items they have in their inventory (e.g. Bramble Seeds), and they can use your own standby Djinn to fuel their own summons. Worst of all, it's apparently programmed to pick the most useful character to hit with Demon Sign.
    • Dullahan now has the Crucible technique used by Valukar in The Lost Age. Crucible is the power to use your Djinn to launch your summons into your face. Dullahan also gets the Charon summon for free, and his attack pattern means that he usually follows that with Djinn Storm, which is its own That One Attack.
  • That One Level: The Craggy Peak Ruins, a zodiac-inspired dungeon. Half an hour of kindergarten puzzles (save for the infamous Capricorn tiles), no boss fights, and no dialogue or story development altogether.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Poor Himi. She joins as an 11th-Hour Ranger at a point in the game where she can only really participate in the bonus dungeons and the final boss, so there isn't much main plot left for her to have a part in by the time she joins up. Despite being the daughter of two characters from the previous game who already didn't get much screentime, Himi's only significance is to act as a Plot Coupon to help get the group where they need to go. She also barely has enough lines in the game to fill a single page. Despite having an interesting class design as the first Venus Adept mage character, Himi is the worst of the worst when it comes to being a Flat Character in this game, with one scene literally having her ask what's going on as everyone else reacts to a twist.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Psynergy Vortexes. They completely disappear after the Konpa Ruins without the characters ever mentioning them again. Until the stinger. Which probably means that most of the game was just a distraction to keep the team from their real mission long enough for some bad guy to act unhindered...
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Many fans do not appreciate the change to the easily exploitable RNG system in the first two games since obtaining end-game equipments and some forgeable materials via Rare Drops are nigh-impossible without it.
  • Viewer Gender Confusion:
    • Amiti was subjected to this, and his rather androgynous appearance coupled with Spell My Name With An S certainly didn't help. Many gamers, and the official European site, made the mistake. Finally solved when a trailer gave him a shirtless scene).
    • Rief/Crown as well, which wasn't at all helped by his initial unveiling not using any gender specific language and the masculine English name. He was seemingly confirmed to be female with this trailer due to female Voice Grunting, but on further examination, an extremely similar pitch was used for male children in the first two games. Rief has since been confirmed to be a guy, although a girly one. Becomes a weird sort of Fridge Brilliance and Hilarious in Hindsight when it's revealed that Rief and Amiti are second-cousins.
  • Visual Effects of Awesome:
    • Much like the GBA games, Dark Dawn goes all out with battle effects, particularly the summons, which are even more flashy and over-the-top than ever.
    • Remember Catastrophe? It looks cooler and you should check out what's under his cape. Here ya go!
  • Woolseyism:
    • The European version makes a few pragmatic changes from the US one, from minor things like changing "mom" to "mum", but it's most noticeable during the finale. The American release mentions that "Arcanus" sounds like the most important card in the tarot deck, but no such card exists. The line makes more sense in Japanese where Ace really is one of the most important cards in the deck. The European version changes the dialogue completely to imply that Alex chose the name "Arcanus" because it refers to the entire deck. Karis theorises that he'd chosen the name because "(he's) holding all the cards". They took out the Symbol Swearing though. WHYYYYYYYYY??!
    • Wording is important here. Kraden doesn't say that "Arcanus" sounds like the most important card in the deck, he says it sounds like the most important cards. Multiple. Specifically, he means that "Arcanus" sounds like "Arcana". Tarot has two sets of cards. The Major Arcana and the Minor Arcana. The Major Arcana are the strongest cards in the deck, but even the Minor Arcana would be egotistical, since it implies control over Swords and Cups (Blados and Chalis), as well as Wands and Pentacles.
    • The player character Crown was probably renamed Rief in English-language versions to avoid confusion with the change of the villains' Theme Naming from playing cards to the Tarot (the suit of Pentacles is sometimes called Crowns). His sister Noble was probably changed to Nowell for the sake of consistency (and possibly Foreshadowing for her specialties; her name refers to a winter holiday, and Kraden indicates in a cutscene that she can use Frost/Cold Snap/equivalent).



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