Golden Sun General

Yes, it's just dependant on how many Djinni you have, so you'll unlock your options gradually as you find them.

The most straightforward way to play is to keep assigning Earth Djinni to Isaac, Fire Djinni to Garet, and so on. Isaac with 5 Earth Djinni becomes a class that's strictly better than "Isaac with 2 Earth Djinni", for example (and that class line is Jack of All Trades). Plus, you can just use/release Djinni in combat (which will temporarily unequip them) without worrying about drastic changes.

While that works better at the beginning (when you barely have any Djinni), that straightforward option becomes boring soon enough, so I like to switch Djinni around to see different classes and try out different strategies. So, Isaac with 3 Water Djinni and 2 Air Djinni can suddenly become a Psynergy-focused job, for example.

To make matters even wackier, you can use Djinni in battles for attacks, meaning the characters can automatically class change during combat. It's a ton of fun, lots of possibilities.

While the system allows for lots of classes you can easily beat it with the standard ones. The games are very easy.

By the way, do you guys know any good mods? Ideally something that raises difficulty without being ridiculous?

Mixing djinn and experimenting classes is the best part of the system.

Seriously aside from Venus the vanilla classes are a bit boring, with Mercury being Boring Yet Practical. The ninja-disciple-master class was my favorite.

Here's a video breaking down what's great about the first Golden Sun, made only two days ago.

If Nintendo ever was to attempt a Golden Sun revival, what do you think would be the best way to do it?

Let's say Golden Sun 4 comes out, and it's a direct sequel to Dark Dawn. I'm sure most of Golden Sun's existing fans would be happy about that, but anyone who isn't familiar with the series would have to deal with the fact that the story continues off of three lengthy, dated games filled with characters that they have no prior investment in. If Nintendo decides to go the remake route, then that means investing resources in updating the gameplay and art assets of three handheld games from the 2000s to try to appeal to modern gamers, and it would still take time before they finally get past a Dark Dawn remake and into uncharted territory. Maybe they could reboot and start the series over, but that might piss off core fans who want to know what happened to Isaac at the end of DD.

I would personally be all for a series reboot, or maybe a gaiden game soft reboot. What about you?

Do you really need to worry about new players being lost? Many series get new games that do amazing and bring in new players despite being direct sequels just because the games are hyped enough. If the hypothetical Golden Sun 4 is good enough I think the most you might need to do is put out straight ports of the earlier games out on the Switch to grab attention and get people who don't emulate to play them.

That said, I think a remake of the first two games is a good idea. They were originally supposed to be a single game and were split into two because of the GBA's space limitations. They could be remade together as a single complete game. I don't think there's anything about the gameplay that requires serious reworking, so they can focus on getting good at making the updated graphics the fourth game would have. Maybe rework and add some dialouge too because the GS games have pretty basic writing.

I'm not sure about remaking Dark Dawn though. That seems like it might take a little too much time before they can make the fourth game, and remaking it as a part fourth game would probably take too much resources away from the new content. But on the other hand, a remake could allow them to fix things people didn't like about Dark Dawn, and therefore make people more excited for a continuation of it.

I think remaking the first three games and following those up with Golden Sun 4 would be the best move. If I had a choice, have the first two games be HD sprites and Dark Dawn would be updated 3D models, to reflect the artstyle shift over time and the timeskip. All three games look great for what they are on the system they were on, but they could all look so much greater upgraded and on the Switch.

Sure, there are some story-driven sequel games that sell just fine, but Golden Sun's case is a bit more problematic. Keep in mind that Golden Sun 4 would: a) come out at least eight years and two consoles generations after Dark Dawn, releasing to a generation of new gamers who may not have even heard of Golden Sun; and b) pick up from the steepest of cliffhangers, asking new players to get immediately invested in the disappearance of a character they have no reason to be attached to.

My ideal solution, if not a full reboot, would be to start with a new gaiden game that introduces new players to the world of Golden Sun while still being its own, self-contained story, recapping the worldbuilding from GS 1-3 along the way. Maybe set it just after Dark Dawn, in another part of the world, and have the new main characters have to deal with the consequences of the Grave Eclipse. Have Ivan or Jenna or someone appear, point the characters towards Isaac as part of their quest, and then end the game on roughly the same cliffhanger (Isaac is missing!), and then the next game picks up from Matt's POV and ties DD and the revival game together.

I don't imagine that a fourth game would start with Matthew's party right after Dark Dawn anyway. Having the game continue right after the cliffhanger would be awkward even for people who played all the previous games, and I kind of felt like they were setting up future party members with the talk about Rief's sister Nowell and Himi's brother Takeru doing their own stuff somewhere else that we never see. I think it's likely a fourth game would start with some new protagonist in a different location, which would give time to recap the events of Dark Dawn without needing it be considered some kind of side-story game.

I always thought that the sequel would logically start from the POV of Felix/Sheba offspring. As Felix and Sheba have been separated from the rest of the major characters for decades, it would make sense for their kids to need exposition on the state of the world, and logically they would decide on their own to take on the world-saving quest and eventually meet up with their cousin Matt's party.

I can't approve of Felix/Sheba. It's gross, she's 14 and he's 18.

I would have Golden Sun 4 be a Lost-Age style perspective shift. Have a whole new party of six people, 4 of each main element as well as one each of the new Dark and Light Adepts. Nowell is an obvious pick for Mercury. Ahri, the baby from Contigo, can be the Jupiter Adept. The Light Adept is one of the beastmen who were transformed by the power of the Apollo Lens. The Dark Adept is someone from Tuaparang. Not sure about the Venus and Mars Adepts, maybe Venus can be Felix's kid and Mars can be someone from Prox or Kibombo? Or Takeru, forgot about him.

The game expands Golden Sun's standard gameplay to include 6 in-battle characters, so that you can use your whole team at once. Mid-way through, you join up with the Dark Dawn team for a 14 person party.

The story of Golden Sun 4 should answer all our questions. It absolutely should not leave on a cliffhanger, and it should be a proper climax to the Golden Sun story. The story should involve Anemos and Tuaparang, and Alex should be the final boss. All the playable characters from the first two games who weren't in Dark Dawn should make an appearance.

Edited by PushoverMediaCritic on Sep 8th 2018 at 6:58:38 AM

All I want is Jenna dragging Felix for leaving her alone again after everything she went through. All other playable characters can be ignored for me if that happens.

Alternatively, starting with a redo of Dark Dawn could be the best approach to rekindling the series. Rebuild it from scratch with modernized visuals, do something about the difficulty curve, and rework the dialogue to give the characters more personality. The plot can stick, points of no return included, but do something to mitigate permanent missables; it could be as simple as giving any missed Djinn a 1% random encounter rate on the world map, for example.

I would argue for implementing new battle mechanics to make the turn-based system more interesting. Golden Sun's system is about as vanilla as a turn-based battle system can be, and there's no incentive to try any strategy besides, "Spam attack for unleashes with all four characters while occasionally healing." I think having a way to build to unleashes instead of getting them randomly - treating them as super moves, basically - would be a good start.

Nintendo applied for a new Golden Sun trademark. Now, this could just be trademark renewal, but it might not be.

I'm pretty sure it's just a routine trademark renewal. There's no information there to distinguish it from any other.

Except routine trademark renewals happen every ten years. The last time Golden Sun's trademark was updated was seven years ago.

Edited by PushoverMediaCritic on Sep 13th 2018 at 1:20:40 AM

The way I would have restarted the series would have been a remake of the original GS 1+2, that accounted for the changes made to Angara in Dark Dawn.

Really, do you expect us to believe that Sana was really hidden in the background while it was an aggressive Empire? Conversely, what happened to Xian and Altin? The former I could see being on the Sanan side of the Insurmountable Waist-High Fence that separated it from Kaocho, and thus destroyed before you got there,^note though it would have been nice to see some ruins, but Altin should have been on the Kaochoan side, and, thus visitable. Also, Eclipse Ruins notwithstanding, Morgal (as a city) grew up really fast in the generation that it existed, especially for being in the middle of a war.

Then again, they could just have a straight-up remake of 1&2 and declare Dark Dawn non-Canon, following up with a new game. Then again, how successful was that with Star Fox?

Either way, having 2 protagonists of the same type kind of makes having a single game problematic: And Now for Someone Completely Different just doesn't work as well if it's only done once. Maybe "Rashomon"-Style if they still go with the original story, shifting POVs at intervals until the team-up at Jupiter Lighthouse. Or make it about Isaac and Jenna rather than Isaac and Felix; Jenna was the POV character during the Intro to Lost Age.

Regardless, enough time has passed that I think they need to do what they tried with Star Fox and restart from the beginning of the saga.

If Golden Sun were remade, I'd like to see it in an Octopath Traveler-esque style, to preserve the pretty sprite graphics while still getting updated.

Also, I just noticed that earlier someone said that Felix/Sheba shouldn't happen because of their age difference, and I just feel that I should point out that it's the equivalent of a high school senior dating a freshman. Not exactly scandalous by any real-life measure.

Still feels icky. Felix is mature for his age and Sheba is immature for her age, they both act at least one year older or younger than they are, respectively. Also, it fails the "divide by 2 and add 7" rule hard.

I don't know, I just can't get that horrified by the idea of teens dating teens.

I would be very uncomfortable with an 18 year old dating a 14 year old. 14 is barely out of childhood, while 18 is entering adulthood. There is a huge mental and emotional maturity gap between those two ages, even though they're only 4 years apart. Especially a stoic and mature 18 year old with an immature 14 year old.

An 18 and 14 year old dating would be weird, but a 4 year age difference isn't that big in the long run, considering we're talking about a 30 year time skip between the Lost Age and Dark Dawn. Skip ahead just 3 years to when they're 21 and 17 and it's no longer weird.

Maybe after or during the timeskip, sure, then I would be more okay with it. I still feel like Sheba and Felix are a bad match-up, though. It's based on exactly one scene at the end of the first game with multiple other valid reasons behind it, and isn't hinted at whatsoever throughout the second game, despite the focus being Felix and his team.

It's like when people were shipping Isaac with Mia based on literally nothing just because she was the only female in the first game's party, despite multiple explicit hints that Jenna had a thing for Isaac.

Edited by PushoverMediaCritic on Sep 13th 2018 at 8:03:58 AM

The Isaac/Jenna hints mostly came in Lost Age when he was able to talk and be a character, just like Felix/Sheba comes from the game where he could talk. And it's not like Mia/Isaac, where the two literally do not have a single canon one-on-one interaction or conversation.

There are plenty of games with a Silent Protagonist that sell romance between the main character and the love interest. Even in the first game, I felt hints that Jenna had a thing for Isaac, like how she focused on him over Garet. In the second game, which has more in-party interactions than the first one, Sheba interacts a lot with Jenna and Piers, and a bit with Ivan after the teams come together, but she hardly ever talks to Felix. The second game focuses much more on Felix's sibling relationship with Jenna and his relationship with the Proxians.

Felix saving Sheba from the Lighthouse can easily be interpreted as a hint at his heroism than anything romantic. Also that it's his fault that she was even in that location to be in danger, and he recognized that. That's how I interpreted it. I'd be more willing to believe Felix and Karst were a thing than Felix and Sheba, based on their interactions.