Golden Sun

Golden Sun, in its own special way, reflects the ending of an era. It’s a console-style RPG that on the surface tributes games from the Super Nintendo era, but truthfully has more in common with its contemporaries: Japanese RPGs of the late 90s and early 2000s. It also does an excellent job showing why the two eras are distinct and why concepts from one don’t work so well in the context of the other.

When I think about Golden Sun today, I immediately think of its biggest flaw: there’s too much dialogue, and over half of it is pointless filler. This was common in RPGs of the era, and at the time nobody complained. We were used to info dumps akin to those seen in Chrono Cross, long introduction sequences like Wind Waker’s, and unskippable cutscenes. Some of these genre mainstays have unfortunately stuck around, and it’s a wonder when a game gets around them. I don’t mean to demonize the genre for this, as it was a necessary growing pain for RPGs to experience. We’d never have seen a great plot twist like Nier’s or the deeper character interaction seen in games like Xenoblade without game developers consciously trying to make their work imitate literature. It’s sad, then, that RPGs with a lot of potential such as Xenogears and Golden Sun simply don’t hold up that great today.

Chrono Trigger is often considered one of the gold standards a 2D RPG should aspire to imitate, and I personally agree. From the angle of story presentation alone, it outdoes Golden Sun by leaps and bounds. Dialogue is short, carefully worded, and sufficient to get the player invested in the characters. Remember how quick Lucca’s explanation of why Marle ceased to exist was. It even had a cutscene, and it was shorter than any dialogue sequence in Golden Sun. More importantly, it explained everything the player needed to know about the situation, delved a bit in to temporal theory, and introduced Lucca to the party, all in one scene.

By contrast, one of the earliest significant scenes in Golden Sun concerns Isaac and Garet escaping from the Sol Sanctum to pursue Jenna and Kraden. This scene gets dragged out by Saturos and Menardi taunting Isaac and forcing him to deliver the stars to them, the place starting to cave in, the Wise One explaining the circumstance, and finally the boys getting out. Another long scene follows this. However, very little happens here. It’s all essentially an action sequence setting the plot in to motion. There’s nothing important to think about, no characters are developed beyond what was presented initially, and we learn nothing about the Wise One that will reflect its nature at the end of Golden Sun 2.

Golden Sun suffers from other transitional blemishes. The pseudo-3D graphics have aged horribly over the past ten years, whereas Chrono Trigger still looks vibrant and well-tuned. Its soundtrack, while not incompetent by any means, sounds like it’s trying to force a bombastic orchestra on to the GBA sound chip. Gameplay even suffers. The battles are old-school to a fault, not even allowing attack redirection, and yet they provide little challenge to the player. The Djinn system contributes to the imbalance, as it sounds great on paper but in practice only serves as guide bait and accomplishes little since spells are so useless in comparison to summons. This is a problem seen in, yet again, other games of the era, Final Fantasy VIII in particular. Junctioning is great in theory, but doesn’t mesh with the battles the game throws at the player.

What am I trying to get at here? Well, it’s something we continue to see happen over and over again. Golden Sun claims to have an old-school aesthetic, but it doesn’t commit all the way because it can’t. Gamers of the time expected a certain amount of volume to the story and such, so making a simple, elegant game like Chrono Trigger was out of the question. Developers today don’t want to be stuck in the past either, but the difference is that they’re better at modernizing old styles of combat. Persona 4 feels like a retro RPG with new-age style. Golden Sun is just a mess, and it sadly illustrates something like a swan song for the games I personally loved growing up. RPG developers were no longer allowed to keep it simple, as stuff like the Final Fantasy games had made us see the genre as one full of new ideas and progress, often failing to realize how to implement new ideas successfully while still maintaining the heart that made these games fun to begin with.

Golden Sun now serves as something of a history lesson. It’s proof that everything can look like it’s hitting the right marks, but the sum of the parts isn’t adding up due to one big flaw; a huge one in this case. As stories became richer and more important to games than ever before, so too did editing. Slowly but surely, games have gotten better about it.

4.5