Post B5rrG4FsXuLaBSHs7U by ChristiJunior@detroitriotcity.com
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 (DIR) Post #B5rqbXLfTMnUXgfVke by ChristiJunior@detroitriotcity.com
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       Golden Sun: The Lost Age Writeup1/3Unlike with the first Golden Sun I don’t have all that many childhood memories of its sequel, due to never having actually finished it. Hell, even when revisiting it on the Wii U I don’t believe I got far past the 10-hour mark, falling far short of even my original GBA playthrough. That said, there were various moments from the game that stuck in my mind: exploring the inside of giant statue that turns out to be a mechanical dungeon; fixing up a Lemurian ship and sailing the ocean for the first time; an unpleasant meeting with Menardi’s sister; saving a maiden that was about to be sacrificed to a giant Serpent; finally reaching Lemuria (that one required a Guide…) and above all: the absolutely epic Air's Rock dungeon, which by the end had me questioning whether I’d actually beaten it because there wasn’t any boss to fight.Oh, and there was this other thing about Golden Sun: The Lost Age that I vividly remembered, which was that despite never beating it I easily considered it to be superior to the first game!Now that might sound strange, me preferring the game I’d never actually gotten around to finishing over the childhood favorite I’d done multiple playthroughs of, including one where I grinded all the way to level 54 and obtaining the Kikuichimonji sword (by far Ivan’s most powerful weapon and an EXTREMELY rare reward for defeating the Fenrir enemy). What was the deal here, had I just been taken in by the shiny new sequel and convinced myself that it was an upgrade because Bigger equals Better, ignoring glaring pacing issues? You could call it the Turok 2 > Turok 1 Theorem.Anyway, after recently tackling TLA for the third time, this time on the Switch 2, and FINALLY completing the game, everything has become a lot clearer to me. Suffice to say, I can’t really blame the game itself for my inability to finish it on the GBA – but more on that later.Golden Sun: The Lost Age is not so much a sequel to Golden Sun as it is the second half of a story that was still woefully incomplete by the time the first game’s credits started rolling. In terms of chronology TLA starts exactly where the previous game left off (barring a very short prologue segment just before the Venus Lighthouse is lit), but it brings with it not just a change in perspective, but a change in your entire mission: while the goal of Team Isaac was to prevent the 4 elemental lighthouses from being lit, the goal of TLA’s Team Felix (consisting of Felix, Jenna and Sheba, all established in the first game, later joined by Piers the Lemurian) is to light them. On paper this is quite the tantalizing premise, but the game ultimately proves disappointingly unwilling to actually milk it for much drama or conflict at all (so no, you never actually get to fight Team Isaac).Indeed, the early stretch of TLA feels surprisingly disconnected from the climax of the first game, as your overarching goal for quite a few hours is simply to procure a boat (quite ironic, given how the first game ended with Team Isaac setting off on their newly acquired Lemurian ship). The story loses almost all momentum, becoming quite sparse and episodic, as well as largely disconnected from the events of the first game aside from a handful of references here and there. Worst of all, despite being an actual, legitimate character in the first game, becoming a Golden Sun Protagonist has magically rendered Felix a mindless Mute.All of this sounds quite negative, and I certainly do consider these points legitimate criticisms and shortcomings – but ultimately it matters a lot less than you’d think, because as you might recall, the story and writing of the first Golden Sun was actually by far the least impressive aspect of that game. That being the case, TLA doesn’t really lose all that much from essentially doing its own thing, letting you familiarize yourself with your new party and leaving you free to explore this brand new continent for dozens of hours, especially since it eventually DOES shift the focus back to the bigger, overarching story.Moreover, the world you get to explore in TLA is far grander than the one in the first Golden Sun, with far more stuff to see and do. In so many ways TLA truly is the ideal Bigger and Better sequel: whereas the first game took something like 20 hours to beat, this one is closer to 35-40 hours – and that’s not due to padding, but a result on TLA meaningfully expanding on the first game in so many different ways.Not only are there tons of new Psynergy powers to play around with, but certain old ones (most notably Whirlwind) see fresh new uses as well. Moreover, all these new powers open the door to countless new puzzles, which is also reflected in the dramatically increased number of dungeons to tackle. And we’re talking legitimately big, ingenious and meticulously designed dungeons here, which both in terms of quantity AND quality can rival the dungeon selection of most Zelda games (and in case it wasn’t obvious, this also means that TLA straight up mogs BotW and TotK in terms of dungeons).In the case of one particular category of dungeons, the elemental “Rocks”, just getting to the dungeon in the first place can be quite an adventure, somewhat reminiscent of certain Skyward Sword pre-dungeon stretches of gameplay, which boast plenty of unique and creative puzzles while at the same time giving you a taste of the kind of challenges the actual dungeon will confront you with. The one bad and baffling thing about these dungeons is that while they end up gifting you story-critical rewards, they usually don’t include any actual Boss battle, which is just…why? Surely crafting these massive and complex dungeons takes incomparably more time and effort than creating basic JRPG bosses, even if you give each one a couple of unique attacks? Hell, just conceptually it took me a few seconds to come up with bosses for each of the elemental Rock dungeons:Air's Rock: Cloud Monster (think Huff N. Puff from Paper Mario)Aqua Rock: Giant Sea Serpent (inspired by the Midgard Serpent)Gaia Rock: This one actually HAS a proper boss, lolMagma Rock: Phoenix (self-explanatory, but would obviously involve a mid-fight fakeout death)At the end of the day these are still great dungeons, but them missing that cherry on top is somewhat frustrating. However, don’t get me wrong: in terms of dungeons and puzzles The Lost Age overall completely outclasses the already excellent Golden Sun 1.
       
 (DIR) Post #B5rrG4FsXuLaBSHs7U by ChristiJunior@detroitriotcity.com
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       2/3In fact, that is something of a recurring theme with this game: in various ways it cleverly builds on the stellar foundation laid down by Golden Sun 1; not only do you get all the Summons from the first game, but now you can unlock a variety of brand new Summons that actually combine Djinns of different elements. Likewise, in addition to all your old classes there are now a number of brand new unique classes that can be instantly accessed through special items – and the first such new class even gives you the Psynergy power Avoid, an AWESOME new QoL feature that renders the Sacred Feather item obsolete, due to letting you quickly and conveniently avoid random battles (as long as you’re not underleveled). This is such a gamechanger, especially when tackling the dungeons, and it’s worth noting that it took Pokemon an additional 10 years before making Repels as convenient as avoiding random battles becomes in TLA.And of course, due to this being a much bigger and more ambitious game, there’s also far more towns to visit and a far greater level of environmental variety. Likewise, the most powerful new Summons visually outdo even the most impressive Golden Sun 1 Summons, and the final boss’s ultimate move likewise surpasses anything seen in the first game. So while the game essentially boasts the same graphics as its predecessor (which were of course superb by GBA standards), it still ends up being the more visually interesting and impressive game.Maybe even more important however is the fact that this wealth of new locations sets the stage for SO many great new songs – and boy, if you thought that Golden Sun 1 boasted the best GBA music in existence you’ve been missing out, because HOLY SHIT is TLA’s soundtrack absolutely God-Tier…except for the Jupiter Lighthouse theme. Seriously, what even happened here – did they forget to replace the placeholder music with the actual song or something? I’m surely being overly harsh here, but after that outstanding Venus Lighthouse theme, I expected waaaay better. Apart from that lone dud though, this might just be an all-time Top 10 soundtrack right here – it CERTAINLY was at the time the game first came out.In the face of all these formidable strengths I kinda expected there to be some glaring flaw, most likely related to pacing, that kept me from ever finishing TLA, but…actually, no. Sure, when you finally get your boat the game greatly opens up, with the story remaining quite minimalist by JRPG standards (your mission is at one point literally summed up as going around and learning new Psynergy powers), but there actually ended up being far less aimless wandering/sailing than I had feared. The game’s world is big, but not overwhelmingly so, and the places you’ll eventually need to backtrack to with you newly acquired powers are pretty obvious if you haven’t been taking long breaks from your adventure. I really can’t explain why I dropped the game so quickly on the Wii U…While open, this stretch of the game was still far from aimless, and indeed, the lack of overt handholding actually felt quite refreshing in Current Year. And again, this was around when I stopped playing the Wii U version of TLA, so all I had to go on was memories from more than 20 years ago, and yet I never felt all that lost. The main criticism I have of the game’s world map is that some of the later continents ARE relatively empty, but otherwise there really wasn’t much to object to here, and by JRPG standards at least the game was decently respectful of my time, despite being so much bigger than Golden Sun 1.And eventually The Lost Age DOES become a more story-driven experience: the stakes are raised, events from the first game get recontextualized, and you actually see various Golden Sun 1 plot points be paid off, like the importance of the Shaman Rod that Ivan was protecting, the relationship between Master Hama and Ivan, Ivan’s true origins….wait a minute, why are all these payoffs focused on Ivan exactly? I mean, I’m not complaining, he was actually my favorite party member in Golden Sun 1, I just find it interesting that Camelot seemed to give him such special treatment.Of course, the defining turning point of this game (and arguably, the entire Golden Sun series) is the moment when Team Felix and Team Isaac finally meet, reconcile and are united into one party. It’s such a grand, satisfying event (and Isaac can actually speak now, woohoo!), what both games were building towards all this time….and it’s also the moment when I stopped playing The Lost Age back on the GBA.Yeah, that probably sounds confusing, but it’s actually connected to perhaps the coolest individual feature of The Lost Age, namely the ability to transfer your actual Golden Sun 1 party over to The Lost Age. Ideally, you’d be able to do this with a link cable, but that requires you owning multiple GBAs, so most people probably used the Password system – and if you want to transfer ALL your Golden Sun 1 data (levels, Djinns, stats, items, the whole shebang), you’re gonna need to be type in this absolute MONSTROSITY of a password. Well, at the start of The Lost Age I did precisely that…and it did not work. Why didn’t it work? I’m still not 100% sure, but at the time I was convinced the reason was that while my copy of Golden Sun 1 was European, my TLA copy was American – the reason being that some relatives had been traveling to the US shortly after the game came out, and since this was when Nintendo used to treat Europeans like absolute niggers, I had asked them to buy a US copy of TLA since the GBA was region free. It seemed like a good idea at the time – little did I realize that getting TLA a few months early would actually result in me completing the game 22 years late. Now, keep in mind, I’m not absolutely SURE that the regional difference was the problem (even the Golden Sun wiki describes the password as obscenely long after all, so it’s very easy to believe I typed something wrong somewhere along the way), but at the time I was certainly convinced that I’d screwed myself over. What I SHOULD have done was of course try out the most basic password first, to verify whether the transfer even worked across different regional copies, but I didn’t think of it at the time.Even after having failed the data transfer, I convinced myself that this wasn’t actually such a big deal, that I could play through The Lost Age, eventually unite with a generic Team Isaac and still enjoy the game to the fullest…but once that moment actually came, it just felt so diminished by the fact that this wasn’t actually *my* characters I was reuniting with that it legitimately killed my motivation to play any further. Hell, I had actually completely forgotten that I ever met up with Team Isaac in the first place! When I recently dug out my copy of TLA and put it into my launch day DS (the only GBA game compatible system I own that still works btw) I was 1) surprised that the save data was still there and 2) shocked by just how far I’d gotten through the game. I really didn’t have any memories of anything past Lemuria. So yeah, that explains why I’ve been so convinced that TLA was better than Golden Sun 1 for all these years: I actually DID progress far enough into the sequel (30 hours actually) that I had ample justification for that judgement.By the way, my failure to ever complete Golden Sun: The Lost Age was the reason I never bought Golden Sun: Dark Dawn for the DS, rather than the lukewarm reception the game received. I didn’t know whether DD was a direct sequel or not (since I never actually saw how TLA ended), but my mindset was that didn’t want to continue with the Golden Sun series until I had gotten past the point in TLA where I had been stuck for so many years.
       
 (DIR) Post #B5rrVP2zWW6d0sZVZ2 by ChristiJunior@detroitriotcity.com
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       3/3Over the course of this latest playthrough of mine I FINALLY managed to right this wrong, arguably my single greatest Gaming Shame. And I gotta say, getting to play The Lost Age with my Golden Sun 1 party, with all the stats, Djinns and items that were the product of MY latest playthrough, truly did feel incredibly satisfying – the Cool Factor of the party transfer feature is honestly off the charts, and more than anything contributes to Golden Sun and The Lost Age ultimately feeling like one big game. And of course, going from 4 to 8 party characters is just a massive improvement in terms of party customization, even if Isaac and Felix as well as Ivan and Sheba are pretty interchangeable in terms of their default role in the party.BTW, I actually had the foresight to copy my save file ahead of reuniting with Team Isaac, and so I’ve also managed to transfer over my ancient GBA save data of that grinded up level 54 team I talked about earlier. I deadass thought I’d long since missed my opportunity to ever move those guys over to TLA, and so there’s something genuinely cathartic about seeing these overleveled beasts laying waste to TLA’s monsters – though I’m also glad I didn’t actually use them to beat the game, because obviously having half of your party be THAT overpowered just trivializes the entire game.Unfortunately there isn’t actually that much story content left after the parties are united, just 2 big plot-relevant dungeons really. That said, the story definitely takes some interesting turns towards the end, with even some of the more disappointing elements (like the villains essentially just being Saturos and Menardi 2.0, and even the final boss looking very similar to the first game’s final boss) turning out to have been misdirections of sort. A character only briefly featured early in the first game, whose lore implications always far outweighed his screen time (and honestly, if I hadn’t played through Golden Sun 1 again just before tackling TLA, I probably wouldn’t even have remembered him) ends up returning in a big way, and in terms of both excitement and drama the climax of TLA easily surpasses that of its predecessor.And so I finally finished Golden Sun: The Lost Age and got to see how the story of these two amazing games actually ended. While I had the final boss was Spoiled way back in 2002 by niggerfaggot gaming sites, I had fortunately managed to keep clear of all other information about the ending, and on the whole, I found it both satisfying and uplifting. Sure, the story has plenty of shortcomings and missed potential, and not just the ones I mentioned earlier in this writeup. For example, when it comes to two of the first game’s more mysterious, morally ambiguous characters, one ends up dying offscreen, while the other gets clowned on during the ending. Parts of TLA’s writing also has an oddly childish and conflict-averse tone to it, while at other times the conflict seems quite forced. We also never get any notable reveals about Sheba’s mysterious past, which the game even acknowledges towards the end. That said, by virtue of actually COMPLETING its story (while still leaving the door open to plenty of future adventures in the world of Weyard) is a mostly-satisfying way, as well as successfully raising both the dramatic and emotional stakes, I’d still take TLA over Golden Sun 1 in terms of story – though again, ultimately they both part of a bigger whole.One aspect where TLA is clearly worse than the first game however is culture war issues. While Golden Sun 1 was blessedly free of progressive politics and fashionable modern messages, TLA features an unsympathetic Senator literally called "Conservato” – no points for guessing his ideological bent! Obviously the characters embracing Change are portrayed as being in the right, while Conservato is wrong, with no character you’re meant to actually like ever expressing support for Conservato’s viewpoints. Moreover, there’s also a slight bit of Feminist messaging when Sheba is confronted by the sexism of an isolationist tribal leader, though when he’s later on proved wrong nobody actually rubs it in his face (I called the messaging “slight” for a reason). There’s also a lot more racial diversity in this game, though that’s very much justifiable given the far greater geographical scope, and all the party characters remain light-skinned.While unwelcome intrusions, these bits of left-liberal politics ultimately constitute little more than isolated incidents that never become major story themes – and keep in mind, this game is actually quite light on story compared to most JRPGs to begin with. For that reason I think a Based Morality rating of -1 is most appropriate, which means that the negative elements are real, but not really a big deal.…there’s also some funny NPC dialogue with reference to Flat Eartherism (the context here being that Golden Sun’s word actually IS flat!), which doesn’t actually count as a political statement in any one direction, it’s just a fun bit of text that I wanted to draw attention to, lol.Despite some flaws, Golden Sun: The Lost Age is an overall outstanding game that EASILY surpasses its predecessor. It’s very much a “Bigger, Better, More!” type of sequel, but one that doesn’t merely retread old ground, instead setting off in a bold new direction before eventually fulfilling its promise of satisfyingly concluding the tale of not just 1, but 2 teams of heroes. The real question is, is Golden Sun: The Lost Age the best original GBA game, period? Sure, the GBA did boast plenty of good games, including the likes of Mario & Luigi, Metroid Fusion, Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, Pokemon Emerald, its Fire Emblem entries, Wario Land 4…but personally, I don’t really feel that any of those are in TLA’s league. There is really only one game I feel actually compares, and that’s Zelda: The Minish Cap – and honestly, it’s been so long since I played that game that I really can’t decide at this point. For now at least I’d let TLA and Minish Cap share the #1 spot – and honestly, considering how I didn’t even come close to hundred percenting TLA yet (there’s at least one Summon I know I missed), it’s gonna be REAL tough for Zelda to claim that throne all for itself.
       
 (DIR) Post #B5zZTA5bvAYC8JG3Lk by MiaElk@poa.st
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       Idk if i would put minish cap on the number one slot, i was somewhat turned off by it new hit or miss visuals along with the shrinking mechanic. I, personally, was far more enchanted by FE Sacred Stones with its dramatic story and fantastic soundtrack/presentation.This was a good review and read. How is Golden Sun TLA's side content? I did enjoy 1's arena along with the changing character dialogue in it. Also, was there some good post game content in TLA? You said level 54 was a bit overpowered... surely the game about the second half of Golden Sun 1 had atleast 1 ultimate dungeon or some kind of super boss?These are some classics i need to visit and revisit regardless.
       
 (DIR) Post #B5zaCX6FDTUcWsBmNc by ChristiJunior@detroitriotcity.com
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       @MiaElk There was one optional late dungeon with a pretty powerful boss at the end, but it was still weaker than the final boss. There's plenty of other optional dungeons tho, and more Djinns to collect that in the first game.Moreover, there's definitely some stuff I missed (I didn't look up guides or anything that), and knowing that there was at least one Summon that I missed there's still the possibility that I failed to locate a Crossbone Isle-style dungeon.BTW, in terms of levels: my main TLA party was around level 34 with it joined up with Team Isaac, which was just at level 29 by the end of my latest playthrough (which was already enough to pretty easily beat the final boss in that game).Level 54 in Golden Sun 1 is crazy overkill, I believe I grinded up to that point simply to unlock all the Psynergy spells that are available.
       
 (DIR) Post #B6ALU36W7I1m8dlnma by Grimwing@eveningzoo.club
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       @ChristiJunior your write up inspired me to start up a new file and play through them both again. Great series (we don't talk about Dark Dawn). Though I wish the characters would shut up sonetimes.One note about the inclusion of different races in the games. I think it's actually based, because the races are absolute stereotypes. I just got to Xian in the first game, and they are a bunch of yellows talking in broken English and practicing kung fu. I seem to remember the Indian village in two being all dressed in feathers and wigwaming, and the nigger village practicing voodoo and being too rock stupid to realized their god was a clockwork statue.Good write up. 👍