Golden Sun: Dark Dawn

Rating: E10+

Score: 9.0/10

When the Game Boy Advance came out in 2001, it was a powerhouse for your pocket. Great series started on it too. Among those are two Turn-Based RPGs (Role-playing games) of note that made the Game Boy Advance a huge hit for fans; they are Fire Emblem (marking its first North American release) and Golden Sun. Golden Sun took some new aspects from its world and mixed it in classic RPG formula for a great combo. Two games later, Golden Sun makes its appearance on the Nintendo DS in Golden Sun: Dark Dawn. Does it shine as bright as the sun?

The story stars the children of the Warrior of Vale, in other words the children of the warriors in the last game. Thirty years after the event that was the Golden Sun (the event in which alchemy was restored in the world), all is well. However, Tyrell tries to fly an aircraft too advanced for him and he crashes, and a special feather is needed to repair the unit. The children set off to find the feather, unaware of the difficulties awaiting them.

I would say the story is more accessible to newcomers of the series because of an added mid-cutscene encyclopaedia to learn about people, places, and things you need to know. What starts as a cool way to keep track of jargon soon becomes the story's easy way out of directly explaining anything. Despite this cut in information, the story keeps getting more packed with redundant dialogue and long conversations with little to no bearing to the story as you go, and it can be painful to sit through. It's like if Bruce Willis was fighting and every twenty or so minutes he'd stop and have a long, lengthy, wordy conversation with his partner before continuing. It breaks flow.

Even the story can't scratch the grandness of the combat system. You fight in a party of four versus up to five enemies. You can use Psyenergy (the game's equivalent of magic) to summon magical forces and attacks that increase in scale as levels do, or make use of the Djinn system (or also just simple attack if you're boring or out of Psyenergy).

The Djinn system is quite complex, so bear with me. Djinns are small animal-like creatures that can be caught and used in battle like a spell. Simply holding them increases and decreases stats in different ways, and holding any combination can change that character's class altogether, gaining different strengths and weakness with each class. Each Djinn is associated with an alchemy type: Fire, Water, Wind, and Earth (named Mars, Neptune, Mercury, and Venus respectively). While having all one type of Djinn on a character is the simplest approach, having combinations of each adds variety of Psyenergy attacks to use and sometimes adds better strengths than a more simple arrangement can give. For example, having straight Mars (Fire) Djinns on a Mars-oriented adept can make that adept very powerful with plenty of attack and defense, but unbelievably low agility (accounts for speed). If that same adept is given a lot more Venus (Earth) Djinns, he/she switches to a completely different class tree, and has a lot more agility and attack than before (with a small drawback in luck, the most unreliable stat). He'll/she'll also gain Venus psyenergy attacks, which is great for diversity. Then why keep anyone in "simple arrangements" (also called mono-elemental)? Summoning gets tricky, that's why.

Djinns can be set on the character or set into stand-by mode. When set on the character, you gain the stat increase and added psyenergy that Djinn give. You lose those when the same Djinn goes into stand-by, but you can then use him as a summoning tool for a devastating attack, and you're Djinn will be reset afterwards onto your character after a few turns (and when set after summoning like that, you gain a psyenergy increase for that Djinn's respective psyenergy). Setting all your Djinns on stand-by is a good idea to prepare for big bosses, but characters will lose their classes and stat increases, which gets more dangerous as you complicate your Djinn arrangement. Having the perfect number of set Djinns and Djinns on stand-by, along with a plan of attack before a battle, is the key that can make or break big bosses battles. It's tactical planning at its cleverest.

You find Djinns around the world, some hiding and some just out in the open. The more you have, the better off you are (but they're far from mandatory). It gives an extra edge to exploring the game's massive world.

While the puzzles aren't terribly hard, and the story is lacking, the game handles it's whole combat aspect so well you can forget about the negatives. The tactical system of the Djinns in and out of battles along with the already large scale of the battles offers an experience like no other. It certainly outdid Fire Emblem's arrival to the Nintendo DS (although that wouldn't have been hard). This Dark Dawn is much brighter than it appears.