The Sun Shines On Golden Sun: The Lost Age

Author's Rating:

Pros: Gorgeous graphics, magical music, great gameplay, mind-numbing puzzles, fun as hell

Cons: Transferring data from previous game, NPC don’t tell you where to go

The Bottom Line: 
You Wanna Use Up Some Batteries, Be Addicted To A Small Screen, and Have Some Of The Most Fun You'll Ever Have?

Author's Review
There are very few games that are legendary; that make it into the “Classic” status. I might say in one of my game reviews that a game is “awesome” or “spectacular”, but that game just might be fun to play, not legendary. Few games come around where you can just sit back and say, “Holy crap! That was a good game.” I haven’t played a finer game than Golden Sun: The Lost Age since Final Fantasy VII. Would I call this game a “Classic”? Uh huh. Would I go far enough to say that it surpasses all of the other games released last year? You bet. Could I call it the best game you can own for Gameboy Advance? Yes, sir.

The original Golden Sun was a game released a little after the launch of Nintendo’s epic GBA and while not a lot of people I knew tried it, the people that did loved the hell out of it claiming it to be the best RPG since Final Fantasy III. That’s when I knew I had to get my hands on the hand-held system. So I bought it for my birthday (along with some other titles) and played it…and played it…and kept playing it…until finally I stopped. I realized that I was just skimming through it. Well, three months ago I picked it up and started over from the beginning trying to make my way through it with all of the bonus items. I did. And that’s when my interest in the sequel, The Lost Age, began.

Golden Sun 2: The Lost Age was released last summer I believe it was to stellar reviews and excited gamers across the world. I didn’t buy it then because I hadn’t finished the first one yet. I’m not joking with you guys: as soon as I beat the original two months ago, I went directly to EB Games and bought the second one.

What might screw up a lot of people when they buy The Lost Age is that you have to enter a password at the start. This password is in the clear data that you might have had if you took the time to beat the original. If you entered your password then you could transfer all of your data to the second game. Well, I looked at my clear data and it just looked confusing and since I didn’t have a link cable, I took the easy way out and punched in another person’s password off of the internet. This might screw people up since it takes five pages of typing in symbols and letters on your GBA and it’s very time consuming. Well, what do we get afterwards? At the final point of the game you get to use that data with your old characters!

Golden Sun 2 starts off exactly where the first game left off. Felix and Sheba fall over the side of the Mercury Lighthouse and into the ocean later landing on an island that Kraden, an elder from the first game, Jenna, a Fire Adept, and Alex, a bad guy, inhabit. So there they are floating on the island when they finally land on the mainland, but it’s an unfamiliar land. Now, it’s Felix, Sheba, and Jenna’s job to hunt down the Mars Star for the legendary lighthouse that they have to light along with the Water Adept, Piers, that they meet along the way.

You’re lost, huh? Here’s some background info: in Golden Sun you started as different character given a tough mission to stop some evil doers from lighting the four elemental lighthouses of the world to unleash a major alchemy that might destroy the world (or help it). Setting off on their adventure to stop the people from lighting the houses, two of them get lit when some major events happen leading to what happens in The Lost Age.

Still lost?

It’s hard to give a story synopsis for the Golden Sun games because there’s so much going on, but just bear with me and carefully read the short paragraph(s). You have to play the games to understand. Actually, check out Rock_On’s (Jeremy’s) review of The Lost Age since he gives a great summary of the game.

Now, the story does sound vaguely familiar, but that doesn’t at all make it bad. The story is quite simple, but it’s intelligent either way. It’s another one of those “epic” RPGs. I happened to like the stories in the games because they were put in wickedly and nice. I mean, it won’t be hard to involve yourself with the story for 30 hours or more because it’s a great story.

As for the characters, you have a Jupiter Adept (Wind) named Sheba, who’s one of the supporting backbones of the group and is quite good in battle unlike her counterpart in the original game, Ivan. You also have Felix, who’s the Venus Adept (Earth) and he has a long history with the good guy group of the previous game. He’s the main character and in the last game he talked a lot, but in this game he mutters only a single groan. As for the Mercury Adept (Water…that makes sense), you have one of the coolest characters of the entire game: Piers. You meet this guy who’s imprisoned a quarter ways through the game and he proves to be one of the most powerful. Lastly, you have Jenna the Mars Adept (Fire) who is the sister of Garet from the original and surprisingly, she’s the healer of the crew instead of the lead attacker (at least that’s what I used her for).

Each of the characters has their own magical abilities through a magic called Psynergy (Sin-Ergy), which can be used on the battlefront but also while traveling and in dungeons. Like Mana in other RPGs, you have Psynergy Points, which can go away fast if you use too much magic. You have types of abilities for each character like Move, Hover, Blaze, or even Sand. For each of these feats you can achieve special tasks. For instance, if there’s a statue on the other side of a large rock, you can use the Move ability which will create a hand that will move the statue anywhere you please (within a certain distance). Battling and using this magic proves a staggering task since some abilities can really suck up your magic power. Now, as you can imagine, using abilities in dungeons with millions of puzzles does some awesome, right? Try it! The dungeons can get frustrating if you don’t know your magic.

As for dungeons and puzzles, let’s just say this is almost like a turn-based Zelda game. The puzzles are done so well and are so fresh each time that you find a new one that you will be amazed. Going into this game, I thought that the developers could never top some of the mind bending puzzles in Golden Sun, but they did and they created a game that’s even harder. The puzzles can get you lost and I have to admit that I needed to look at a walkthrough to one of the specific dungeons (the last one in the game was hard). If you like to use your mind to play a game or just to challenge yourself, then you should already own The Lost Age.

The gameplay in this game are basically the same as the original’s. You travel to towns and do side quests to get items and you can buy armor and weapons to help on your adventure. Something new gameplay wise is the ability to find forgeable items that you can take to a certain place to forge into powerful weapons and armor. And one of the coolest things about that is that there is a lot of forgeable material to find from Golem Cores to Dark Matter. Another friggin’ cool new aspect of the game is that you can find caves where you discover new summons. When summoning in battle, you can use two different elemental energies at the same time. Isn’t that amazing? It is.

As for summoning, the way you do it is to find Djinns. Djinns are little hard to find elemental creatures scattered all across the globe, which you are required to find in order to become powerful and have all of the Psynergy and major stats. In fact, it’s impossible to beat the game without them. While leveling up from battles you can earn stats, but these certain Earth, Wind, etc, Djinns boost your stats and abilities when they are equipped. For example, if you fuse a Mercury (water) Djinn with Felix (an Earth Adept) then he will probably lose hit points and evasiveness or more things. But if you equip the Mercury Djinn to Piers (the Water Adept), then he will gain a new Psynergy, he will be more evasive, and he will earn more hit points. Using the Djinn to take advantage of all of the skills is a fun and simple task. Djinn can either be found while traveling around on the world map or they can be found through solving puzzles in dungeons. And what sucks is that they either go with you willingly or they fight you. And they can sometimes run away from battle making it so that you can’t catch them again.

Which leads to this GBA game’s save function. Gameboy games are meant to be played on the go and that’s what I use it for normally. When games are really difficult to save to (for example, the Final Fantasy and Resident Evil games), then it makes saving really inconvenient. With Golden Sun and The Lost Age, you have a saving system that is awesome. You press start, you save over your slot and you’re done. It takes two seconds—really. That’s super convenient for gaming on the go and one of the reasons why I love this game. As for length, this game took me thirty plus hours to complete and I discovered all of the Djinn and a majority of the items, so it’s much shorter than the original (by about ten or fifteen hours), but if you buy it used like I did then you can get thirty (or more) hours for twenty one dollars. That’s a good price. Unanimous?

There are so many good qualities about this title that I don’t know where to start. How about the graphics? The graphics are so good in The Lost Age that it makes some PS2 games look shoddy—that’s how good they are. During battle, the camera sometimes makes 360 turns, which is incredible to see on a screen so small. Plus, the particle effects that are added into the game are some of the best I’ve seen this side of Legend Of Zelda: The Wind Waker for Gamecube. The character animations are surprisingly detailed from facial expressions all the way to the way that they slouch or walk upright. The capabilities of the graphics are staggering. Golden Sun 2 really chugged the hand-held system. As for the locations, you have a ton of different locales from islands, snowy places, rainforests, deserts, and places where it’s raining and snowing (which is also incredibly detailed. The graphics really do no wrong and because they are so good, they make the game actually believable.

As for the sound, I haven’t heard such a good soundtrack since Final Fantasy IX—and this is a hand-held system for crying out loud! Coming through the little speakers are sound waves and music so crisp that it makes you amazed. You can hear each individual instrument from thundering drums to twangy stringed instruments. The music that is showcased in The Lost Age is really exotic and it captivates you and holds your attention throughout your whole gaming experience. It never gets annoying at all especially when you’re in a frustrating dungeon! That’s a first, yah? There are some returning tunes from the original game like the main theme and some individually placed themes for each character, but aside from that, everything is new and more spectacular. There are basses playing and guitars and more out of the ordinary instruments that I’m not at all familiar with. This soundtrack should earn a goddamn Grammy for being so good. No joke.

The only real disappointing aspects of the game for me was that the non-playable characters (i.e. people who are in a town that talk to you or your acquaintances throughout the game) never really tell you where to go. They never told you where a secret thing was or what else you needed to do before you advanced further in. They never even told you where to go from time to time, which led me wander around the game searching for towns until I finally got the nerve to print out a map and walkthrough. Secondly, the final boss battle pits you up against a three-headed dragon that almost looks exactly like the dragon that you defeat in the first game. And it wasn’t even that difficult to beat! The first game’s finale was friggin’ hard, but I breezed through the ending on the first try. You know why? You play against the dragon and then when you die, the old crew from the original game comes in and you play with them against the dragon. It makes it way to easy even for my standards. But the game itself is hard, so don’t think that this game is a “breeze” since The Lost Age has many hard parts to it (sort of like guys…ooh, that was wrong).

I’m happy. You know why? While playing Golden Sun 2: The Lost Age I had rechargeable batteries. I recharged my batteries a couple of times while playing and let them charge before taking them out of the charger to resume playing. If I didn’t have rechargeable batteries then I would have wasted a lot of money on batteries. I played the crap out of this game. The Lost Age was one of the few hand-helds, which I truly could not put down. Sure, the original was addictive as was Castlevania: Circle Of The Moon and Breath Of Fire II, but The Lost Age had me reeling back to it after being away from it for a school day. I loved every second of my playing time and I think that if you have GBA and you like good turn based role playing games that are in the vein of the Final Fantasy franchise, then you should immediately buy Golden Sun The Lost Age. I was bummed after beating it though because the ending wasn’t left open for a sequel meaning that there might not be another Golden Sun game, which leaves me totally depressed. I wish Nintendo brought it over to GC, because can you even imagine how cool a full 3D game would be? Anyways, I had a good time playing and hopefully you will give this game a try. Oh, yeah, and before I leave: Can someone do charity for me? Give me a GB SP! I want one so bad………….

© Jason Haskins, 2004

“JiggyJay”