Golden Sun

Golden Sun

Developer Camelot Software Planning Publisher Nintendo Published 2001-08-01 Platforms Game Boy Advance Genres Role-playing game Themes Adventure, Fantasy Series Golden Sun Distribution Commercial

Golden Sun is an RPG developed by Camelot Software Planning and published by Nintendo for the Game Boy Advance on 2001-08-01.

Personal

Own?	Yes. Loose cartridge.
Won?	No.

I had heard good things about the game from several sources, so I tried it out in a GBA emulator. I probably put about 45 minutes into the game before getting completely bored of it and quitting.

Review

3	4	5	5	4

Best Version: Game Boy Advance

— This section contains spoilers! —

Good

• The background graphics and music are well made.

Bad

• The game has a very generic feel to it.
• Spell casting lacks strategy; all spells work well against all enemies. Ice spells are effective on an ice monster and earthquake is effective on flying monsters!
• The stairs in the main town blend in well with the background making them difficult to distinguish.
• Most things that you can search are empty, and the reward for finding something is very minimal.
• Combat requires you to space out your attacks in order to make them count like the original Final Fantasy. While this makes combat more strategic, it's a pain to have to bother with.
• I didn't care for the pre-rendered 3D sprites. They didn't fit in well with the hand-drawn backgrounds.
• I didn't care for how the people morphed out of shape to show emotion.
• When getting the element stones, Jenna suggests letting the boys do the task of collecting them, implying that she is just as feeble as the old man; then, she gets kidnapped. These are obnoxious anti-woman tropes.
• There are a lot of yes/no questions to add role-playing choices, but they seem to affect the outcome.
• The cut scenes are really slow and dull.

Ugly

• Searching uses the same button as the menu, which opens the menu every time there isn't something to examine. This makes you want to never search unless you're confident something is there, which makes you miss out on a lot of optional items.

Media

Documents

• 

  Manual - USA.

• 

  Prima Guide.

Videos

Longplay.

Play Online

Game Boy Advance (France), Game Boy Advance (Germany), Game Boy Advance (Italy), Game Boy Advance (Spain), Game Boy Advance (USA)

Representation

Strong female character?	Pass	Mia and party members Menardi and Jenna, Sheba, and Feizhi are also significant.
Bechdel test?	Unknown	I'm not sure if the women ever talk to each other.
Strong person of color character?	Fail	Although race isn't mentioned, and the game uses an anime style, nearly every character is drawn as though they're white.
Queer character?	Fail	There are no queer characters.

Links