what do you like about the world of GoldenSun?

[Thunder-squall]

Personally, none of the lore or mythology really hit me.  All the references seem more or less random, and don't form into anything greater than the sum of it's parts... Basically, GS is really glittery, but the depth of the world doesn't hit me in the way that other titles do.

So is it the game play?
The sentai character elements?
The collectible djinn?

Of is it actually the lore and mythology?  What am I missing?

[Daddy Poi's Oily Gorillas]

Probably the art and music?

[Misery]

No, I agree that Golden Sun doesn't bring much to the table in terms of lore or mythology. It does take some creative swings with some of the boss and summon designs though.

If the question is about the world itself, then... it's kind of hard to say. There are definitely places I don't care much for, but overall the aesthetics are very well done. The majority of the world is dull enough that the special places seem more special. I also like how the player's combat abilites are integrated into puzzles, and how the Lost Age had pretty long, mazelike dungeons. Actually, I think I have to say that the dungeons are what I like most about the world.

If this is about the actual game though, I think there's a lot more to like than the setting. Note that when I say "the game" I usually refer to the two GBA games, as I tend to pretend Dark Dawn doesn't exist.

[Thunder-squall]

Probably the art and music?

Is that specifically what you liked about it, personally, compared to other games?  I do believe it seemed to have rounder images, and brighter designs.  The pseudo3D of the battles also made it stand out.   I'd say the graphics are perhaps the most ambitious I had seen on the GBA outside of GunStar Heroes. But most fans don't stick with something because of the flashy graphics, I assume.  What made you stay with it?

In fact, I'll confess that while I started to play Golden Sun on the GBA (circa maybe 2005-6), I don't believe I played much past the first giant tree (isn't that like the first dungeon or something?), it seemed to light for me, and I passed it up for other RPG-ish games, like the two Summon Knight, Swordcraft story games, which I played through completion.  This was all via emulators, though, which makes games easier to pick up and put down (compared to if you bought a physical copy).  I hadn't played video games in a while, and so I was essentially going back to see what my nerd friends were talking about.  No joke:  My first RPG ever was via NES emulator, and it was Breath of Fire.  Played it through completion, and that basically began my quest to check out other games in that genre. Admittedly, this was sort of nerdish passion, rather than leisure, and so it's true I'm more of a general gamer than an RPG-fan.  And given that, I imagine there's stuff about Golden Sun that a straight-up RPG fan might like that I just didn't get.  Hence my questions on this forum.

Regardless, the difference between me and you guys is that you guys think Golden Sun is pretty special.  And I want to know what you see in it.  I'm really asking about your very own, very personal tastes.

No, I agree that Golden Sun doesn't bring much to the table in terms of lore or mythology. It does take some creative swings with some of the boss and summon designs though.

It's not an objective question.  It's a personal one.  Are the bosses and summons things you looked at and say "huh, neat"?  Which were your favorites?

... overall the aesthetics are very well done.
... the special places seem more special.
I also like how the player's combat abilites are integrated into puzzles, and how the Lost Age had pretty long, mazelike dungeons. Actually, I think I have to say that the dungeons are what I like most about the world.
BUT
I tend to pretend Dark Dawn doesn't exist.

(obviously the quote is edited a bit)

So, I don't quite understand why you don't like Dark Dawn, when Dark Dawn seems to kick the first three things you mentioned into overdrive?  There's some great cinematic stuff, and the burning pirate village, with the grandma?  That definitely had a sense of character to it.  And I tend to compare the out-of-battle game play much to the Legend of Zelda (DS) series, at least as far as the puzzles go.  While the world and lore didn't impress me much (the same way the original Golden Sun didn't), the production value seemed top notch (the same way the original Golden Sun did).

Disclaimer:  Late in the Summer, I picked up Dark Dawn for the DS (lite) and played through the main quest.  It's the only Golden Sun game I played through to completion, but that's probably due to the fact that I had a physical copy of it, and I haven't emulated anything in a few years.  That game's also what reminded me of the Golden Sun series (after all these years), and what eventually led me to be curious about your fandom.

[Daddy Poi's Oily Gorillas]

Yes, it is what I like, but other games can be pretty neat too, it just depends on which ones you're talking about.

As for why I'm here in the GS Community... that is a good question... Perhaps the editor looked cool? I forget what I was doing then. I can say that I played GS1 first on handheld, and later, GS2 on emulator.

By the way, I mostly left Golden Sun Dark Dawn alone (Mostly because of no good enough emulators, but I did try it some at one point. Mostly the Japanese game before the US one came out.), but from how things sound, people might not like it because the battle mechanics aren't balanced. (I've heard on this forum that they made it too easy... Maybe that's the result of Camelot listening to its fan suggestions, though.)

[Kioll]

The series hit me for flavor and world, and for the sheer potential held in that world.  While it's true that Golden Sun is... hm... shallow?  Well, anyways, for everything we don't know, there's something more interesting (in my opinion) that we DO know.  And there's so much potential in Weyard (as a world for things to be set in) that it drew me in.  Add to it that Golden Sun has my three favorite things in a video game: 1. In-depth character customization (insofar as the classes and psynergy and how you progress, in this case), role-playing potential, and actually challenges the mind (It's a Puzzle RPG, which is my favorite part).

As for why people didn't like Dark Dawn...  It's made of fanservice held together with spit, chickenwire, and duct tape.  As a standalone game, it would've been a fine start to a series or a good standalone game.  But riding on the high expectations of Golden Sun fans everywhere, (and I mean high as in impossibly so), most fans are more let-down by the game than anything, pissed off because they were let down, and don't give the game a fair chance.  As a game, I can name a few things wrong with it individually, but the game as a whole was decent.

Individually...  Many fans wanted a fix for the speed of the games (felt they were too slow), but Camelot over-fixed it.  Himi is walking fanservice (which is fine, I could care less if not for the fact that you get Himi way too late in the game, and she gets a Venus-aligned Reveal power, when foresight/truesight is supposed to belong to Jupiter), and Karis is way too angry.  Sveta is also walking fanservice (which is also fine), and you get Amiti too early in the game (Making Rief almost useless)...  All in all, the biggest issue in it is that it should have been much better balanced considering the 3 years of development we waited through to get it.

[Thunder-squall]

Dark Dawn's pretty easy.  I guess easy enough that you didn't *need* to use all that customization potential Golden Sun gave you, and so the game sort of devalued one of the best things about Golden Sun.

And it's true that when I first played Golden Sun on the GBA (emulator), the customization in Golden Sun probably was over my head, so I wasn't able to appreciate it.  And in Dark Sun I didn't need to use it, so I probably didn't fully appreciate it there either.

But I stopped played Dark Sun after I beat the main campaign, and I know there are a bunch of challenge dungeons still out there for me to find.  Did those not provide you the challenge you wanted?

---
@ the reference to "depth":  So I guess you're into the roleplay thing, which seems to be pretty sophisticated across the various Golden Sun groups.  What makes Golden Sun roleplaying cooler than, say, Avatar the last Air Bender roleplaying?

[Kioll]

First off, the challenge dungeons are too easy by the time they're available.  Once you beat the final boss, not much compares...  Secondly, I feel sorry for you that the customization of the game went unappreciated.  Go read up on the classes of Golden Sun.

[Thunder-squall]

lol, because the best way to appreciate a game is to read about it.  But sure, I'll take some reading recommendations if you'll link to them.

[Wolf]

 Golden Sun: Dark Dawn

The element theme; earth, water, fire, and wind

Typical turn based RPG combat.

Graphics

Stories revealed along the adventure; Wars, hints of family connections, migrations, and so on.

Puzzles

Boss battles; Saving before a boss allows you to try a lot of "what if" situations in battle.  (Ex: Did you know that Isaac and Garet can't kill Tangle Bloom and that the battle is lost after Matthew and Karis have their health depleted?)

Music

[Thunder-squall]

How many of you guys knew that Golden Sun was a two-parter before you played the first one?

[Daddy Poi's Oily Gorillas]

Chances are, I didn't know?

[Thunder-squall]

I was wondering how much the "multi-game spanning epic" nature of the story appealed to people.  Basically, while Dark Dawn itself may not have hit all marks, clearly it was setting up for a sequel, and I wondered if that open-ended aspect of it was something people enjoyed.

[Thunder-squall]

While I loved the visuals of 'falling off the end of the earth' in DarkDawn, I don't quite get the significance of "the world is flat" and "there are 4 elements which aren't actually elements" thing.  It seemed like a poor-man's lore, and I assumed that the developers were just being lazy, and were basically telling the players: "we didn't think much about this, so YOU don't think much about this either."

But am I mistaken?  I have nothing against 4 elements on their own (i.e. Captain Planet or Avatar), nor with flat worlds.  So what's the *best,* lore-consistent pseudo-theory behind the 4 synergies and the flat world?

[Misery]

Basically, while Dark Dawn itself may not have hit all marks, clearly it was setting up for a sequel, and I wondered if that open-ended aspect of it was something people enjoyed.

Open-ended? The Lost Age was open-ended. Dark Dawn ended with a cliffhanger. While that is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, doing it when we may never see a sequel was a rather poor decision.

"there are 4 elements which aren't actually elements"

What is this referring to? As far as I know, there are 4 elements which are elements, and in DD, light and darkness seem to sort of have become elements as well.

[Thunder-squall]

Wind/electricity, rocks/plants -- these seem to be themed based loosely on terrain, if that.  At a glance they don't seem like 4 elemental units which would then be mixed (via alchemy, or whatever) to create new things.  The best interpretation I can come up with is that they resemble the 4 basic terrain types (or ingredients) which could make for a viable living-system (ie. the flat world, which is maintained by a balance of these 4 forces).  And therefore the purpose of these elements is that they were fashioned to sustain the specific setting of Golden Sun.  But within the lore, I don't know what clues there are to exactly what these 4 forces actually are, and what pseudoscience they're supposed to follow.  Basically, I don't know if the mechanics of elements are internally consistent or not.

The djinn, rather than breeding, seem to be spontaneous manifestations of 'elemental energy.'  This suggests that the elemental energies used to have a consciousness--They used to be living things, until their wills and personalities were broken apart, the remnants of which manifest as djinn.  So maybe the flat world and elemental energies are based on the sacrifice of gods?  There's support for this, in the form of elemental summons from gathering djinn together.  And that could be cool.  But from my limited experience with Golden Sun, I don't think there's really any explanation of this, and this is all complete guess work on my part.

TL;DR:  Why was the lore of Golden Sun made the way it was?  There are two answers:  (1) game play, (2) to tell a story.  I'm interested in how the lore of Golden Sun contributes to the second.  As far as I can tell, the story would have been just about the same if the Adepts were X-men, and their powers were not various components of some whole.

[Misery]

Pretty much all of that is explained in the prologue of the first game...
The 4 elements are:
Venus - the earth and the plants, and the power to give life
Mars - fire and fiery stuff
Jupiter - wind, lightning, powers of prediction and clairvoyance
Mercury - water and ice, and the power of healing

Furthermore, they're based on the elements in greek mythology... like a lot of things in these games.
There's never really much explanation for the djinn, other than that they're manifestations of the elements, and they had been sleeping in Sol Sanctum until the elemental stars were returned to the world.

[Thunder-squall]

If that's all there is to the explanation, then at the moment it still seems to me that they "superficially resemble" mythological stuff, rather than create an interpretation based on mythological stuff.  And isn't djinn Arabic or middle eastern?  I'd have imagined that by now fans would have either hyper analyzed GS's mythology, or fan-ficced  a better one.

Frankly, I know many of you have created tons of fan lore, and from a DnD perspective, it seems that wouldn't have been possible without a strong creation myth.  So what's the myth behind GS that's inspired so many?  I can't believe that it's just the fact that it borrows some names.

[Misery]

Indeed, the mythology they borrow is only used as a framework to tell a completely different story. I think Dark Dawn may be resting too heavily on its mythos, which quite frankly, is a pretty weak foundation.

And well, since you have played Dark Dawn, you should know the premise of the series already, but I'll give you my take on it. Alchemy, which is apparently some force of nature with little in common with the real life concept of alchemy, once existed in the world, making a Golden Age possible. However, this powerful force was abused by mankind, and wise men who deemed it causing more harm than good sealed it away in four stones known as the elemental stars. They were then hidden away in the heart of Sol Sanctum, and the people of Vale were assigned to guard them. To restore this power to the world, the elemental stars would have to be brought to their respective lighthouses, which in turn have a clan assigned to guard each of them. This is the central theme of the first two games.

And as you say, djinn are obviously borrowed from middle-eastern lore, I just meant that there isn't much of any explanation for them being there (not that one is really necessary).