Did the GBA series need a sequel? What did the sequels need to get done?

[Thunder-squall]

So much of Dark Dawn is concerned with the past, that I wonder if the series stopped moving forward, and instead focused too much on looking back?  I dig the fan service, with unique designs to the djin, and the production quality and all that.  But what were the things that Dark Dawn needed to do to push the story forward?

I think that the new game has basically trapped itself, by having so many characters it'll need to bring back or cameo if there was a sequel to it.  Or maybe not.  Maybe DD was planned as a trilogy, where the first games followed different characters, and then the finale let players pick from all the characters of the precious games, including the original GS games (since those protagonists are still mostly able bodied).  But right now I don't see where things are going.  The future of the series seems pretty open ended, which makes me think there's not some great follow up planned.

DD has made a lot of unknowns for it to answer, but I wonder how much of that is fluff, and how much of it fills a need laid out by the original GS games.

[Misery]

Looks like you nailed it in your first sentence - Dark Dawn did not move the series forward.

To answer the question: Golden Sun 1 and 2 make up a story with an open but conclusive end. They didn't necessarily need a sequel, but are very welcoming to one. The main problem is solved, but the ending really leaves you wondering "what happens now?" For all the talk of the terrible things that would occur if the seal on alchemy is broken, or the greatness of the golden age of alchemy, you don't really get to see any of it. The first because there's a 30 year time skip, and the second because the world 30 years later seems to be pretty much the same as earlier. Probably because they were so busy trying to remake Golden Sun on DS that they forgot to make a new game.

It's pretty backwards, really - instead of letting the past be the past and building on the established story, they make a plot that in no way connects with what has happened, while retelling and referencing past events. Dark Dawn does not satisfy any curiousity that might be left from playing the previous games, and instead creates a whole bunch of new loose ends.

These "what's wrong with DD" posts may get a little ranty, but I think it's an important thing to define.

[Thunder-squall]

I can defend Dark Dawn on some level, in that it introduces the ancients, and how they worked with the beast folk to do... stuff.  Could it be that Dark Dawn's biggest flaw is its story telling, since it underplays all the epic stuff it introduces?

[Misery]

Oh... with everything I post, it may seem like I hate Dark Dawn. I don't, and I admittedly had a good time going through it the first time. It has a lot of good qualities, especially the world and various environments. It's just that it failed miserably as a sequel, and the plot is terrible.

[Thunder-squall]

not accusing you of hating Dark Dawn, just trying to widen the conversation.  Basically, I'm secretly trying to figure out if one can make a better version of Dark Dawn by taking out the crud.  If the crud's taken out, then is there enough new stuff there, such that it can be expanded upon *without* the need for additional fan speculation?

Because that'd be the ultimate GS hacking project, where we don't go against the established canon, but rather make the franchise a better version of what it already is.

Though the truth *may* be that DD is just unsalvageable.  And if that's the case, then I think the fandom benefits if we can come to that decision impartially, and in a way that we don't feel to defend ourselves as "not hating Dark Dawn."


As I hinted at in the OP, I think Golden Sun is trapped.  It has too much of a legacy that it simply can't ignore, and yet it seems that it can't move on *unless* it ignores its past.  I've been trying to think of what I'd do instead, and I'm not coming up with any answers.  So I'm just going to mull on it for a while.

[Luna_blade]

You guys are probably right here, about the series not moving on. Camelot could also have made the prologue, or just the lighting of the beacons millenia before GS...

[Radamanthys]

Camelot themselves said they have no idea what to do with the story and how to drive it forward. The way the story ended in TLA, a sequel should've delved with the rift that threatend Prox.

The rest of the world was just getting smaller by the continents shrinking and the gaia falls borderlines advancing more and more into the world but there was nothing about why at the north the fabric of reality was being eaten away by this rift of nothingness.

When I first played DD and saw the psyenergy vortex I thought it was going to be related to that and the vortexes were lured into the world by the world being rich in Alchemy but it seems they were created by devices that the Zenith tribe made, so any sequel to DD would be a very bland "we gotta take the big bad evil emperor I mean empyror" of good vs evil, which kills one of the biggest things the GS series where things are not black and white with the villains. So DD not only didn't advance the series fundamentally, it introduces complications into the plot, how the elements work (light and dark now being a thing), the geography, etc.