Eight Lessons I Learned from Golden Sun (2001)

It doesn't surprise me much that Golden Sun did well with reviewers and contemporary players: here's a new RPG franchise that pushes the GBA's graphics to their limit in the prettiest way possible. It's easy to forget that most GBA games were heavily scrutinized for their graphics, and praised when they hit it out of the park. People were divided about Wario Land 4, regarding its graphical leap from its predecessor, so much so many reviewers (IGN, TotalGames.Net, GamePro Mag, and Gaming Age) made that the primary reason for their verdict! At a time when graphics were literally tied with gameplay in importance, is it really so shocking that a visually-gorgeous RPG would be praised?

…But this isn't about what Golden Sun did right as an RPG, this is about why Golden Sun completely lost my interest and what mistakes I vow not to emulate.

1. Tread Carefully when Composing a Soundtrack - If you've ever heard the overworld theme in Golden Sun, you might describe it as subdued, yet bombastic, and hyper-victorious, sorta like an older Isaac thinking back to the good ol' days of trekking through the world. That's a huge misstep, and this is arguably the song you hear the most out of the entire OST. When I think of traveling between important locations, where danger lurks, I think "apprehension," "gentle excitement," "contemplation," "nature sounds." What I don't, and shouldn't be made to think about are "victory before the battle," "deep excitement," "nothing to worry about," "the regal sound of an orchestra." I can't stress enough how the tone of this one song makes the entire game feel boring: it deflates any tension and desire to see how it all ends by basically telling you in music form that everyone feels as if fate has already been decided in their favor.
2. Never Put the A-Plot on Pause - I don't care what countless TV shows do; you can't put the main plot on hold and forget about it when you tell a story; I understand that now. If you're telling me about your encounter with a Swamp Monster, I couldn't care less about your stop at a gas station on the way to the swamp! That's not what the story's about and not why I want to listen to it! Golden Sun is the story of Isaac and Garet getting the McGuffins and fixing their hometown against the wishes of a small, evil group; tell me that story, and don't interrupt it for HOURS-AND-HOURS to have them play hero in every city they come across, as if I'm watching mediocre episodes of the Pokemon TV show. I learned firsthand by playing Golden Sun that if you drop the plot, players will drop your game en masse. If you want to have a story without a through-line plot, you need to start it that way and you need to have interesting characters who change over time. 
3. Balance the Frequency of Battles (and Give Battles Depth) - Before you scuff at this, yes I'm aware of the feather item that prevents battles. The bottom-line is that, like all late 90s JRPGs, Golden Sun continues the trend of pushing boring, repetitive, mindless battles in your tired face every three seconds. With or without a "repel" item, this as absolutely intolerable to people who actually value the quality of the time they spend with a videogame. This is just the surface of a much worse problem. For the developers to cram so many battles into the overall experience tells you how little faith they had in the rest of the game, and how much misplaced trust they had in their boring battle system. What Paper Mario 64 introduced to me is the idea that battles don't have to be the only highlight of the gameplay of an RPG. Golden Sun puts zero effort into making gameplay outside of battle fun (or "feel good")… except for one or two of their dungeon puzzles which actually are interesting, rather than something even a 6-year-old can figure out by trial and error in a matter of seconds. The battles are bad for a few reasons. Firstly, there is not much in terms of tactics. Most of your options do effectively the same thing: more damage to a slightly wider group of foe. Some attacks take a turn to charge, or boast stats, and there are plenty of ways to heal someone in the party. That is literally the full extent of the battle system, you almost can't get more shallow than that, though it is interesting that you can't easily revive a "downed" party member. Lastly, the battle system is simply designed poorly. Certain items are completely underpowered, and some magic attacks are overpowered. Money is practically infinite, and most items you never need but clog up your inventory for emergency situations.
4. Never Subject Players to Nefarious Mazes - Remember how the graphics are so great? Not on the overworld they aren't. Imagine a GBA, blurry overworld where everything looks identical, and there are very few landmarks aside from the shape of the river that happens to be on screen. Congratulations, you're lost. Good luck meandering awkwardly around each corner, hoping to find a place you can go. Have fun being turned around when, at last you enter a town, because uh oh! the town is closed for some reason, time to start all over. Exploration should be exciting, not dreadful (see #3). Furthermore, going to the wrong place at the wrong time in Golden Sun means getting your ass kicked by a difficulty spike, as if a poorly-designed, randomly-generated sandbox world.
5. No Unnecessary Reuse of Awful JRPG Tropes - Every since Super Mario RPG/ EarthBound revolutionized the genre as mainstream games, nothing--and I mean no single game--has had any excuse; no game that peddles the same old trite deserves your money. Period. And guess what? Golden Sun peddles the same old trite that made 90s JRPGs age poorly. I'm talking about "every single town has a problem that you have to solve and no one living there is memorable." I'm talking about "NPCs only exist in towns, and every town has an inn, shop, and healer." I'm talking about "there are no explanation for why every-monster-ever roams the land." I'm talking about "there are literally no reasons for why said monsters can't just barge into a town and eat everyone." I'm talking about "it doesn't matter how young you are, you need to save the world, the whole world and everyone you come across because that's just who you are." I'm talking about "your only choices in dialogue are Yes or No and it doesn't matter which you pick." Enough of this shit. Maybe it was cute in the late 80s, and the early 90s, but it wasn't cute in the 2000s, and it still isn't fucking cute.
6. Backtracking isn't a "Good Incentive" - in Wario Land 3, if the player fucks up, he or she has to start from the very beginning and do it exactly right, and let me tell you, some of the enemies that send you back to the beginning don't play fair. This brutal, meanspirited game design is present in Golden Sun too, and for the very first time, I realized how powerful a time-waster an RPG can become when you pad it with awful shit that makes the player retrace their steps as "punishment" for not understanding something esoteric about your puzzle.
7. Avoid Repetitive Storytelling - This is straightforward: don't force the player to experience the same thing over and over in a story unless there's a good reason for it. If the first two towns have a dangerous problem that needs solving, don't write the third fucking town such that it has a community-wide danger that the player must solve. I did that twice already, Christ! Golden Sun in its entirety is extremely predictable, so much so that the second time the game was getting ready to add a character to my party, I figured it out within seconds, because they did it in a really similar way the time before, and this person acted the part.
8. Don't Have Dull Character Designs - Compare the NPCs of Golden Sun with the characters of Okage: Shadow King, and 3DS Fire Emblem games. I'll wait. Did you notice how infinitely boring NPCs are in Golden Sun? Or how easy it is to take regular humans and make them fun to look at? Seasoned fans of JRPGs or Anime will both tell you the same thing: boring character designs will kill their interest in your show/ game because it shows the team who made it have no dedication to quality and thinking outside the box. Mia the healer is arguably the only human exception to everyone being bland, and I must admit I love the Claymation look of the enemies.

Poor Golden Sun, how ripe it is for a reboot that fixes its fundamental problems! To its credit, it's got graphics on par with DS games, which is really impressive both from a visual-art and technical view point. Sadly, being technically impressive 17 years ago isn't technically impressive anymore, the opposite in fact. Time has a way of revealing what deserves to be remembered, and what doesn't, and if Golden Sun's pretty graphics are it's only saving grace, I can guarantee you that people will continue to move on to better RPGs and not look back...back to the days when RPGs copied all the wrong elements from each other for decades at a time until the whole genre became crusty and stale.