Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, is the third in one of my favorite series of handheld RPGs. Continuing the story as it left off in Golden Sun: The Lost Age, Dark Dawn follows the children of the heroes of the first games as they embark on their own quest to save the world.
Dark Dawn features some updates, but ultimately feels like a Golden Sun game. The battle graphics and world map are all updated and turned into 3D, but have a similar perspective. You can still use your psynergy (basically elemental magic) out of battle to solve puzzles by melting ice, filling up pools, freezing things, moving things around, and other actions. You still can find djinn, which can either power you up by being equipped to you, be used to summon powerful monsters if they are not equipped, or used to heal or buff your party or deal damage to enemies. The tone of the stories is basically the same, featuring a relatively light approach that avoids some of the dour stereotypes of JRPGs.
Dark Dawn makes several changes to the format, but ultimately makes mostly the wrong ones. As is my custom, however, I'll begin with the positives.
I just love the fact that they made another Golden Sun game. Solving the puzzles, collecting djinn, and getting those hard to reach treasure chests in dungeons are all there, and are as still satisfying, although more on that later. The djinn and treasure are both very much improved, as each djinn has their own design now, rather than all looking identical to other djinn of the same element, and powerful weapons now have unlockable skills. In the other Golden Sun games, once you equipped a rare weapon (called an artifact), it would occasionally unleash a powerful attack when you order a regular attack. In Dark Dawn, each artifact generally has several powerful attacks, which get unlocked the more you use them. It is to your advantage, thus, to stick with weapons, and gradually increase their power.
I liked that you were rarely floundering for things to do, as when trying to find Poseidon's Trident in Lost Age, perhaps the most miserable moment in the series.
And that's basically what I liked about Dark Dawn. Ouch.
The beginning of the game is a tiresome and extremely long tutorial that could (and should) have been made optional, rather than 45 minutes of review for series vets. And frankly a few optional signs here and there would have made the simple mechanics of Golden Sun apparent to anyone with the reading comprehension and problem solving skills of a fifth grader, so I really don't see the need for a huge tutorial. This isn't a hyper-deep game that requires a ton of handholding.
The story is a mess. The villains' goal is unclear, and Alex' (you'll know who I'm talking about if you've played the other two games) role in the villain's team baffles me. psynergy vortexes, random black holes that suck up psynergy, play a huge role through the first 2 hours of the game, and then completely disappear, almost like they were intended to be a main focus, and got forgot about. They do tease the concept at the end of the game, but it seemed an afterthought. They blow all of the "twists" in the story basically from the outset, showing a ham-fisted approach to story that never delights or surprises.
The graphics "update" frankly take the most gorgeous games on the Game Boy Advance and turn them into a pedestrian affair. I would have been 100% impressed with the GBA games had they been released first on the DS, and I was not very impressed at all with the DS one.
You get djinn WAY too quick, making you absurdly powerful. No longer are djinn teased and then you have to go back to get them after getting new psynergy or items. I had 7 djinn for the ultimate class at about 15 hours, and breezed through the game as a result.
Speaking of difficulty, Dark Dawn is one of the most absurdly easy RPGs you will ever play. There are way more dungeons than in the other two games, but some can be completed in about 3 minutes, and few feature bosses at the end. Experience comes in super fast, making leveling up a breeze. I did 0 grinding or sidequests, and beat the end boss on my first try. The boss was tough, but not so tough that I needed to try twice, or level at all to beat it. As to bosses, there are probably less than 10 bosses in the main game, and only 3 were difficult in the slightest. And the random enemies, once pretty tough in the GBA games, were pushovers, never threatening your HP totals at all. This means the healing items once so valuable in the GBA games were basically a waste of inventory space in this game.
Even the puzzles were easier, making the game significantly less rewarding. While getting the rare treasure chests was fun, they just didn't feel as rare as in the past game, and I never had any trouble getting them. One thing that made the puzzles easier was the significant lack of psynergy required to solve each puzzle. In the other two games, puzzles would require seamlessly switching between many different kinds of psynergy to solve puzzles. Typically puzzles in Dark Dawn require one, or maybe two types of psynergy to solve.
The world of Dark Dawn felt smaller and less interesting than either of the other two games. The music also was the worst in the series, although it was never great to begin with. The games again, like their two predecessors, feature was too much dialogue (and too many emojis) to no interesting end.
This game is a mess, although I enjoyed some aspects of returning to the world of Golden Sun. I really can't recommend it to anyone but the most die hard Golden Sun fan, and am fairly confident that it will likely be a disappointment to them as well. I'll give it a 5.0/10.
I am still making a call as to what handheld game I'll be playing next, so I'll post a teaser at some point, perhaps tomorrow.
-TRO
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