I have a ton of nostalgia for Golden Sun, since it for a long time was THE defining non-port GBA game, at least in my eyes. With its impressive pseudo-3D battles and spectacular Summon animations, not to mention its sensational soundtrack, Golden Sun was the game that truly showed what a huge leap the Game Boy Advance really was over the Game Boy Color – but even beyond its superior graphics and sound, it just felt like such an amazing, epic adventure to someone like me, who was still very new to the JRPG genre at the time due to only truly coming of age as a gamer back when the N64 was my primary console (the GBA Breath of Fire port was my first “proper” JRPG, while Golden Sun was my second). I love the N64 to pieces, but its JRPG selection is just comically bad, unless you count stuff like Paper Mario and Ogre Battle 64.
So a lot of my love for Golden Sun is definitely due to both the state of handheld gaming at the time, as well as my personal gamer profile. Nowadays, when handheld consoles like the Switch 2 and the Steam Deck can handle the likes of Cyberpunk 2077 and Elden Ring, the Wow Factor that Golden Sun benefited from is obviously long gone. Moreover, as I started playing more JRPGs this resulted in Golden Sun steadily falling in my estimation, due to its middling story and characters, short length and Cliffhanger ending making for a seemingly far less substantial and satisfying experience than offered by many other games in the genre. I kinda started to suspect that the game’s superlative music had at the time caused me to view the whole thing as far more grand and profound that it really was.
HOWEVER, as I played even more JRPGs and actually got around to replaying Golden Sun when it became available on the Wii U, something surprising happened: My opinion of the game sharply rose, and after my latest playthrough a couple of weeks ago my view of Golden Sun now is actually not that far behind how I viewed it back in 2002. So what happened? Well, while the game’s shortcomings are still all there, a much greater familiarity with the JRPG genre has actually given me far greater appreciation of Golden Sun’s unique strengths, especially in terms of gameplay and puzzles - in many ways this is Zelda reimagined as a Classic 16/32-bit JRPG, complete with huge and elaborate dungeons/temples!
The defining mechanic of Golden Sun is Psynergy, the game’s version of magic, a lost art nowadays safeguarded by the inhabitants of Vale, an isolated village situated at the base of Mt. Aleph – and it turns out that Psynergy is a highly versatile power, which is good for far more than just battling monsters. You can for example summon a giant hand to push blocks from various impossible positions, freeze a puddle of water into an ice pillar or turn completely invisible under the cover of shadows. These Psynergy powers act like Items in Zelda, allowing you to solve all sorts of environmental puzzles and opening up access to a great many new areas, as well as enabling you to finally grab various hidden goodies in familiar locations.
Golden Sun actually boasts quite a few more Psynergy powers than I remembered, and they’re all put to good use. This extensive moveset and myriad of ways to interact with your environments makes for a FAR more gameplay-intensive experience than most JRPGs – indeed, just like in Zelda most of the game’s challenge is related to puzzle-solving, not combat. Combine this with a pseudo-platforming element (auto-jumping between closely positioned platforms in a manner very similar to the pre-BotW 3D Zelda titles), and you have all the tools necessary for a fun and satisfying action/adventure experience, even ignoring the JRPG elements.
While short by JPRG standards (this time around it took me 20 hours to beat the game and its optional challenge dungeon, as well as collecting the vast majority of secrets), Golden Sun’s gameplay-heavy approach to the genre must be factored in when judging its size, which results in the game coming across as quite a bit more substantial that I remembered it. Ultimately, there’s tons of clever and varied puzzles to tackle both inside and outside of dungeons, plenty of different environments and a good amount of towns to visit. Combined with a consistently high level of quality and polish, not to mention the lower standards first applied to handheld games and later on to Retro games, and I’ve yet to actually feel shortchanged whenever playing through Golden Sun.
Outside of the Psynergy powers and environmental puzzles Golden Sun is quite the classic JRPG, with turn-based combat, random battles, a top-down perspective and an old-school JRPG world map. However, the game DOES boast an additional mechanic that adds some welcome depth to combat and team-building, namely the elemental Djinns that you can collect and equip. These guys come with all sorts of beneficial effects in- and outside of combat (like unique attacks or buffs, boosted stats and the unlocking of new Psynergy powers) that always makes it very satisfying to track one down, but the way they work in combat is especially interesting: using a Djinn in battle places it in Standby mode, costing you its boosts as if it was unequipped, but also making it available for a Summon attack (you can also put Djinns on standby outside of battle btw). The more Djinns of the same elements you have on standby, the more formidable the Summon, and the most powerful Summon (which costs you 4 Djinns) deals truly ridiculous damage as well as temporarily boosting your elemental powers, and is something that ALWAYS gets used by me during boss fights. However, the fact that you have to purposely Weaken yourself in order to access these summons makes for quite the ingenious risk/reward system.
Personally, I barely ever use the Djinns of my party healer Mia for the hardest battles, since her job is healing, not damage, and so I want her to be as durable as possible, with access to her best healing spells. Meanwhile, in the case of Isaac, Garet and Ivan I put 2-3 of their most useless Djinns on standby in advance, and then when the battle starts I use various support-oriented Djinns to Buff my characters (especially their defenses) in order to make them more durable in their weakened state, before nuking the boss with multiple Level 4 Summons in order significantly lower its health. I’m sure there are other, more Optimal strategies, but I like my approach and feel that it aptly showcases how the Djinn system gives you a lot of options and flexibility.
Additionally, while the standard approach is just equipping each character exclusively with Djinns belonging to the same element, mixing up your Djinns actually allows you to reclass your characters in all sorts of interesting ways that can result in entirely different movesets, many of them admittedly suboptimal – but there’s at least one complex Djinn combination that results in several classes that are straight up SUPERIOR to the standard mono-type Djinn classes, which makes experimentation well worth it. This level of character customization also somewhat makes up for the game’s small character roster (just 4 permanent party members in total).
