I played from 12 Apr 2026 until 04 May 2026, on Switch 2 NSO
Child me somehow never played this game. Despite being in its target audience playing games at the time of its release, and even despite wanting to try this game, I never got my hands on a copy growing up. So it's remained on my list of "games I want to someday experience" for 25 years and I just never got around to it until now.
It's tough for me to be too critical about Golden Sun. This is a game with a target audience in the range of 10-14 year olds, and I knew this going into it. The story, for me, was quites simplistic; the gameplay a total breeze. These things are, for me in the mindset I had while playing the game, actually to the game's benefit. When I think about making games for young audiences, there's precious few examples to go off of, especially when the goal is to make something story oriented. Golden Sun completely nails this. Right from the opening scene, with its strong, heavy, but very comprehensible hook, the game does a great job presenting the game's world and its characters to its audience. As the journey unfolds, the narrative stays focused on the tasks at hand, hinting a bit at the world's politics and the challenges facing the adult characters, but only enough to build context for what the kids are doing. The villans and the worldbuilding remained somewhat shrouded in mystery right until the end; it's VERY apparent that they either intended on making a single game and simply couldn't fit it onto one cartridge and had to cut it into two, or perhaps right from the start they wanted to end the first game on a cliffhanger and always planned on the sequel. Either way, the abrupt ending to this first game was somehow still narratively satisfying, yet has me excited to see what will happen in the next one.
My one complaint with the story is that, even for kids, pseudo-silent self-insert protagonists feel narratively lacking. From the story's perspective, Isaac is the leader and is the one having conversations with the NPCs, but in practice the story is pulled along by Garret, Ivan, and Mia. My observation is that it can be hard to tell a story with a silent protagonist at all, but it's sort of doubly difficult in a character focused genre like JRPGs, where we have to contend with the player character being both the center of the story yet also completely irrelevant in how it's told.
Also putting myself into the mindeset of a kid just getting into games, I can see the gameplay feeling quite deep and intricate. There's an enormous amount of space for building your characters with all the different classes and available spells, yet the game's combat difficulty remains low enough that it's hard to go wrong with any of the options. I think the only boss fight I failed and to which I had to rethink my approach was the second-to-final boss, which was certainly a step up in difficulty. My gripe here is purely from a QOL perspective, in that towards the lategame as the spell lists got longer and longer, I felt that scrolling through the menus to select a spell quite tedious. Many of these later spells were functionally direct upgrades to previous ones, yet the old ones cluttered the menus. I imagine the developers thought players might have a reason to use the older spells due to their lower PP costs, yet because PP regenerated quickly enough after combat and PP pools grew rapidly with levels, I never ran out even when only using the max level skills.
A highlight of the game is the ludonarrative harmony, which is truly excellent, in spite of the low difficulty. The puzzles, in particular, make great thematic use of the game's magic system - you can freeze puddles of water into ice pillars to lift a door, you can push blocks from a range to open a path, you can read minds and reveal invisible objects to uncover secrets. There were also a lot of puzzles which didn't make use of the magic system at all and were purely material, like pushing rolling logs around to open paths, which I think helped to ground the otherwise fantastical setting. I think there were a few times that a puzzle "type" was used and then never touched on again, like the puzzle involving pushing a torch around and avoiding water drops - this would be one complaint I have about the overworld puzzles. The other complaint is the general lack of puzzles that used multiple different forms of psynergy to solve.
The other highlight is the visuals. I've been learning pixel art and this game is absolutely something that I'll be using as a reference in the future. The battle scenes are beautiful, with the painted backgrounds and great use of camera angles. Spell and attack animations were fast and punchy, enemy and characters designs were phenomenal. The towns and dungeon tilesets were clear and expressive. I'll dock points only for the overworld, with its weird camera tilt that just looked off (it's possible that this looked fine on an actual GBA LCD screen, and only looked weird for me because of playing it on the Switch.). To tie it back with the ludonarrative harmony, I very much liked that the game telegraphed with its pixel art which objects were interactable and how. I don't think I ever struggled with a puzzle due to not knowing what was part of the puzzle and what wasn't.
I think one missing piece to this game would be breadcrumbs hinting at some of the side content. After I beat the game, I took a look at some guides to see what I missed out on. Turns out, there's some stuff to do on a return trip to the main character's home town of Vale, and I also never returned to Donpa (though the exact timing of when to return to Donpa would have been nice to telegraph). I also never knew how to access Crossbone Isle and I'm not sure that the method to access it is telegraphed in-game anywhere. To make matters worse, I saved after the point of no return, so I couldn't even go back and check all these things out in my completed save file. Definitely a bit disappointing as it seems Crossbone Isle has the same role as post-game superbosses in other JRPGs, so it's a bit sad I missed out on it.
Overall, Golden Sun is a cute little adventure game aimed at a young audience, that I think nails everything it sets out to do.