I have a dark secret. A terrible secret I have kept hidden for so long, I cannot help but reveal everything today.
...
I really, really, really, really, do not like Golden Sun.
At all.
I think it fails as an RPG, and even moreso as a game in general. It's hard to explain why this is the case. It is a combination of multiple things.
I guess I would like to begin pointing out that the majority of the game is spent talking. The game feels like it is 80% dialogue or something, and the characters seemingly never ever shut up.
"Well it's an RPG, genius! People talk a lot, that's normal!", you might think. But no. In every other text-heavy RPG, the dialogue is used to either flesh out the setting, or develop the characters. Yet none of these things happen in Golden Sun. The characters just talk for the sake of talking, and almost every bit of dialogue is empty, barren, and devoid of character or anything, safe for maybe a small pointer on what to do next.
Who is Isaac? Or Garet? Or Ivan? Or Mia? The game doesn't let us know and the dialogue is so sterile you can't even draw your own conclusions. It makes your party members seem like blank slates with elements attached to them. I mean try to describe to me what kind of character Garet is without mentioning that he is Isaac's friend and the fire dude. You probably won't be able to do it without making stuff up.
I feel like this game is the equivalent of a politician. It keeps talking but doesn't actually say anything.
On top of that, the game is also incomplete. As soon as you're about halfway through the story, the game cuts off and hits you with a screen that pretty much says (I paraphrase) "Thank you for playing to this point. Now if you want to know how this story continues, please purchase the second half of the game which we will sell to you at full price". And they even got away with it. It's amazing.
I really don't want to turn the game to shit for anyone who likes it. If you managed to enjoy it somehow, that's great, and you're probably better than me at finding the appeal in it. But as a whole it kind of baffles me how this series was so well-received with how little it actually has going for it. Like, all I can see in it is a sub-par, substance-less RPG with pretty graphics and (usually) good music. And maybe the Djinn thing is cool for a while.
But apart from that, all you get is half a game filled with empty dialogue. And that's kind of sad in my opinion.
Oh my god, I wanted to get this rant off my chest for years. My apologies to anyone I might have alienated with this.
