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Golden Sun: Dark Dawn

Ic0slay3r

Smash Apprentice
Joined
Dec 5, 2009
Messages
184
Location
Puerto Rico
I did a 40min walk to get to the nearest game store cause I dint wanted to wait for anyone to pick me up to get me there. Waited in life for like 20min(kids should give their mom a specific list of games they want, instead of the mom asking the employee of the game is good, or what is the rated M for, or simply if it works on the console the kid have) anyways, I wasted like an hour for someone to tell me that the game is going to be release tomorrow here in PR :(

I really wanted to play the game today :(
 

Octave

Smash Ace
Joined
Jan 4, 2010
Messages
512
Location
Connecticut USA
It's really good so far. I don't like how they've simply reused a lot of the items (read: weapons) but the gameplay is solid. I feel like you level up a lot faster, though.
 

RT

Smash Hero
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...
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Rockettrainer
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Just got the game today (Gamestop is ********), and despite the looooooooooooooooong opening that can't be skipped (as far as I could tell), it's going good so far.
 

ZIO

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Joined
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Yes, the only thing I didn't like was the opening.

Not anything like the original that sorta throws you for a loop story-wise.

But very reminisce of the originals and I like that. I also like getting to re-meet Flint.
 

ThreeX

Smash Lord
Joined
Apr 20, 2007
Messages
1,350
Location
Fall River, MA
It's really good so far. I don't like how they've simply reused a lot of the items (read: weapons) but the gameplay is solid. I feel like you level up a lot faster, though.
yeah, definitely agree with you on that. Also, the puzzles seem a little easier :\ I'm not too far in it.
just restored the alchemy forge
Possibly just because they've reused lots of the same puzzles D: but, whatever. One thing that really bugs me.. is that when you activate a certain spell out of combat, sometimes it'll like.. auto aim to the nearest object. It seems like that gives away certain puzzles.

BUT the game is still amazing <3



edit:
has anyone replaced rief with amiti?
 

Octave

Smash Ace
Joined
Jan 4, 2010
Messages
512
Location
Connecticut USA
yeah, definitely agree with you on that. Also, the puzzles seem a little easier :\ I'm not too far in it.
just restored the alchemy forge
Possibly just because they've reused lots of the same puzzles D: but, whatever. One thing that really bugs me.. is that when you activate a certain spell out of combat, sometimes it'll like.. auto aim to the nearest object. It seems like that gives away certain puzzles.

BUT the game is still amazing <3



edit:
has anyone replaced rief with amiti?
I feel like later on the puzzles got a lot tougher, or at least more complicated (I was able to figure them out pretty easily but I did enjoy them.) I'm pretty far into the game at this point (taking my time and enjoying it)
currently at the Apollo Ascent, grinding levels, missing a few Djinni
and you definitely gain levels faster. Especially where I am now where I get a **** ton of exp (you'll know where I am once you get there)

@edit:
Amiti is a lot better but he does lack Wish. Rief's healing is truly unmatched. He's the new Mia. I try to keep all of my party members around the same level, though.
 
S

smash brawl player 99021

Guest
Can anyone help me
get through the Ruins or whatever? After you pass through that gate... I don't really understand what to do. Near the beginning :p
 

RATED

Smash Lord
Joined
May 14, 2008
Messages
1,627
Location
The Grand Line... PR
I loved the game, the only thing I hate was Himi cuz the way she was brought to the game...

it was like : We need the 2nd Venus adept... let's see... there's no ideas? Let's go and pick a rock, make a girl float and go with Mattew(horrible choice name IMO)

also saddened me that bosses or monster in general doesnt inflict that much dmg compared to GS-TLA, so most battles were easier

Good thing is that the game says to you : " a new one will come and it will be good".
 

ThreeX

Smash Lord
Joined
Apr 20, 2007
Messages
1,350
Location
Fall River, MA
I loved the game, the only thing I hate was Himi cuz the way she was brought to the game...

it was like : We need the 2nd Venus adept... let's see... there's no ideas? Let's go and pick a rock, make a girl float and go with Mattew(horrible choice name IMO)

also saddened me that bosses or monster in general doesnt inflict that much dmg compared to GS-TLA, so most battles were easier

Good thing is that the game says to you : " a new one will come and it will be good".

hey add spoils please >__>
 

Raziek

Charging Limit All Day
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Ok, guess I'll weigh in. I'm just gonna spoiler tag the whole thing because I'm lazy. Warning, there is an angry rant within my spoiler tags. You may or may not find it entertaining. No refunds, no returns, read at your own risk.
Thoroughly disappointed. The game started off just fantastic, then the plot careens into the bounds of "Where the **** are we?" Like, Alex is barely explored, we never went to Bilibin, we never fixed the soarwing, the whole plot is the main 8 getting ****ed around by EVERYONE.

Almost all of the new characters suck the fat ***.

Karis is great, she's like a wonderful cross between Ivan and Mia. Excellent class sets, Pure Mage go go, 10/10.

Tyrell is a turd. I only kept him in my party until I got Sveta. He's like Garet except they're trying to over-milk everything that made Garet good, and it falls on its face and you just end hating his guts because he just pisses you off. Classes still mostly suck, he's only good as a Ronin for Quick Strike abuse.

Matthew is just fine. Traditional Venus clone of Isaac, and I love Isaac, so all is well. Master for justice.

Rief is so ungodly bland. He's just a clone, and he looks like Max from Pokemon. Benched as soon as I got Amiti.

Amiti, you had the potential to be awesome. Fantastic character development (ALEX'S SON, HELL YES), Pretty decent stats. Then you get crippled by an evolved form of Piers syndrome where you get no melee classes and only get Light Blades and Bows. What the hell, Camelot? Give us a goddamn mercury warrior already. I want a Mercury class that I can roll around as Luminier, maybe Ronin and all that jazz. I had him stuck with Mercury in his default class all game, just because that's the only one that didn't suck, and I hated Tyrell, Eoleo, Himi, and Rief.

Sveta is just wonderful. Great character development, FANTASTIC CONCEPT, Beastman class ***** face, Jupiter Warrior done RIGHT, she gets the right mix of classes to be legit melee. Probably my favorite new character.

Eoleo, I thought I would like you. You're a better Tyrell with a less ****ty personality, better stats, and better classes. Somehow, I just couldn't use you. No Long Blades for no apparent reason, awful portrait/sprites, and you just don't fit in with the rest of the cast. They're all like 19, and you're what, like 35? ****ing Pedo, man.

Himi, seriously, what the hell. Camelot takes a chance to make a great character, makes her join late, for basically no reason. Gives her the personality of a brick. She's never really involved. Venus mage is gimmicky as ****, and she's got caster base classes and caster stats, with a **** ton of melee classes for alts. I cannot fathom how Camelot keeps getting the stats and classes backwards. Give Himi mage classes, and give Amiti warrior classes. Stop failing. The only reason I don't hate Himi is because Weapon Grace is ********. She comes in turn 1, buffs Matthew, then switches out on turn 2.

So yeah, they failed with 4/8 characters just based on character design, and made a bunch of ******** design choices.

Points of no return are ***. Like, 15 missable Djinn or so? REALLY?

Unique Djinn sprites was an excellent idea, but caused the mild annoyance of no longer seeing them labeled by name in the menus, which means you have to remember all the shapes. Kind of pesky.

Here's another major beef I have. You recycled ALMOST EVERY ITEM IN THE GAME. The only new **** is Sveta's gear, Bows, and maybe one or two other items. The mastery system is dumb, and it made the weapons feel less unique as soon as they started overlapping.

Spinning us loose when we get the boat was ********. At least TLA gave us some idea where to go.

Furthermore, WHERE THE **** ARE ALL THE LOCATIONS FROM THE PAST? No Vault, No Kaylay, no Xian, no Altin, no Tolbi, NOTHING! All we got was Kolima randomly teleporting over to the east, and Champa getting ****ed in the ***! WHERE THE HELL DID ALL THE CIVILIZATIONS GO TO?! And how exactly are there thousands of random ancient ruins popping up in the center of a continental landmass that was always there?! Being locked to Angara and the North Sea was a kick in the ****, we can see Gondowan, but we can;t go there, Hesperia is off-limits, we didn't even TOUCH Prox.

No Lucky medals, no game tickets, no fun stuff? No Colosso? No Trial Road? Nothing?

Blados and Chalis are probably the worst villains ever. Blados is literally a carbon copy of a Naruto character, right down to using ****ing Shurikens and having a bigass sword. Chalis is just a wannabe succubus. Last boss was AWFUL. It wasn't a dragon, it had ONLY ONE HEAD.

Difficulty was all over the place. The entire first part of the game was a joke, then you get butt****ed by the Tuaparang soldiers who just stun you constantly when you have no healing, then the game is massively easy again, then the last boss is all of a sudden way harder then everything else. I haven't fought Dullahan yet, but Camelot probably ****ed that up too.

Another gripe. Why did 50% of the game have to have us neck-deep in furries? There was no conceivable reason for that. It wasn't an awful decision, but it was pretty pointless, and doesn't really add anything to the plot. It's poorly explained, poorly executed, and the "tension" it's supposed to build never amounts to anything besides keeping us out of Border Town's left side.

You guys didn't add ANY new classes really. Just some character specific knock-off classes. Pirate line is just a gimmicky Brute, Venus mage line is meh, only Sveta's is remotely interesting.

More plot gripes. Where the **** did psynergy vortexes go?! They show up for like, 3 scenes, then they just DISAPPEAR until the credits roll! What garbage is this?

The game feels bland, unpolished, and downright rushed. This is not what I expect for Camelot quality games, and you'd better hope you fix things in the next one.
 

Octave

Smash Ace
Joined
Jan 4, 2010
Messages
512
Location
Connecticut USA
Looking back, I actually agree with a lot of what you said.

Read at own risk:

I ****ing hate that there are missable djinni. I have to replay the game now just to get those so I can make the best classes. The rehashing of the weapons/items bugged me but I liked how they had different unleashes, though the Sol Blade should have just had Meggido. It's irritating to give someone all crit items just so that they unleash something worthless like Purgatory.

The world being moved around like it was was stupid, especially (like you said) the random ancient civilizations that were brought up. There was absolutely no mention (that I can recall, at least) of the "Jenei" and definitely no mention of the so-called "Dark Adepts" who never even used psynergy in the two short battles you have with them.

On that note, Blados was a mix of Naruto characters and Agatio from TLA which was incredibly disappointing. Absolutely no originality. And what was up with Alex? He was suddenly relatively on the good guy's team at the end? Hopefully they explain that in the next game.

The character development for everyone but Matthew, Karis, Amiti and Sveta was garbage.

I liked how you could get 41k exp at the end per battle (not). Takes away the grind of an epic RPG. AND I DIDN'T EVEN REALIZE IT WAS THE END. It came out of nowhere imo. It was like "SUDDENLY CHIMERA LAST BOSS FIGHT HAVE FUN" and I was like "waitwat." I also didn't like how it explicitly told you that there was going to be a sequel although I will be buying it day one.

I did enjoy the game for the most part; the general gameplay stayed the same, but those things just detracted from the game a lot.
 

Raziek

Charging Limit All Day
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I did enjoy the game for the most part; the general gameplay stayed the same, but those things just detracted from the game a lot.
This. Despite my angry rant, I still enjoyed the game right up until the end, I'm just hella pissed that they left it at that.
 

Exdeath

Smash Master
Joined
Sep 20, 2009
Messages
3,006
Location
Florida
Rant/Criticism:

Despite abstaining from all hints/news/possible spoilers, it took me ~24 hours to finish the game at level 43 with 71 Djinn (I raged when I realized that I couldn't go back and get the Mercury Djinn at the pond -- I couldn't figure out how to get it and didn't know that it was missable). I switched Rief for Amiti and didn't change my party again.

I never lost a fight once, I never ran, never got stuck (it took me an hour or two of exploration once I got the ship), never had to use an item until the final boss fight (I mostly just sold all of my common items and stockpiled money in case I needed to get new equipment), barely explored at all until I was forced to with the boat, and I can't say that I felt a desire to like I did with the first two games. The environments weren't that interesting, the hypertexting as distracting and annoying, the repeating and re-referencing was annoying. I felt like the entire game was a proverbial trip to the supermarket (near the end was the only part that felt dramatic and that I really cared about the characters -- Matthew and Sveta in particular). Virtually every plot twist was entirely obvious and/or not really a twist at all. The Metroid Prime 2 rip-off was interesting at first, but got old later (as did the attempt to make a plot twist at the end with a certain other element).

The game was exploiting nostalgia almost entirely throughout the game. I could appreciate the game being so easy with how eager I was to see the plot, but that too was disappointing. What first attracted me in Golden Sun 1 was the plot. Golden Sun 2 disappointed me quite a bit with the "'We're good guys by the way.' 'Oh? Ok then. We'll join you guys.'" conflict resolution, and this seemed to take that and run with it (I'm mainly referring to the NPCs around the Eclipse Tower events). The townspeople and geography lacked the personality that made them so unique in the first game. The plot was mostly linear, as opposed to the increasing trend of open-ended traveling in the second game. I could tell when the ending was coming because I felt like I was halfway through what I was expecting.

I thought that the difficulty in Golden Sun 1/2 was nearly perfect because you didn't need to grind to make it through the main plot, but there was still enough difficulty that the player needed to think for most boss fights. Even decent grinding wasn't didn't over-power the characters and there were multiple obvious places for grinding. There was a very challenging secret boss whom challenged the overall mastery of game play and was still beatable in multiple ways, which allowed for creativity. I haven't made it to the secret boss in GS3, assuming that there is one (I believe that I need to re-play through the game to get the pond Djinn), but the difficulty level of the any of the fights rarely ventured into the point where I stopped mashing my A button. GS3's main story was so easy that I rarely saved due to forgetting there was a point to do so. Even when the final boss fight was announced as being "Tougher than any other fight," I pretty much just rolled my eyes, healed the venom poisoning from the fight before, and continued on with little problem. Even the puzzle environments had an easy-mode-of-sorts; Insight.

The character designs in general were bland. Blados is Kisame. Alex wears the second least mysterious costume that I've ever seen after Superman. I knew exactly who the final boss was as soon as they showed him (I'm curious as to whether or not someone was surprised). Isaac came off as an arrogant jerk and a Wesley. Himi was a tacky add-on, Eoleo was boring, as was Rief, and Amiti lost what character and interest he had as the game progressed. Tyrell was another highlight of nostalgia exploitation. I liked Karis and Sveta grew on me until the end when they highlighted her as more of a main character (which I actually did like). Matthew is ...

I laughed a lot at unintentionally comic points, such as Matthew's assumed expletive and when Chalis was described as being such a beauty before they show her 3D face:
.

I liked the new weapon/Djinn system until the short time passed when it became apparent that little thought and effort were put into it. Although I enjoyed the music (Motoi Sakuraba is among my favorite composers), I felt like it was a step backward from Golden Sun 2. The graphics were more polished than other 3D attempts on the DS (e.g. Final Fantasy 4), but I still found the look to be unattractive -- something that isn't a major issue, especially considering my distaste for early-PS2-/PS1-/N64-era 3D graphics (I still think that the summoning sequences look good in particular).

With that said, I eagerly await Golden Sun 4 and I will probably purchase it as soon as I can, just as I did with Golden Sun 3.
 

ZIO

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
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Eh, other than so much not being explained, I enjoyed the game. being spoiled by DQ9, I sorta wished there was a Cure All functions, plus the ability to auto-scroll your text during battle. Plus, the option to customize your interface (Much like the first two) and the addition of a hard more.

I enjoyed the game as a whole, and have yet to get to the extra bosses/dungeons. But I'm sure those won't be much more trouble than the main game. I still find the 1st Goldesun to be my favorite, while making the Lost age a second and putting this in third. Not to say that it's bad, just my taste.
 

Kevin

Smash Journeyman
Joined
Sep 3, 2004
Messages
245
Location
CANADA
I played both the first two games on GBA, and I enjoyed both of them. How is the game play like for this one? Is it the same? And also, is there a WiFi battle mode?

And is the storyline linear? Wondering if it's a continuation because I wouldn't want to play a 'sequel' with a completely new storyline.

Also is there any way to transfer data from the previous games through the GBA slot?
 

F8AL

Banned via Warnings
Joined
Nov 15, 2006
Messages
12,403
Location
Ontario, Canada
I played both the first two games on GBA, and I enjoyed both of them. How is the game play like for this one? Is it the same? And also, is there a WiFi battle mode?

And is the storyline linear? Wondering if it's a continuation because I wouldn't want to play a 'sequel' with a completely new storyline.

Also is there any way to transfer data from the previous games through the GBA slot?
No, there is no sort of multi-player mode.

Nope, you cannot transfer data from the previous games.

I'll let someone else answer the other questions.
 

Raziek

Charging Limit All Day
Joined
Oct 14, 2008
Messages
9,626
Location
Halifax, Nova Scotia
NNID
Raziek
3DS FC
3866-8131-5247
I played both the first two games on GBA, and I enjoyed both of them. How is the game play like for this one? Is it the same? And also, is there a WiFi battle mode?

And is the storyline linear? Wondering if it's a continuation because I wouldn't want to play a 'sequel' with a completely new storyline.

Also is there any way to transfer data from the previous games through the GBA slot?
Gameplay is extremely similar.

Online battle mode is the most glaring omission, but it'd be HEAVILY unbalanced by Sveta anyway, so whatever.

Story is pretty linear, but you do have a LITTLE room to **** around and do things out of order, but not much.

Dark Dawn is basically a standalone title. The first two essentially provide the backstory for the game.

No GBA transfer functionality whatsoever.
 

Smasher89

Smash Lord
Joined
Nov 4, 2005
Messages
1,936
Location
Sweden
I did get a little suprised by the last boss "first forme", I kinda thought it was Alex but he just dissapeared instead.
I think this is a buildup for the next game on 3DS where Both parents and children steps in against possibly Alex. Nothing at all with the wise one was a bit suprising, but since he's connected to Mt Aleph it's understandable.
 

Kevin

Smash Journeyman
Joined
Sep 3, 2004
Messages
245
Location
CANADA
Thanks for the replies guys, I'll probably play through it during the next few weeks.
 
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