Introduction

When I was a little kid the moderators told me not to play Golden Sun. So once when I was starting an LP, I did. At first the poor design was overwhelming, but I had seen that before. I kept looking, forcing myself not to remove the batteries, and then the horror began to dissolve. My sense of good taste shrunk to nothingness and everything came into focus and for a moment I understood. My friends didn't know if my judgment of quality would ever heal. I was terrified, alone in having withstood that game. Slowly better games crept into my GBA, and I could enjoy them again, but something else had changed inside of me.
-Quovak, pre-insanity

This is a terrible idea.
-Both of Quovak's friends

Golden Sun is, second only to Phoenix Wright and every single Pokemon game, the bane of this subforum. Released near the very beginning of the GBA's lifespan, the game initially stunned audiences by virtue of having graphics and audio that were only five years out of date instead of ten.

(Pictured: Handheld RPGs pre-Golden Sun)

The novelty of being able to play a halfway non-horrible game while on a car ride (or, more accurately, while squinting into the GBA screen during a supernova so as to make out the details) led to many ignoring the game's crucial failing: It wasn't particularly good. GS attempted to compensate for its paint-by-numbers storyline by having it take up roughly the amount of space as Finnegan's Wake (and make about as much sense

), the characters are less than one-dimensional, the battle system is so simple that meaningful strategy is impossible and unnecessary, and the game only follows half of its own storyline before making you pay up for the next installment to find out things like, say, the significance of the title. This pacing is never alluded to in-game.

Golden Sun still manages to appeal to our nostalgia, however. Perhaps the shared joy of trying to keep our retinas from bleeding was enough to overshadow its poor pacing and absurdly uneven difficulty, or perhaps the seven different attempts at playing this game can simply be chalked up to masochism.

Masochism, surely, was the inspiration for Syrg's kind-of-recent attempt to stop people from trying to LP this game, but, as I am currently demonstrating, he failed, and I'm here to try accomplishing his dream instead. While the game is far from the worst ever made, only having given me a few forms of cancer, its hallowed position in our minds as a result of being "cursed" and perpetually unfinished (I'm among the many who consider Syrg's attempt not really an LP) is far more than GS deserves. But what's to stop me from failing in this goal as well, you ask? Why, just like last time, my own masochism, idiocy, and poor planning of LPs. What else?

Toxx Clause: If any post on the first page of this thread contains the letter S, I will finish an LP of the original Golden Sun (without relying on sequence breaking or otherwise opting out of content) by January 1, 2011. Toxx clause fulfilled on December 19th.

Ah, the good old sound of an ensuing trainwreck. Feel free to discuss both games as much as you want without spoiler tags, berate my stupidity, and do whatever you feel necessary to reduce the tedium of Golden Sun. In the meantime, brace yourselves. You'll need to.

Golden Sun

Suddenly I'm Also Playing The Lost Age

Bonus Content

WilliamLongfellow Fights Saturos Without Mia (And actually makes a GS battle challenging!)
WilliamLongfellow Sees How Long It Takes For GS To Notice Mia is Missing (Answer: Quite a while)

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A note on Golden Sun's writing:

Quovak posted:

In case 70,000 words somehow seems low, I'll refer again to my thread title. The original Metal Gear Solid game script is about 36,000 words. Metal Gear Solid 2, as in the game that has a 45-minute conversation about meme theory between the penultimate and final bosses, is about 47,000 (both of these are for all the mandatory cutscenes, not including optional CODEC calls. Likewise, the GS count doesn't include NPC flavor text).

Golden Sun has 1.49 times as much text as Metal Gear Solid 2, and it is all broken up across three-line dialogue boxes. Golden Sun is also half a game. I have cut out well over half of the dialogue in this game and I don't believe I've lost anything of value.

It's every bit as bad as you think, if not worse.

A note on The Lost Age's priorities:

Sworder posted:

So I got on the larger of the 2 game scripts on gameFAQs and put it into a word cloud.

I don't think anyone is surprised.

The Let's Play Archive

Golden Sun

by Quovak

Introduction

Table of Contents

Golden Sun

Suddenly I'm Also Playing The Lost Age

Bonus Content

Quovak posted:

Sworder posted: