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When the Nostalgia Goggles are on too Tight
Topic Started: Jun 19 2016, 04:52 AM (1,077 Views)
Safe Haven
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Bratty Vagabond

December 25, 2011 (Most likely)

A small gift was opened, revealing a DS game case with a heavily denim clad boy posed heroically in front of an eclipse. The memories are faded, but at the time the girl was around seven. She played the game, rushing through the story and forgoing any sort of treasure or djinn hunts. Eventually, the girl finally made to the finale of the game, with few memories besides that of a silly child's crush herself. Sadly, with her inexperience, she was stressed to tears over the goat/wolf/human chimera. Like most games she could not win, the child put the game away for years, until a slightly older version of the girl picked it up again.

Who knew the obsession that would stem from that choice.


Anyways, in a more serious tone, I'm going to come out and say it...

I really liked Dark Dawn.

I can here your gasps of disgust and sighs of pity now, but let me say this first.

This is probably due to my close connection to the game in my younger years. I am biased, and have literally no sense of quality.

Anyways, moving on... as I said, I thoroughly enjoyed Dark Dawn for a multitude of reasons.

It looked nice, it sounded nice, I love most of the characters... yeah, they were a little underdeveloped don't even get me started on the villains but I've had so much fun making inside jokes and stories about them. Hell, I wouldn't have two of my closest friends without Dark Dawn and it's characters.

It was simple, it was enjoyable, and it was fun to follow the story of Matthew, Karis, and Tyrell as they went on a journey for a feather and ended up saving the world. Life's funny like that cx

Now, I understand that the story may not have been the best, or that the second generation route might not have been the best path to take, or that a cliffhanger when you aren't 100% sure you're making a next one is the dumbest ending ever, or even that the characters sucked. I haven't spent much time around the older games, usually playing with a walkthrough for fear of missing something and trying to get the goddamn passcode for Fort Knox to work, so I don't really know what a Golden Sun sequel should look like.

I'm just saying that I thought that Dark Dawn was a great game, and an even greater game when all the inside jokes are applied XD

Anyways, thanks for listening to my newbie opinion :D

and if you find a way to take nostalgia goggles off please let me know
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Miva
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Keep your goggles on, its not hurting anyone. Us oldies are more critical of DD because we waited a long time for it and we were so excited. Yeah it wasn't the best game ever, but I do think it had good qualities and I'm glad they made it.
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WitchRolina
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Missing the Unified Aesthetic

Eh, most of the anger on Dark Dawn isn't over the qualities of the game itself, but rather because of two other things:

1: The stark departure of trends the series had before, and embracing of many player-unfriendly aspects (such as PoNRs)
2: The failure of the franchise to grow and evolve, or truly iterate upon itself in any real substantial way.

In fact, many of its problems are actually that it tries too much to please the fans, to the point that it tries to appease both sides of a conflicting argument (See: New Heroes vs Returning Heroes, and Light and Dark as Elements vs Light and Dark as Symbols). Basically, Dark Dawn tried superficially to appeal to everyone, but really didn't do what it needed substantially to satisfy returning fans. Too little where it mattered, too much where it didn't.

In fact, I'd argue the best way to enjoy DD is to start with it. You won't have the same baggage of expectations the rest of us had.


Of course, there are many things DD got right, too. As much as we like to complain that DD just didn't give us what we wanted or needed out of a sequel, it did step up the game in several areas. The icons DD has a far superior in design to the GBA ones, and the in-battle models were spectacular.

It's not that we hate the game, it's just... well, we're disappointed. It could have been much better, you know? And it wouldn't have taken much. Change the focus of the main quest from the stupid feather to the Tuaparang. Give us a fully new class setup and stat support for psynergy. Make conversations flow better, and let Matt speak (you gave us dialogue options for crying out loud!). Those small changes and DD would have been a much better game.
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Tichondrian
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Tide Warden

My own analysis starts with like, the game setup. There used to be a choice of how the game progressed and how you as a player interacted with the world, you were pretty much allowed to be where ever you wanted to be as a player. There was a focus on exploration. And the Golden Sun world had a lot of good things to explore and find.

Essentially one of the strong points was how it got the player to search around the world, explore the world on where to go next.

Dark Dawn decided differently, and chunked up the explorable world into specific set places. And the worst offence was the points of no return. If you played it for the first time, you were faced with these points of no return too suddenly, and I often felt like I did not have enough time to explore where I was and felt suddenly railroaded into the next area of the game.

And even moreso, it lost an element of being able to go back, because now the game trimmed away those tantalising paths that were blocked off and you later learned how to overcome. It removed pretty much all of this type of content in favour of it's linearity.

And that is one of my big pieces of beef.

Another big piece is character development, or better yet the lack of it. Due to the game's structure, the adepts were introduced too quickly, and in an attempt to quickly build out a cast of 8 characters, not many characters received a lot of screentime. And the stuff that was left felt like it was jammed in awkwardly.

I wouldn't have minded this game just to have one set of 4 adepts. And focus on their story. But that is my last piece of beef. The story went nowhere. And it was a typical setup story where a lot of answers were going to be given in the sequel. The bigger issue with this last one being, there has been no sequel. I personally feel like we have been left to hang here.

We know the Psynergy vortexes are an issue, we know the Tuaparang and dark adepts are trying something, and that Blados and Chalis were doing shenanigans, Alex was also trying to pull something.

The problem is it feels unfinished and frankly a bit rushed. The pacing of the story is off.

And frankly it feels unfair, I wanted Dark Dawn to be a cool sequel, and I feel had they shifted the direction and cleaned up the story a lot, the game could have been brilliant. Rip out the whole sidequest of getting the feather, focus just on the Psynergy Vortexes, have these be the new life threatening things. Have a clue be hidden around Mount Aleph that forces Isaac to make a decision, send his son and friends because they can't handle Aleph but they might be able to handle this quest. Introduce the Tuaparang as potential benefactors of these Psynergy vortexes.

And the last thing is motive, we know the motives of Saturos and Menardi were of good intentions, this setup was clear from the inception of the Golden Sun story. But again with lack of a sequel to provide context to this story, we know nothing. And I think that is sad.

I don't know, I am very critical cause I loved Golden Sun's story as a kid, the whole change of perspective, how there is no good versus evil going on, but a clash of ideas and beliefs. It was so revolutionary. Golden Sun doesn't have bad guys per se, they have good guys who are at the end of their wits. I don't see it yet.

And without the Golden Sun Dark Dawn: Part II to clear this up, and with the mediocre story we have gotten so far, I can't say Dark Dawn was great. I enjoyed it, but unlike the Lost Age, I have not replayed it.
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cipher
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Fancy Chicken

I'm glad you enjoyed the game! I think despite its flaws, the game brought in a new generation of fans to the franchise so that was a great thing.

Not to mention it gave the fandom a whole lot more fodder for discussion!
e r r or
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WitchRolina
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Missing the Unified Aesthetic

Can't deny that. The subreddit flat out made a rule against bashing it because of our tenancies to devolve into multi-hour rants.
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Shadowfyst997
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The Dark Wolf General

Without getting too intense into it here, I enjoyed Dark Dawn. I'm on my fourth playthrough right now. Do i prefer the first two games? Absolutely. Doesn't make Dark Dawn a bad game. My main gripes with it is that DD was way too easy, and they retconned a LOT of lore from the first two games. Also Himi. F***ing HATE Himi. >.> Don't even get me started. Then there are the PoNR's which can be a little aggravating, but easy to work around once you know they are there. But Dark Dawn as a whole? Yeah, it's fun. It scratches the Golden Sun itch.
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Delfes
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Regular Adept #18

Multi-hour rants? Wow that's a lot of ranting. Granted much of it is deserved, DD was far from all bad.

To be fair, golden sun was never a difficult game. Neither TBS nor TLA gave much of a chalenge in normal mode except for the super bosses, and even then it wasn't all that hard save for dullahan. Sure, there was hard mode, but only after the first playthrough.
Edited by Delfes, Jun 21 2016, 02:16 AM.
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darkjaden825698
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I, personally, really liked Dark Dawn. TLA is still my favorite in the series, but DD was good in its own rights. I loved some of the new concepts it introduced: dark adepts, the Alchemy Machines, Apollo Sanctum, the Beast Tribe, etc. I actually didn't mind the next-generation aspect of it, even though I usually hate most things that make heterosexuality explicitly canon. I liked the second party, too, though I agree that a cast of eight feels a bit crowded in a game like this.

Honestly, the game isn't that long; it feels like it fits closer to TBS's length than TLA's, which is probably why a cast of 8 seems really out of place. If the game were longer, had more going on, more plot-related anyway, not feather-related, it wouldn't seem as bad, in my opinion.

So, Dark Dawn. Not great, but not terrible. Worth a replay, for sure.

I'm just surprised it took them 10 years to make it so if you fell the enemy with one person the next person should attack the next enemy, not just defend. Always hated that about the original games. Made grinding kind of a bitch.
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Cato Felix
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Aspiring Hero

I played it too long ago to remember, but I had just stopped playing while collecting the Umbris (I think?) equipment. I forgot why I had been collecting them, too, but...

I didn't hate it--I enjoyed it for what it was worth, as it came in a nice time in my life, too--but I don't think it felt as much a Golden Sun game as it could've, as a few others are saying above. Still, enjoyed it, and I just remember liking Sveta the best. ^_^
"Remember Man, that you are dust, and onto dust you shall return."
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TiamaJaybird
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Occupation: Sef-proclaimed Shark Expert

Haven chill. DD Was the game that told me the franchise even existed.

I'm a nut for story and world building and while playing DD, I found a world I'd never encountered before and was pretty much overwhelmed by it. Now that I've played the fist two, the world in DD seems a bit small and dull, but I still have a soft spot that makes me return once in a while to just walk around and look at the atmosphere and environment. I liked finding little things and details in the game, things that made it all the more special

And, let me be honest here, I made the same mistake you did when playing the game for my first time. I rushed through it and found myself stuck at the Chaos Chimera. Not my greatest move. And for god's sake, I was in college. I was like, 18 or 19 playing the game. And I made the EXACT same mistake you did.

Older or younger, people can still screw up playing a game as basic and one note as DD. XD
"Give the performance of your life!!" - Kaori Miyazono Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso/Your Lie In April
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Artisan
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Dark Dawn could've used a better narrative to avoid dragging out smaller parts of the story and the enemies needed a way to keep up with the insane amount of power the player could get by exploring and grinding. Critique aside, it was a pretty good game.
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Cato Felix
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Aspiring Hero

Just one other thing about the game--the PoNRs actually were one of the reasons I didn't like the game so much. One of the cool things you could do in TBS was go back to Vale after getting Ivan to get the treasure behind the ivy wall. I didn't feel like DD did that sort of thing, as much. At least, I don't really remember it...

(Just, um, another little thing to throw on DD)
"Remember Man, that you are dust, and onto dust you shall return."
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Shadowfyst997
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The Dark Wolf General

Yeah, PONR's are a real piss off for me. I hated that If I didn't have a guide with me to double check, I'd miss Djinn. and as a completionist, that would piss me off. What I always did with the first two games was go through the game, collecting every Djinn that I remembered how to get, which is most of them, and then at the end of the game I'd go collect all the ones i'd missed, looking them up if I had to.

IN DD, on my first playthrough, I was livid to discover i'd missed like 2 that I could never go back and get again. Soooooooooooooo mad.
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