LogFAQs > #899544239

You should try Skyborn and Echoes! Echoes is much, much improved though, so you may want to do Skyborn first (it's short).

42. Golden Sun: Dark Dawn
Original Release: 2010
Developer: Camelot
Platform: DS

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This game is condemned by the Nintendo community, or just people in general as a whole. It's wholly underrated. It's a damn good game. Stop hating on it. Let me explain.

Dark Dawn was not the follow up everybody asked for. People's expectations after the first two games were simply too damn high, but Camelot went ahead and released a game that is essentially "part one" of an ongoing story, a prologue of sorts. Well, the sequel never came into fruition, likely due to poor sales and word of mouth. That's a real shame, because the story was shaping up to be something good as you reached the end. It's like if Trails SC never came out. Speaking of story, it's...not good, but it gets better. There's a reason for that, I think...the game is more concerned about worldbuilding rather than telling a compelling plot. Your goal is to go repair something and finding the item takes up half the game. You trek through a fantasy ancient Asia and finally find the hawk's wing but then all hell breaks loose. It's quite jarring for a Golden Sun game to get as dark as it does when a certain eclipse occurs, but I thought it worked pretty well, and coming from a happy-go-lucky journey to "we must now save the country" felt rather refreshing.

But really, the game isn't really about the plot. It's more about the journey. I love the Fantasy Counterpart Culture trope (basically an expy culture of a real world thing, ie Wutai is Asia and Gold Saucer is Vegas-y, look it up on TVTropes) and we saw traces of it in Golden Sun 1 and 2's amazing world. Dark Dawn takes it up another notch, this time being set in a new Angara (alchemy did it) the same continent from Golden Sun 1. The majority of Angara takes heavy inspiration for ancient Asian civilization. I mean, just look at this map:



You'll visit an ancient Thailand, an ancient Korea, an ancient Tibet, an ancient China, an ancient Siberia...and so forth. Oh, and there's even the Great Wall of China. The designs of each part of the world are impeccable. Each town looks different and is booming with detail and personality. The game world is simply beautiful and it's easy to get wrapped around it. There are also many, many locations for a 20 hour game and like I said earlier, everything and everywhere is filled with tons of detail. This is easily one of the best things about this game! I can't forget to mention the amount of lore/backstory and worldbuilding here. As you journey, you'll constantly learn about the ways of the world and certain terms, names, and locations will appear in your glossary in case you want to look it up. Being enveloped in the journey makes it much easier to appreciate the lack of story in these sections, and then once the plot picks up in the second half, you'll appreciate it even more!

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Obviously I can't rank this higher despite my overall appreciation of it as said above. It's still a freaking flawed game. It ends in a terrible cliffhanger with tons of unanswered questions and plot threads. The game obviously needs a sequel but the only way we'll ever get one is if Camelot decides to re-released the remastered GS trilogy and it sells well, and they might only consider it. I'd love to revisit this beautiful, breathtaking world again. The characters also suffered from the "prologue" feel of the game. You get eight of them, which is a tad too many for a 20-25 hour game. They're all mostly one-note and four of them have little reason to be there. The last character joins way too late and has barely any lines. I get the impression she would have had more of a role in a sequel.