I'm excited for you! If you like it, that is. There's a lot of game to enjoy, and if you do dig it you can carry over the save to the sequel. If you don't like it though, no pressure. There are so many other games out there to try. :)
I won't deny that it's a fun game. But... If you think it was well-written, it's the rose glasses. The story is really nonsensical if you think about it...
I remember playing the first Golden Sun very close to its release thanks to emulation. But my rom was bugged so the game crashed when the final boss used his ultimate attack. At the time I didn't know I could transfer my .sav file from one rom to another, and that it would probably work if the roms are from the same game/region. I was just a teenager. 😅
The second game I played on cartridge and the wait was very painful because, contrary to what's costumary nowadays, Golden Sun The Lost Age released on the west a few months after its japanese release date. The japanese rom was floating around the web, with some very preliminary stopgap fan-translations, but it was not a good experience and most people chose to wait.
Hell yeah! It’s one of my favorite games. It’s in my desk drawer next to me. Not sure where the 2nd game is right now tho. I’m a big fan of how you get to play the story line from two different perspectives. I also like the whole djinn system that lets you change how your characters are spec’d and they’re attack styles.
I lost my cart years ago and I'm still to this day upset by that, easily my favourite gba game by a mile. The djinn system was super cool, I remember when I starting figuring out how assigning to different characters and having them set or unset would change skills and the like, now I really want to go play it again
Actually used to be a member of a forum focusing on the Golden Sun games. I was very impressed with them back in the day; they felt like a prime SNES-era JRPG designed for the GBA. I especially liked how the Psynergy system was used for puzzles outside of combat; non-combat uses of magic is something I've considered to be lacking in JRPGs generally, so it was a nice curiosity.
I've played all of them and I really enjoyed 1 and 2! I have played and beaten 3 but I can't possibly tell you anything about the plot because I literally don't remember it. I just remember farming levels on the last map at the end of the game because it was amazing experience. Definitely give 1 and 2 a chance and just forget about 3.
Golden Sun holds a place in my heart as the first JRPG I played that had me do more than just click Attack for the majority of turns. A lot of older titles suffered in that regard, but Golden Sun addresses it with regenerating PP and free Djinn actions to encourage you to explore your toolkit. Puzzles were also fantastic.
My childhood. Played golden sun and the second one. Never played the third. I probably played those games 3 or 4 times through. I'm pretty sure I have one and an SP around my place somewhere.
Played on the GBA many years ago. Weirdly I have not been able to appreciate a jrpg before or since, for whatever that means. Great style, great music, I recall a fun story but maybe that's just the rose glasses. If you have a hankering to try it is say go for it.
I think it (and its sequel) is the best original RPG on the GBA. It's a little slow to start and it suffers from mountains of unskippable dialog at certain parts but the overall experience is just so damn good I can let that go. Especially the class system, it has one of the most novel class systems I've seen in an RPG.
I played both one and two when I was pretty young. My parents found gba games to be a lot cheaper on eBay. Turns out they were bootleg copies. Because of this the character transfer didn't work from one to two. I was pretty bummed about it.
Still a fun series! Ragnarok!
It's amazing, and highly recommended. I will say for the best experience, play it back to back with it's sequel Lost Age. They are basically 2 halves of the complete story.
Wow I never expected to see golden sun pop up just randomly in the wild like this, but the game has a lot of sentimental value to me. The class system is amazing, this visuals are stunning if not a little dated, the soundtrack is top tier even to this day. I also moderate the magazine here, though the majority of the community is on the Golden Sun discord.
I played through the first one when it came out and really loved it. Never played the sequels though, for whatever reason.
This is probably just me, but I've tried to play through the original on an emulator over the years, and I had a hard time getting in to it. Just felt kind of slow from what I'm used to now.
It was my first GBA game and it blew my mind. I loved that game so much as a kid. Even revisiting as an adult, nostalgia aside, it's a great game. Def one of the best RPGs on the GBA.