Golden Sun

I'm going to use this to promote Golden Sun...the greatest series ever to reach the GameBoy Advance (and later the DS) XD

The first two games, for the GameBoy Advance, pushed the sound and visual capabilities to their limits--the music was composed by Motoi Sakuraba, who also composed the music for Eternal Sonata. The graphics are pseudo-3D, and you can run diagonally XD (As a kid going from the Pokemon games to Golden Sun, this was pretty impressive to me, haha.) The two games also stand alone fairly well--I played the second game first, and then went back and bought a used copy of the original. (Now, however, it's probably pretty hard to find--I haven't seen a used copy of either game in any Gamestop I've looked at.)

The one major claim to fame that the series has is Isaac, the blond-haired (hothothothothot) hero of the first game, and secondary character in the second, who was made into a trophy in the game Super Smash Bros: Brawl.

Eight years later, we fans finally got what we wanted--another sequel, called Golden Sun: Dark Dawn for the Nintendo DS. This story followed the beginning of an adventure led by Isaac's son, Matthew. In my opinion, Dark Dawn wasn't as challenging as the original two as far as the puzzles go, but I still enjoyed it, mostly out of nostalgia value and the fact that Matthew was the child of my favorite pairing. The music was again composed by Motoi Sakuraba, so there's nothing lacking there. The graphics weren't my favorite, but they were still pretty impressive, considering.


In general, if you want a good game, pick up the original, and if you find yourself falling madly in love like I did, then you should try the DS version.

I felt the same way about the DS version. When I got to the end, it was a bit of a let down that it was so short and not terribly challenging. The first ones are amazing though!