Golden Sun: Dark Dawn review

Golden sun and its sequel The Lost Age worked together to create one of the best JRPG game experiences available anywhere, let alone the GBA. It wooed people with its amazing graphics, great battle system and the extremely clever Djinn Summon system that was a unique and completely new addition to the genre.  After many years of fans clamouring for more, Camelot eventually delivered with its DS sequel Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, which I can rightfully say was most definitely worth the wait!

At its core Dark Dawn is a classic style turn based JRPG, you will choose what actions each character (in your party of 4) will perform and then combat is executed in order designated by the character and enemy agility rating. This of course is all standard fare for anyone who has had previous experience with JRPGs of any kind, but where the game truly shines is with what it builds on top of these classic mechanics and twists it offers to the mechanics of things such as equipment and summon monsters.

As previously mentioned you play the game with a party of 4 characters, which you can select from a pool of 8 people, offering 2 characters for each element. You are also able to switch these characters in and out of your main party whenever you wish, so you are not locked down too much. You start the game by being introduced to Isaac and Garet, the protagonists of the first game and their respective sons Matthew and Tyrell; you are also introduced to Karis as well (who is the daughter of Ivan, another character from the original). After a tutorial dungeon you set off with the latter three characters to begin your adventure, meeting other party members at various points throughout the game.

One of the things that I really liked about this game that I haven’t seen done much before is the way that Dark Dawn handles weapon critical hits. Rather than the classic style where you get a chance to deal more damage, here they offer what the game calls weapon unleashes. Each weapon will have a set of abilities that will do different things, usually 2-4 per weapon with some being shared across weapons. Every now and then the weapon will “unleash” one of these abilities when using a standard attack which will do things such as attack multiple enemies, increased damage or apply a status effect. With each ability having its own animation, some of which are really quite impressive, it adds more excitement to the standard brawler class and variation to the standard attack.

The Djinns in the game are Golden Suns equivalent to summon monsters from other RPGs, but here they provide a much more important role both in the games story and with battle mechanics. Djinni can be one of four elements (Venus, Mercury, Mars and Jupiter or earth, water, fire and air respectively) each having their own ability, which can be attack powers, buff abilities or healing. There are 72 Djinn in total that you collect throughout the game, with 18 of each element, you equip them to characters of your choice so that they will be available for them to use, also depending what combination of Djinn you have equipped, it will change the characters inherent class and abilities. Here is where things get different as each Djinn has 2 modes, active and standby, while active the Djinn provides a bonus to your characters stats, but when you use its ability it will go into standby and you will lose the stat bonus. Of course there are advantages to this, first being you get to use the ability but there are also more powerful summons that are available to use which require certain Djinn on standby, for example to summon Daedalus you will need 3 Venus and 4 Mars Djinn on standby, meaning that you are constantly balancing what to do with your Djinn in battles.

 Another thing that this game does differently to other JRPGs are its dungeons, there are still random battles as you explore, but by using certain Psynergy powers (this games equivalent of magic) on the field you will be able to affect the environment in a number of ways. The developers have done a great job here as they have created very puzzle like dungeons, not unlike that of the Legend of Zelda series, so there are things such as block moving puzzles and element based puzzles (i.e melting ice with fire) which require some thought to complete. While none of these puzzles are particularly difficult it provides a whole other aspect to this game which helps to make it unique, another nice touch is that in heavy puzzle rooms there appears to be no, or at least a severely reduced amount of random battles.

There are also some other smaller things that I believe are worth a mention, one such thing that I like is the fact that your PP will recover as you walk around, so you will likely never find yourself out of mana,  keeping you from getting stuck in some places. I also approve of being able to save anywhere you want and that the save menu also shows what your next objective is, so if like me you sometimes find yourself not playing a game for while, you can find out exactly what it was you were doing just by looking here, which is extremely useful.

Saying that though there are also some things that I did not like about this game, included in this is a absolutely pointless emote system which you use to respond to characters with, as Matthew is a mute hero, no matter how you respond I don’t think it changes the game at all, and some of the emotes are ambiguous in what they mean. Another thing is that the game ends on a really weird note, you defeat the boss and after that not too much happens, some character wrap ups, but the story is left almost completely open, this is obviously  leaving it for a sequel, but it is annoying none the less.

I’m sure people who have played the original games are reading this and thinking “Hang on a sec, this sounds exactly like the first games” which brings another of the things that I noticed while playing the game. Throughout the whole game, the gameplay is pretty much identical to the originals in every aspect (including the hidden boss monsters), from what I can tell there are no new mechanics or anything. This is not exactly a bad thing, as the originals were excellent games, but if people did not enjoy the other Golden Sun games then they should look elsewhere, as this does nothing to attract a new audience.  

TL;DR

While Golden Sun: Dark Dawn offers nothing new from previous titles and is pretty standard fare in the realm of JRPGs, it’s still a solid game that doesn’t do too much wrong and is likely one of the best games that I have on my DS. With the main story clocking in at around 25 hours there is quite a lot of game to get through, and there are also bonus dungeons and hidden bosses to explore once the game is completed. I would have a hard time recommending this game to people who are not fans of either the previous games or JRPGs in general, but for people that do like such things you are in for a thoroughly enjoyable experience.

4.5/5

Portal 2 review

Back in 2007 Valve released The Orange Box unto the world, a device used to push some of Valve’s previous games as well as some new ones, one such game in this compilation was the hidden gem of the package - Portal. No one knew what to expect from Portal and it ended up being the surprise favourite, with its dark humour, good atmosphere, clever puzzles and the amazing character of GLaDOS, it became a huge talking point amongst gamers and has remained a staple of great games design.

Now a few years on Valve has released Portal 2, this time as a standalone game which some people doubted at first because if it was much like the first game, although amazing, wondered if it would be worth the full price of a retail release. Well I can safely say that these fears are not needed as the sequel outdoes the first and keeps on going, Valve shows us once again that they are one of the leading developers for a reason.

The coloured gels in this game are awesome additions, if only for the above use.

Portal 2 retains all of the mechanics that were a part of the first game; you of course have your trusty portal gun, which fires two different coloured portals that represent either side of a doorway, buttons that you will more often than not have to use the weighted cubes to hold down, as well as all of the physics from the first game such as retained velocity when travelling through portals. Using these mechanics the player will be given a puzzle room to solve, and when complete can move to the next room.

Along with all of this, the game introduces many new mechanics into the game that both help to increase the complexity for the puzzles, as well as adding more variety. This includes three different coloured gels that are orange, blue and white which make you speed up, bounce and create portal surfaces respectively. Other new mechanics are things such as redirection cubes, that will change the direction a laser is going in (often needing to be directed to a laser switch), hard light surfaces which are bridges that can be used to walk on or block projectiles, excursion funnels which act like a tractor beam and aerial faith plates that launch you in a specified direction.

While this does sound like a hell of a lot of new mechanics to get into, Valve have been smart not to have too much going on in one room, often featuring no more than three or four different things to keep track of at once. By having so many varying puzzle types it helps to keep the game feeling fresh, since as soon as you are starting to find one mechanic a bit tiring the game will then switch it up and offer you new ways to do things. This is a hard balance to keep considering the longer length of the game and is very well done.

Lasers are cool, so in turn laser puzzles are cool, right?

Speaking of game length the single player campaign took me around 8 hours to complete. I don’t really want to speak too much about the specifics of the campaign as it really is best left for you to discover for yourself, just know that the game has some amazing new characters introduced, with all of them having great voice acting, not one line in the game sounded weird or wrong. The game also has brilliant pacing in that it will switch up the puzzle type or area style just when it needs to and also has much greater narrative and direction that the game follows compared to the first game. 

Following on directly from the end of the single player is the co-op campaign; the idea of this is completely new to the series and is fairly well executed despite there being a couple of nitpicky issues that I had. In co-op player 1 and 2 play as two different robots named Atlas and P-Body respectively, each player has their own portal gun that shoot separate portals, therefore some working together is required to coordinate them. The robots also have a variety of humorous commands they can execute such as dancing, hugging or playing rock paper scissors to see who gets to risk their life first. The campaign is split up into different testing areas that can be reached via a hub world that you start in, with each area following a different theme (such as hard-light bridges or excursion funnels) and containing around 10 tests each. While this works well to cut the game into sections, I wish that they would’ve varied the areas a bit more, such as having the tutorial tests for each mechanic in one area then mixing up the tests for the remaining areas. The entire co-op campaign took us roughly 5 hours to complete, which is a decent length as it is more room to room challenges, rather than following a narrative like the single player.

What you don't see here is the emote where they tear eachothers heads off.....

TL;DR

In summary the game triumphs over the first in every single area, creating one of the most enjoyable games I have played, and with the co-op mode you have the added bonus of being able to argue over puzzle solutions with a friend while attempting to work together (which is a good thing), making a great addition to the single player campaign available. Although there will still be doubts of paying full price for what at least for myself was a 13 hour game with pretty much no replay value, I think that it makes up for it in character and pure enjoyment.

4/5