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| A Hateful and Vitriolic Rant Cleverly Disguised as a Review (massive spoilers, obviously) | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Dec 4 2010, 11:45 PM (1,590 Views) | |
| Kentington | Dec 4 2010, 11:45 PM Post #1 |
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Your Robot Overlord
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As I'm sure most members of this forum would (the remainder coming here solely to engage in increasingly convoluted attempts at online vengeance), I consider myself a die-hard fan of the Golden Sun series. There was a time when I would have been willing to give my left testicle just to look at the box art of some hypothetical Golden Sun 3 - specifically, that time was sophomore year of high school, and by Kraden does that make me feel old. So, the question then becomes - was Dark Dawn worth the long years of waiting with nary a peep from Nintendo? Is it a worthy sequel to the games we once loved? The answer is a resounding... meh. Setting/Story Let's get the good out of the way first. A Weyard torn by seismic disasters and ravaged by war is thematically a step in the right direction - showing the immense cost of unsealing Alchemy and the struggles that lie ahead is vastly preferable to saying that "the original cast all lived happily ever after" and setting the game in the far future. With the exception of "Fireball-Throwing Pigeon" Tyrell, the characters actually seem somewhat interesting this time around, if a bit of a statistical anomaly (it's no wonder that Weyard is politically unstable if three out of every eight characters are royalty of some sort!). I was also pleasantly surprised to see that they refrained from killing off any of the old crew for dramatic purposes. Unfortunately, the rest of the setting is pretty weak. Cities and nations that didn't exist thirty years ago now dominate the continent, and have even had time to undergo civil wars and split in half. Despite the wars, people are so relentlessly upbeat (notice the entire city of musically-inclined beastmen - you sure got over your racial persecution and attempted enslavement quickly, didn't you?) that the emotional impact is completely lost. A few tidbits regarding the ancients are revealed (including the casual revelation, through an encyclopedia entry, that the Wise One is an artificial construct), but they aren't given any real substance - yes, they sealed away Alchemy because they feared its power, but why? Were there warring clans or rival factions? An apocalypse stopped only by an ancient band of heroes that would make excellent protagonists for a prequel? We're left with little more than we already knew, and some tantalizing hints that are never elaborated upon. New entities are introduced that should have been obvious in the previous games - it's kind of hard to miss a continent-spanning wall, after all - while only a handful of towns from the original games (which we're already emotionally invested in and would like to witness the fate of) recur. So, Weyard has been taken in a completely new direction, and quite logically the developers realized that they needed to include some elements that would be familiar to players of the first two Golden Suns. Unfortunately, they overdid it, to the point where much of the game feels stale - or worse, like fanservice. The items in particular seem to have been shamelessly recycled, with only a few new artifacts showing up. You'd have to jump through a lot of hoops to explain that in-world: maybe the original heroes, realizing that they were too old to be protagonists, decided to visit all of Dark Dawn's dungeons in advance and leave their one-of-a-kind relics just lying around for their kids to find. Several bosses from TLA reappear without explanation, as does Crossbone Isle (with the puzzles dumbed down and given an injection of blandness, naturally). Worst of all were the "Psynergy Training Grounds," an actual theme park - in a medieval-ish fantasy world, remember - based around the first two games' adventures. Notably absent are some recurring places and people that actually would have made sense - for instance, why wasn't Xian, rather than Tonfon, the capital of Sana, with Feizhi as a recurring NPC? Worst of all, at least for someone for whom the story is the main attraction in any game, Dark Dawn's plot is all setup and no punchline. The main storyline seemingly accomplishes nothing besides getting a bunch of random NPCs killed; the initial problem of Psynergy Vortices is completely forgotten until the post-credits cliffhanger, a new clan of "dark Adepts" is introduced right at the end (again, with no resolution; everyone seems to just sort of leave after the Giant Doom Laser is fired), and Alex's master plan - besides showing up wearing a Phantom of the Opera mask that conceals his identity about as effectively as a shirt saying "TOTALLY NOT ALEX" - involves causing an apocalyptic eclipse (say that three times fast) and then ending it with no discernable gain. The original games may not have had ground-breaking plots, but at least they went somewhere; Dark Dawn just sort of ends with no resolution. Gameplay Gameplay-wise, Dark Dawn sticks closely to its predecessors, with a few improvements - weapon proficiencies and multiple unleashes were a nice touch, though they could have been done more in-depth. I assume I don't have to elaborate on Golden Sun's gameplay - it's quite good for a JRPG, and the whole "use your spells for more than just murder" aspect is something I wish more JRPGs did. Besides the two specific cases below, I can't think of any major nitpicks, with the possible exception of bows (pointless, since they're mechanically no different from melee weapons - if the goal was just to add new weapon types, why the hell couldn't we use Menardi/Karst's badass scythe?) and a few new Psynergies being almost entirely useless (Track has two uses in the entire game, while Insight is more or less a "hint button" for especially clueless players). Speaking of cluelessness, I can't imagine the train of thought that led Camelot to make so many Djinn and summon tablets permanently missable. I can understand not having the time or desire to remake some of the early towns post-eclipse, but there are better options than simply forcing the player to restart the game if they want all the Djinn - maybe stick the ones you missed as rare random encounters in side dungeons like Crossbone Isle, or have them randomly appear in any encounter after you beat the game. Considering the critical role Djinn play in determining your party's strength, I would have guessed that more emphasis would have been placed on not letting a few mistakes permanently cripple your combat effectiveness. Well, maybe that's a tad bit harsh - it really doesn't matter how strong your party is, as Dark Dawn's combat system seems almost entirely vestigial. Until the eclipse, and for much of the game thereafter, every single random encounter can be beaten simply by mashing A, making them completely pointless except for padding that all-important gameplay length. Someday I'd like to see a ROM hack that removes random encounters completely and adjusts your level according to progress in the story so that you don't get mashed to a pulp in the (actually marginally interesting) boss fights. Or, you know, beefs up the enemies so that they actually pose a challenge. Here I'm picturing Isaac lecturing Matthew: "Back in my day, random encounters were a life-or-death struggle! You'd be down to a few PP, wondering if it's worth it to blast the critters into dust, or if you should save them for reattaching your severed limbs after the battle (that reminds me, I have a funny story about a "below-the-belt critical" some idiot scored on Garet and how we had to get Mia drunk before she'd Ply it back on). But you kids have it so easy these days, what with your absurdly-low-cost group healing spell, and the pushover enemies, and..." Aesthetics Hands-down, the original Golden Suns have Dark Dawn beat aesthetically. While creating a fully-3D RPG on the Nintendo DS was a courageous effort, and while there were a few scenes where the 3D really helped immerse me in the environment, current-generation handheld technology simply cannot compete with pre-rendered sprites - particularly when it comes to characters and their faces. You'd think that the developers of (in my opinion, at least) the most beautiful games on the GBA would realize that handheld 3D isn't yet mature and would go with what had worked so well before. After all, it does horrid things to the immersion when you're forced to come up with an explanation for why everyone looks so damn bad: in my case, high radiation levels in the aftermath of the Golden Sun caused everyone on Weyard to grow disfiguring facial tumors. In contrast, Dark Dawn's music was, with one or two exceptions (and here I'm thinking of the sailing theme, which was obviously composed when Sakuraba was suffering from some sort of brain injury), pretty good, with a few outstanding tracks like the epic song that plays when you're marching atop the Endless Wall. Much of it was remixed from the original games, but then again, so was most of the other content... Final Verdict Dark Dawn is a solid JRPG, but simply can't compete with its predecessors. This isn't to say I didn't enjoy it, or that I'm the kind of reactionary who can't handle any deviation from familiar things, but Dark Dawn just feels... unpolished. I would almost call it fanfiction, an attempt to build on something great that completely fails to capture the essence of what made the original great. I have high hopes for the inevitable sequel, though - now that Camelot is witnessing how profitable reviving Golden Sun is, maybe they can afford to replace the nine-year-old they hired to write the scenario ("There's a super awesome clan of DARK ADEPTS!!! And a guy with a big sword named BLADOS!!! And the game ends with a GIANT LASER GUN! Also, beastmen, because I'm completely ignorant of the fact that this will result in furverts stinking up the fandom.") and can produce a game that does justice to the Golden Sun name. |
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| b l o n d e b o n d | Dec 5 2010, 12:11 AM Post #2 |
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Wombo Combo
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*clap* |
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| Venus Djinni | Dec 5 2010, 02:10 AM Post #3 |
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...Meh is right. Some of your criticisms I can agree on (the inexplicable teleportation of Crossbone Isle to the other side of the world comes to mind), but I have to disagree with you on a lot of the others. One thing in particular: I like to think that Tonfon WAS Xian pre-GSEvent. Same goes for most of the other randomly-appearing towns/cities/ruins. If you look at real life during any major period of upheaval, such as the time following either World War, you'll notice cities and countries shifting borders constantly and changing their names and ownership, even within the space of a year or two (less by far than the 30 that Weyard's nations have had to change their names.) Here I'd call it a case of Reality Is Unrealistic. I do agree as well on the point about the artifacts--either there happen to be two Sol Blades, for example, lying around on Weyard, or Isaac was wandering through Angara one day when Apollo himself descended in a golden cloud and said "Yo Isaac, can I borrow that? I need to put it in my temple for your future son to find so he can activate my GIANT LAZOR BEEM UV DEWM!!!11" ...Oh yeah, and I can't have been the only one who exclaimed "I'mma firin' mah lazor! BLARGH!" when the Apollo Cannon or whatever was fired. XD ~
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| Role | Dec 5 2010, 07:03 AM Post #4 |
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Fulminous Witch
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For a strange reason, I'm glad dark dawn included Sveta - for proof as to a reason NOT TO HAVE WEREWOLVES FOR EXACTLY THE REASONS I SAID. One of the things that really put me off about her was the severe equipment restrictions she had - a weapon class EXCLUSIVE to her, along with support for only Clothing. In terms of strategic setups, it severely limited what you could do for her. To add insult to injury, the game gives her some plot gear that could be considered her ubergear - which just packs on the resistance. Then there was the transforming. Though I applaud how they did it, you waste a turn to transform. Tell me, how many turns does it usually take to wipe out a squad of mooks? Yeah, that's right. Usually ONE. MAYBE two. For bosses? Wasn't much help there either. Another thing that it did was show once again the need for a balanced pair of parties. Out of the four characters in the Team Royals half of the party have alt-classes that totally disagree with their build, further emphasizing the need to separate the two teams classwise. As for your fanfiction argument, you forgot something. Half of the team consists of the descendants of the heroes. The other half? PRINCES AND PRINCESSES. I'M NOT FREAKING KIDDING HERE. Overall the game WAS great, but at times I will admit - the werewolf experiment, while cool, failed IMO. And the second party, though fanservicy, was a joke. Eoleo was basically Jenna but with EPAs and Fighter equips. Himi was rather bland, and her only non-base mage class was basically an adaption of the Necromage line. Amiti (while being more or less the son of Weyard's Satan more or less) was just a cruel joke, IMO. Piers, but with mage gear. I really wanna get ahold of their growths, base class values, experience charts, etc... so that I can get a better gauge of them. In this game, it looked like they were trying more to appease the fans than to address the mechanics. We got a werewolf, a jupiter fighter, a female fighter, a female venus adept, a venus mage, and a playable Eoleo all in one game. All the biggest calls addressed right there - except for game mechanics. Which they broke even more, now that unleashes can strike multiple foes now. Oh, and lets not forget that weapon mastery RAISES HOW MUCH THE WEAPON BOOSTS YOUR ATTACK TOO. Oh, and that 999 Attack Stat cap? IT'S GONE. I broke 1K with Master Matt The Sol Ninja after ONE impact. ONE! He's only in his 60s! He shouldn't be able to do that yet! What did they do for psynergy? ... Nothing. As far as I could see, it was the same mechanics as before. Hopefully in the next game they'll focus less on fanservice and more on gameplay and balance, really. AND FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, MAKE THE ALT-CLASSES SEPARATE BETWEEN THE TEAMS. I want no more of this Wizard Sveta and Ronin Jenna bullshit. ...I'm sure, somewhere in that nonsensical rant, there's a grain of logic. But I'm operating on low sleep right now, have quite a few grievances with the mechanics of the game, and reading the topic made just want to post it. If you disagree, just give me some sleep. I may wake up and say "What the hell was I smoking" on some of that. But on the mechanics bit, I'm dead serious. |
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| Kula Diamond | Dec 5 2010, 07:24 AM Post #5 |
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atlus tracts
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To be honest, this was localization's fault. |
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| Role | Dec 5 2010, 07:27 AM Post #6 |
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Fulminous Witch
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Actually, that's not even his name. In the end, it's blatantly said that those are just Titles they used, just like how Alex chose Arcanus. The Almighty himself spells it out for us - all and all, Blados and Chalis are but aliases. We never find out their real names. |
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| Hinoa | Dec 5 2010, 04:20 PM Post #7 |
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Enabling Terrible Ideas since 2012
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Role, I want you to try something: set a Venus Djinni on Sveta. |
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| Role | Dec 5 2010, 05:23 PM Post #8 |
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Fulminous Witch
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Hin, I want you to try something. See if setting ANY OTHER TYPE OF DJINN will allow for her to have similar treatment. Hin, I want you to try something. For Himi, set to her anything other than earth and fire, and see if she is still a mage. I rest my case. |
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| Hinoa | Dec 5 2010, 05:24 PM Post #9 |
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Enabling Terrible Ideas since 2012
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Better than nothing, though, ain't it? [[EDIT]]: And honestly, according to my research, Beastling isn't that great of a physical class anyway. More magic than Squire, but less attack. |
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| Role | Dec 5 2010, 05:51 PM Post #10 |
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Fulminous Witch
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Yeah, there's my problem. I want them to work in more than just base classes. In fact, if they have their own set of alt-classes, it opens up a LOT more in terms of classes. While I have the Children of Vale decked out in leet awesome classes, the problem is is that there's almost NO jupiter djinn left for the others. It'd be less of a problem if I wasn't having to keep Himi as a mage and Sveta as a fighter (leaving ONE alt-class for them). |
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| DJ Octavio | Dec 6 2010, 03:27 AM Post #11 |
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Check out my spicy wasabi beats
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I ended up not using Sveta in her beastling class, I quickly found her brawler class tree by setting venus djinn, and stuck with those. She seems to work better in the class, using those physical psynergy skills for battle instead of using other attacks. |
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| Chrono Ivan | Dec 6 2010, 02:21 PM Post #12 |
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He who strikes like lightning
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Minor quibble re: the whole 'but isaac and felix took all the artifacts!' thing. Look at the demo fights. Look at what Isaac and garet are packing weaponwise. That's right: a normal greatsword and a normal war axe. Look at their djinn... 6 each. Now do you really think Isaac would protect his son with anything LESS than the Sol Blade if he could? The conclusion is inescapable then. Canonicaly, Felix and Co. beat TLA using NOTHING but store bought items and 6 or so Djinn. Which really, makes them even MORE badass. |
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| Venus Djinni | Dec 6 2010, 10:54 PM Post #13 |
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That still begs the question of how the Sol Blade (to name one example) was magically transported from a room in Mars Lighthouse to the top of the Apollo Sanctum, though. Personally, I like my Apollo Descent theory. XD ~
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| Role | Dec 7 2010, 05:47 AM Post #14 |
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Fulminous Witch
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VD, you're operating on the assumption that there's only one Sol Blade. What happened to Isaac's? Two possibilities. First: It's FELIX'S canonically. Second: In canon, he sold it to help with the moving of vale. A mass exodus of its citizens would NOT come cheap, especially with all the expenses they had. They most likely sold sold a lot of their leet gear to help everyone out. |
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| Crash | Dec 7 2010, 06:51 PM Post #15 |
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Wheey! I've became a human being!! I am very handsam!
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*disagrees that Beastform was useless in boss fights* *leaves* |
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| Venus Djinni | Dec 7 2010, 08:24 PM Post #16 |
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I do like the idea that there are two Sol Blades, along with two of every other artifact out there. If there is only one, however, that still leaves the question of how it went from being in possession of Isaac and/or Felix to sitting in a random chest in the Apollo Sanctum, and if canonically they never picked it up at all, then how did it teleport from Mars Lighthouse to Apollo. Along with, of course, every other artifact weapon/armor there is in the game. Nevertheless, I'm willing to call Gameplay and Story Segregation on this one, because I think Isaac giving Matthew his Sol Blade early on in the game would be a gamebreaker, in my opinion. Dark Dawn is a WONDERFUL sequel. ~
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| Chrono Ivan | Dec 7 2010, 09:17 PM Post #17 |
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He who strikes like lightning
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Or y'know, canonoically the Sol blade was NEVER in mars lighthouse. U: Then again you can get multiple excaliburs, tisiphone edges, etc. in TLA, and all of those have unleashes on par with the Sol Blade's. So maybe there are more than one. Spoiler: click to toggle
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| Crash | Dec 7 2010, 09:31 PM Post #18 |
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Wheey! I've became a human being!! I am very handsam!
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I don't have any problem with the idea that there are more Sol Blades than just one. Why should that be a problem? |
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| UltaFlame | Dec 8 2010, 06:39 PM Post #19 |
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Thanks Poui.
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AN ARMY OF FALLING METEORS DESCENDING UPON YOUR HEAD! THE ENTIRE VENUS CLAN UNLEASHES SEVERAL THOUSAND MEGIDDO AT ONCE! And then all of everything else died forever. |
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| Venus Djinni | Dec 8 2010, 10:57 PM Post #20 |
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...Okay, I retract my earlier statement. Multiple Sol Blades are AWESOME. And will ensure Venus Clan dominance forevermore. ![]() INFINITE MEGIDDO!!!!!!!!!! ~
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