So, why was Golden Sun: Dark Dawn disliked so much?

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Lago PARANOIA
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So, why was Golden Sun: Dark Dawn disliked so much?

Post by Lago PARANOIA »

I've played and I've nearly beat the game. I've beaten GS1 and GS2, but like 10 years ago.

Now, I wouldn't say GS:DD is a good or even a decent game. The characters are bland, manipulating puzzles takes too long, and the game has an absolutely infuriating plot twist near the 2/3rds mark. Like, MoTB-ending infuriating. Well, not that bad.

But still, people are getting upset at DD like the early GS games had something worth preserving. I could understand this kind of angst for Chrono Trigger or even Final Fantasy 8, but fucking Golden Sun 1 and 2?! Those games were awful. Even blander characters, a completely muddled plotline, and repetitive dungeon design. To paraphrase FrankTrollman, I consider GS1 and GS2 to be pretty much unplayable. I don't feel the same way about GS:DD. It's like 1E D&D v. 2E D&D.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by ubernoob »

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Last edited by ubernoob on Tue Jun 09, 2015 1:51 am, edited 1 time in total.
shau
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Post by shau »

Golden Sun was the only game in town when it came to RPGs you could put in your pocket for a long time, and it had a few time things to recommended it (Eg. the summon effects were impressive as all hell if you were used to gameboy). Then they waited long enough for people to get nostalgic or alternately realize the weaknesses of the originals.
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RadiantPhoenix
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Post by RadiantPhoenix »

Golden Sun was and is an RPG where get to manually use your magic powers in interesting ways overcome obstacles and advance the plot, in addition to merely stabbing people in the face with them.

IME, this is different from the vast majority of CRPGs. (I'm looking at you Neverwinter Nights!)

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I think my biggest disappointment with Dark Dawn was that I couldn't import my old party.
Lago PARANOIA
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

If I was going to fix the Golden Sun sequels, assuming that one ever happens, I'd do something like this. Using Golden Sun: Dark Dawn as a baseline:

Add in more NPC-to-PC style dialogues. The Golden Sun franchise's biggest problem, by far, is how flat and bland the characters are. If talking to random NPCs villagers would actually have the people in your party talking back, it'd help a lot with characterization.

The villains either need to be more threatening from the start or you need to introduce new ones that don't have the taint of comic relief on them. The villains in DD don't really do anything until the 2/3rds mark of the game, then they do something so game-changing and evil that it's like... it's like watching Elmer Fudd finally catch Bugs Bunny and graphically disembowel him before boiling him alive in soup. Or like hearing that Dalton transformed Porre into a global empire and killed the main characters of Chrono Trigger offscreen in a brutal war. They were played up as ineffectual trash-talking meddlers for most of the game and having them drop a drama bomb that big on the game is too tonally dissonant.

Get rid of that point of no return djinn crap. Having a collect-a-thon is fine, forcing people to go huge stretches of time with reduced power if they don't follow some specific set of steps is a ploy to sell more books.

The characters need to have more diverse tactics than straight-up HP spam. The only real meaningful difference between the characters was that some characters were incompetent at melee, elemental affinities, and Sveta's mechanic. Final Fantasy X, at least the early game, is pretty much the gold standard on how to differentiate the various characters without (aside from the Yuna summoning) deviating from the basic combat engine too much. For example, you should have your glass cannon, your padded sumo character, your Rage Meter character, your mezzer/buffer support character, your jack-of-all-trades toolbox character, your slow-but-strong character, your stretches out party resources character, and your resource-hungry alpha strike character. There, that's eight character archetypes right there and there's a reason to use each one.

Going with the above, the game needs a way and reason to hot-swap characters that's not just '1st-turn summon blitz with second-stringers, bring in the front-liners'. Final Fantasy X to me is the gold standard on how to have a party larger than the in-battle limit while still making them feel useful.

Make the djinn class-change system more useful. While it's not optimal, until the endgame just matching djinn with the peoples' native elements is in the top 90% of ways to arrange them. The game needs a lot more classes with more dramatic transformations for the classes. Moreover, while experimenting is fine you should only have to find a particular combination once. After that, you should just be able to select the classes for your party and the game takes care of the rest.

Better inventory management. If you want to have item limits, that's fine, but as it stands it's not a real limit because you have way more characters than you have item slots and the item slots compete with plot-mandatory items and basic equipment. It's just a huge pain in the ass. You should either have a shared bag inventory like the Final Fantasies or something like Secret of Mana 2/Seiken Densetsu 3's inventory where you have a quick inventory you use in battle and a bag inventory for storage.

Reduce the PP regeneration rate AND get rid of the PP limits for out-of-battle power usage. As it stands, it's not really a meaningful limit. Even when I use PP like crazy I rarely had to worry about running out.
Last edited by Lago PARANOIA on Thu Feb 27, 2014 12:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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RadiantPhoenix
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Post by RadiantPhoenix »

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Going with the above, the game needs a way and reason to hot-swap characters that's not just '1st-turn summon blitz with second-stringers, bring in the front-liners'. Final Fantasy X to me is the gold standard on how to have a party larger than the in-battle limit while still making them feel useful.
In TLA, for the final boss and secret bosses, I did it the other way around:

At first, fire and water alternate barrier djinn, while earth and wind put the hurt on -- earth with swords (for the unleash effects -- go go Megiddo!), and wind with summons (pure wind, of course). When necessary, earth takes one side of the barrier tag-team while fire or water mass-heals (or maybe wind does the refresh with a djinn while the person who would be refreshing heals -- I don't remember if that was an option). Eventually, the boss finishes off my A-team, and then my B-team unleashes hell on the boss with summons. (If you've beaten the bonus boss, this also revives the A-team)

All other bosses were easy enough that I just smacked face with the A-team all the way home.
Make the djinn class-change system more useful. While it's not optimal, until the endgame just matching djinn with the peoples' native elements is in the top 90% of ways to arrange them. The game needs a lot more classes with more dramatic transformations for the classes. Moreover, while experimenting is fine you should only have to find a particular combination once. After that, you should just be able to select the classes for your party and the game takes care of the rest.
Maybe make the different class chains have different resource management mechanics in addition to different stats?

Also, the main problem with mixed-element characters was that if your djinn got disrupted, your character would effectively spaz out between very different classes until they recovered, instead of just taking a modest debuff, so fix that -- djinn disruption should only change the level of your class, not which class chain you're in.
Reduce the PP regeneration rate AND get rid of the PP limits for out-of-battle power usage. As it stands, it's not really a meaningful limit. Even when I use PP like crazy I rarely had to worry about running out.
I rarely bothered with spells other than healing spells because normal attacks almost always did more damage. But, yeah, having to run around for a while to recover PP because I'm struggling with the puzzle was kind of annoying.
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