Golden Sun: The Lost Age

I bought Golden Sun: The Lost Age for the GameBoy Advance like three years ago or something. I played maybe, I don’t know, five hours of the game total in all of that time. Why would I only play 5 hours of a game I payed for? Well, for one, I bought the game when I was planning on going on a trip for business. I needed something to occupy my time on the plane and in the airport. I’d already beaten the four or five games I had (Metroid, Castlevania, Advance Wars, etc.) and I needed something else, so I picked up Golden Sun: The Lost Age. It was a cute game, but one the trip was done, I never went back and finished the game.

That ended about two weeks ago when I picked the game up and started over. I was sitting in bed next to Bebe and I wanted to hang out, but didn’t want to watch whatever show she had on the Tele. So, I went upstairs and grabbed Golden Sun and my Nintendo DS. Wow, I wish I’d played this game sooner because it’s a lot of fun.

I’ve played about 10-15 hours of it now and really enjoy it. It’s a simple RPG that harkens back to the golden era of Nintendo SNES RPGs. The story is a bit over my head, but that’s okay, because the dialogue is so much fun to read. People will say your dumb stereotypical RPG dialogue and then the characters will call those people on it. For example, Ancient Wizard Guys says “We can’t let Evil So-and-so get to the top of the tower and release Ultimate-mega-spell-that-will-end-the-world.” Then, hero number 1 responds, “So, why don’t we just blow the tower up so he can’t go up there. Seems simple enough to me, come on, lets go.” Then, the party starts to run off until the wizard guy stops them and explains some other over the top thing. At any rate, whether you find this tongue in cheek RPG dialogue funny or not, it’s a good game. My favorite part so far was when I was talking to some guys who had been locked up in a jail and one of them said, through the bars, “If it wasn’t for you meddling kids I would have gotten away with this…” A Scooby-Doo reference? Hells yeah it is! You just don’t get that in today’s 100 million dollar RPG games.

Anyway, if you have a GBA or DS and haven’t played the Golden Sun games I encourage you to pick them up, or at least The Lost Age. It’s been a good time.

-Steve