How do you outdo one of the best underrated games on the GBA? Let's find out.

When we last left off, I was talking about the adventure of Isaac, Garet, Mia, and Ivan to stop the four lighthouses of the world from being lit. By the time the first Golden Sun wraps up, two of the four lighthouses have beacons atop them, shining brightly as glorious failures. Then, right before the credits roll, the four hop on a ship and set off for the next stage of their journey.

This is where The Lost Age picks up, except you aren’t playing as the four from the first game. Rather, you start as Felix, Jenna, and Sheba, characters that appeared sparingly in the first game. Felix is Jenna’s brother, back from the dead and apparently set on a course to light the lighthouses despite being warned not to, whereas Jenna and Sheba were taken against their wills and forced into the conflict. The three set out to finish their task, but to do that they’re going to need a ton of new Psynergy to accomplish this goal. Eventually they meet Piers, a new character, to round out the group of four.

The game is immediately familiar for those who played the first title. None of the mechanics have changed in the slightest. Each character has a limited number of inventory slots, meaning that they can only carry a select few items like weapons or armor or healing potions, forcing you to be a bit choosier as to who has what in their possession and what Djinn they have equipped as this will affect what Psynergy they have access to and how effective they’ll be in battles and so on and so forth. None of the core mechanics change at all, even down to the littlest thing, like setting shortcuts to the L and R buttons for Psynergy outside of battles or the method of dealing with curses and downed party members. The Lost Age doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but rather gives it a long stretch of land to really show what it can do when it has some space to get rolling.

If you're not paying attention, you'll have sworn you had just sene this game...

I don’t have exact numbers, but I’d say The Lost Age is a little less than twice as long as the original Golden Sun. I felt a much greater sense of freedom to explore the world since relatively early on you acquire a boat that lets you get to half of the world via the vast ocean. Sadly, there were a huge number of times where I had absolutely no clue where I was supposed to go, forcing me to check online to make sure I wasn’t just going around in circles. I still don’t see that as a bad thing though as I much prefer an RPG that’s so large it’ll take a while to figure out where you need to go next. Then again, I’m the sort of gamer who enjoys finding something new around every corner, seemingly of my own accord and curiosity.

As is standard with the Golden Sun games, these diversions certainly pay off with major dividends. Going off the beaten path down a side passageway usually leads you to an incredibly powerful weapon or a new Djinn, making the rest of the game feel easier, or at the very least like you’ve been playing smarter. Plus, each special weapon has its own Unleash Attack completely unique to that weapon, and while the first game had a handful of awesome Unleash Attacks, The Lost Age has some that look and act even better. I’m particularly a fan of Megiddo, an Unleash Attack that sends the character into the air to slam a giant fireball down to earth onto your opponent. The sense of power the game accomplishes is amazing.

Hellz yeah!

Something I didn’t really mention in my discussion of the first game but that becomes abundant here is the lack of grinding you tend to put yourself through. As the world opens up to you, just searching around will send you into a handful of encounters, enough so that you’ll be gaining experience and money at an alarming rate, meaning that very few boss battles are a real problem in terms of needing to grind. Rather, a lost battle typically means you need to rethink your strategy of Djinn usage or Psynergy selection. The only real exception is the final battle. That boss pulls so many shenanigans it’s not even fair, but then again that’s what a good final boss does, am I right?

Everything here just feels better. The music is even better than the first, offering some tracks that I’d find myself going out of my way to listen to. I’m partial to the ocean battle track, or even the standard battle track. But as I said, everything just feels better here with more to do by far. I kept getting new Psynergy powers that allowed me to access even more areas and still I was never entirely sure what I’d learn next.

Probably the point where the game takes a drastic change is relatively late in the game where I will certainly be giving spoilers away by telling you. You ready? Here come the spoilers!

Seeing Judgment return as a summon isn't the spoiler. Judgment just doesn't want you to be ill prepared for spoilers, that's all. Also I spoiled it earlier anyway.

Eventually your new party runs into your old party from the first Golden Sun, a reunion that does two very cool things. The first is incorporate your old party into your new party, effectively making your new team consist of eight members instead of just four, though there can still only be four out at one time. The second thing that happens is Isaac talks, and pretty casually at that. I was jarred just a bit when he first spoke because this was the main character from the first game, a typical silent protagonist, a role that Felix takes up here as odd as it feels since he spoke so freely in the previous game. However, allowing Isaac to speak pleased me on a level I didn’t expect, mostly because his dialogue didn’t feel stereotypical of the “hero” character. Instead, he sounds like he gets it, making him one of the few characters in a dialogue scene not asking “What’s going on?” I loved that.

Overall, it’s tough to recommend just The Lost Age. Don’t play this one first. Just don’t. You’ll get vastly more if you play Golden Sun first, then follow this right up. Between the two you can easily manage over 60 hours of gameplay, assuming you aren’t going for full completionist work, and that comes at a price of probably under $30 for the pair of games. You really can’t go wrong here.

You'll most likely thank me later.

So who out there has already played The Lost Age? Leave a comment and let me know your thoughts on the series. You know, go ahead and do it even if you haven’t played either game. Does this sound like the type of game you’d be interested in? I want to know. And with that I’m off to let Pokemon absorb my life for a little while now that Golden Sun isn’t soaking up all my DS’ playing time.

Want to know more of some Games You Should Have Played? Check these out:

-Games You Should Have Played: Tomb Raider 1 and 2

-Smash Bros: A Retrospective

-Games You Should Have Played: The Donkey Kong Country Trilogy

Cooler promotional art there never was.

In the early days of the Game Boy Advance, there was a lot of room to demonstrate why exactly an update to the holy handheld was required. Game Boy games were typically simple; even the RPG’s they yielded tended to be shallower then the SNES counterparts. The Game Boy Color gave us color (obviously), but beyond maybe the Pokemon games, there wasn’t much depth to handheld titles.

Camelot, a company previously known for making the Mario Golf and Mario Tennis titles, had a chance to try something extremely different than what they were known for. Instead of an arcade sports title, they made an RPG called Golden Sun, a game with enough flare to justify purchasing the GBA specifically to play it.

The main drive behind upgrading from the Game Boy Color to the Game Boy Advance was the processing power behind the colors and effects the system could generate, colors and effects the previous generation couldn’t possibly handle. What Golden Sun demonstrated within the very first minutes of the game was enough to say, “Yes, this is where handheld gaming is going.” And that’s even before the battle screens appeared.

Mm-mm, that's just tasty right there.

I was amazed when I first got into a battle and saw the level of detail in the characters, backgrounds, and even attacks. Golden Sun is gorgeous in presentation. You’d be hard-pressed not to say it’s stunning work laid out on a GBA screen. Not only does it show off how far superior it is to the GBC, it shows how it’s superior to even the SNES. Just watching the summons would push me over the edge of awesome. Go watch Judgment get called forth and tell me it isn’t one of the coolest attacks ever to make it into video games.

At the heart of every RPG is the story and Golden Sun certainly has one that got me curious. The game starts with Isaac and his best friend Garet running about in their village of Vale as a great tragedy occurs that forces Isaac to lose his father and his friend Jenna to lose her brother, Felix (wink wink). The story picks up three years later after Isaac and Garet have been training with the use of Psynergy, the energy force the game calls its magic system. They enter Sol Sanctum and get tricked into retrieving four elemental gem stars required to light the four elemental lighthouses of the world, an act that will supposedly destroy everything and be very, very bad. Supposedly. I think.

Sort of reminds you of Avatar...doesn't it?

While the story is somewhat slow and fairly basic at its core, there is a certain curious quality about it. I played the game to completion when I first purchased it, but as I remember correctly, I only completed two of the four lighthouses before the credits started rolling. Why? Because there is a sequel, The Lost Age, in which the story is resolved. I haven’t played that yet, much to my distress, but that will soon change as my wife recently found me a used copy for my birthday. My point is, Golden Sun as a stand-alone title leaves you begging for more, even though my first playthrough had me clocking over 40 hours. That’s a serious chunk of time for a GBA title.

Those that have played Golden Sun aren’t going to try and sell you on it based purely on the story, or even the graphics; they’ll try to sell you on the Djinn. Djinn are magical creatures you can collect throughout the game to the point that each of the four main characters can equip seven. The Djinn can be used in battle, each with its own special technique. The trade-off is that the Djinn provide stat-boosts for the characters, as well as abilities for the particular class the character happens to be. The more Djinn, the better the class, and the more varied the type of Djinn you have equipped, the more varied the class will be. When you use a Djinn, however, that stat boost and class change will be lost until it’s reequipped, done so by performing a Summon attack. Summon attacks require between one to four Djinn of the same type, allowing you to make use of the most devastating attacks in the game. Once summoned, the Djinn will then recharge and become reequipped to the various characters.

It’s this constant balancing of equipped and stand-by Djinn that make for a unique battle style in Golden Sun. While you may really, really want to use your Djinn and save up a few to unleash Judgment, you could be costing your character vital stats in the middle of the battle, or worse, forcing him to lose some of his key Psynergy such as Cure Well or Ragnarok. Even better, mixing around and playing with the Djinn combinations can become rather enjoyable since you can play it safe and dull (like I did) and use stack like-typed Djinn upon the characters with the same elemental type, or you can find grand combos that provide cooler attacks than ever before. Golden Sun provides a lot of room to experiment, room that players have seemed to enjoy.

No way! That totally IS Avatar!

My last little thing to mention regards naming the characters. I am a huge proponent of being allowed to name characters within video games whatever you’d like, permitting you to create your own narrative rather than just the one the game provides. It gives you the chance to forge a deeper connection to the story and the characters than you may otherwise have. Oddly enough, Golden Sun permits you to rename Isaac, but not the other characters…unless you know a cheat code. I happen to know said cheat code. I’ll leave you with the knowledge that if you’d like to rename the four playable characters, plus three others, enter Up, Down, Up, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, Up, Right, Down, Left, Up, and then Select while you’re on the screen where you can name Isaac. If done correctly you’ll hear a slight “ping.” You’re welcome.

So there you have it, a true Game You Should Have Played. Dark Dawn, the third game in the series, just released at the beginning of this week, so you might as well spend some time catching up before you dive head first into a righteously excellent game. I’ll leave you to comment on whether you’re a Golden Sun fan or not, but please, no spoilers here! I’m the only one allowed to spoil things!

Want more Games You Should Have Played? Check these out:

-Homeward Bound: More Earthbound For The US

-Games You Should Have Played: Super Mario Bros 3

-Games You Should Have Played: Final Fantasy III SNES

Inventing a new genre that'd get copied again and again.

Did you think I forgot about my Mario Retrospective? Absolutely not. Now that I’ve taken some time off, it seems only fitting I should jump back in with something a bit different. In the last three installments I covered 2D platformers, 3D platformers, and the spin-off series. Today? Pedal to the metal, let’s hit Mario Kart.

Super Mario Kart:

Something about the classics just makes me feel good inside.

The SNES was just a monster when it came to game pedigrees. While Mario began in the arcades, the first time he and his fellow cast members would hop behind the wheel of go-karts and race happens in Super Mario Kart on the SNES, the first and only Mario Kart game with the word “Super” in the title. It was fairly simplistic with only eight characters, Mario, Luigi, Toadstool, Toad, Yoshi, Bowser, D.K. Jr, and Koopa Troopa, and tracks that were more about just racing than any real gimmicks. Still, the building blocks were set in place for what would become something far larger in just a single console leap. The original can be downloaded on the Virtual Console or picked up from Amazon for under $15.

Mario Kart 64:

Whoa, that was just one console leap? Sweet.

The first game I had on the N64, Mario Kart 64 was one of the biggest leaps I’ve ever seen a series take from the first to the second game. It was such a large jump that I can’t stand going back to Super Mario Kart since it feels dated. Mario Kart 64 was just too good of a jump. All the tracks became far more elaborate and diverse, from the hazardous Bowser’s Castle stage to the laid-back D.K. Jungle Park stage. Once again there were only eight characters, but Koopa Troopa was ousted by Wario. Technically, D.K. Jr was replaced by D.K. but that’s just splitting hairs. Also, Toadstool continued going under her newly official US name “Peach,” a transition that happened so nicely in Super Mario 64. Basically, Mario Kart 64 would be hard to beat. It’s also on the Virtual Console or on Amazon for under $20.

Mario Kart: Super Circuit:

Certainly impressive for the GBA.

Okay, technically another Mario Kart game with the word “super” in it, Super Circuit for the GBA was the first time the series went handheld. While keeping the character roster from the 64 version, the tracks and gameplay were much closer to the original SNES version, even with some retro tracks thrown in. For me, the controls were extremely difficult to get used to. Not to say they were bad, just that it took a while to really master this game properly. I never did get good enough to achieve a gold trophy in each cup, but I played this portable title to death. A used copy on Amazon will run you under $10.

Mario Kart: Double Dash!!:

Hey, nothing wrong with trying something new.

Here’s where I’ll pick up at least some flack from gamers: I absolutely loved Double Dash for the GameCube. While it isn’t my favorite Mario Kart game (we’ll get to that), it’s pretty darn close. The whole reasoning is how much I played this one in an attempt to unlock everything I could. I definitely managed to unlock my fair share of extras at the end of my GameCube career and got good enough to take on most challengers. Double Dash got its name for the fact that a player now controlled two characters in a single kart where one would drive and the other would carry a spare item. Tons of new characters got added such as Daisy and (here’s more flack) Waluigi, a character I actually like. This is just an awesome game. I’d still say this is the best console version of Mario Kart, so check it out on Amazon for under $15.

Mario Kart DS:

Sometimes, though, simplicity is best.

This is my favorite Mario Kart game, without question. It was the first game I bought for my DS and the first game I played online consistently. No more two-to-a-kart business, replaced with the classic style that everyone loved. Each character, of which there were once again many, had multiple karts exclusive to them. The controls were absolutely perfect, too. Races came down to simple skill and whether or not you had it. Except…sigh…snaking. The whole reason I stopped playing online was due to the rampant use of a technique called “snaking” which was done by taking advantage of the drift boost you could get. Except people found a way to use this perpetually during a match, meaning they were constantly past top speed an entire race and I could never catch up, no matter how perfect a race I played. They’d just boost down the straight-aways, looking like they’re winding down the track like a snake, and I’d have no chance to win. Still, for single play or with friends it’s my highest recommendation. Amazon has some good deals on new copies and a few used for $18.

Mario Kart Wii:

While not the best, those new tracks were pretty awesome.

The most recent Mario Kart game is where I think the series jumped the shark. The game isn’t awful, and in fact it goes out of its way to eliminate snaking altogether, something I was very happy with, plus it added motorbikes, a features I thought was incredibly cool. But there’s no worse instance of a game being broken on a fundamental level when it comes to a race. Sitting in first place is the least enjoyable place to be in Mario Kart Wii. You won’t get any good items, everyone else will be firing super weapons at you, and half of the time the game will just slingshot opponents past you for the heck of it. Few other games punish you for doing good. And even worse, there are characters and karts that can only be unlocked by beating cups with fast times, something that all comes down to luck in the end. Regardless, there’s a lot of fun here, assuming you’re playing with friends for fun, or even online using a pretty good implementation of the Wii’s online capabilities. If all you’ve got is a Wii, you can’t go wrong here. And ironically, Amazon’s selling the game cheaper new than used at $39.99 for a new copy, silly Wii Wheel included.

Alright, that checks off the Mario Karts from the retrospective. So what’s next? There’re still parties, sports, and RPG’s, so come back soon and see what gets covered next. But of course, what would this article be without me asking for some of your personal Mario Kart memories? Did you have sleepless nights with friends playing Mario Kart 64 like I did? Or did you engage in your own tournaments? Leave a comment and let me know. And just to be nice, I won’t even throw a blue shell at the first commenter.

Can’t get enough Mario? You can read more about him in these articles:

-Mario: A Retrospective Part 5

-The Top 10 Video Game Quotes That Need To Die

-Games You Should Have Played: Super Mario Galaxy

For a guy that's supposed to bear those crystals, he sure does look confused about what a crystal is.

I’m kind of curious about something. How many of you loved Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles on the GameCube? I bought it Day One thinking it was going to be the absolute best game I’d ever play for the rest of my life. I was pretty naïve back then.

Don’t get me wrong though, I absolutely loved the game for what it was and even played through it all again a few years later, but at the time my expectations were sorely unmet, partly because it promised a revolutionary multiplayer experience that cost way too much to enjoy: an experience that I never got a chance to try out since I didn’t have three other friends with Game Boy Advances and GBA Links to the GameCube. Regardless of all that I loved the first Crystal Chronicles game and saw a lot of potential in terms of story. Since then I’ve been waiting for a more substantial Crystal Chronicles title to deliver in terms of story. Well, here it is.

A Game For Some, A Joke For Others

The Crystal Bearers is the new title in the franchise for the Nintendo Wii. I had seen teasers for this one even before the Wii was out and already I was sufficiently psyched up since it looked awesome. Now that the game is finally out I can safely say that if you were like me and wanted the story-driven Crystal Chronicles game, you won’t be severely disappointed. If, however, you were looking for a game with amazing combat or anything, ANYTHING, that resembled either the Final Fantasy games as a whole or the Crystal Chronicles sub-franchise, yeah, move along, nothing to see here. The focus is story and it does it well. There are characters that you’ll like and some you’ll hate, but the point is that they’re all engaging. There is fun to be had.

It's harsh but sometimes the truth can hurt.

Unfortunately, the fun doesn’t go as far with the battle mechanic, though it does churn out a heck of a lot of enjoyable times just playing with whatever you can pick up. The main character, a guy named Layle (because video games need people with crazy names “just because”), is capable of telekinesis, so he goes around levitating things and throwing them around and whatever. Not incredibly deep, but the concept works well enough to get you through the game with a bit of practice. Sadly, the Wiimote will get in your way a few times since, as we’ve figured out by now, it isn’t the perfect controller Nintendo wanted it to be unless you’re playing Metroid Prime 3 or something. Just be happy when it works, which is most of the time, and forget when it has some hiccups. Nod and smile and keep going for sake of the story.

That cactus never stood a chance.

The other big downside is the shortness of the title’s playtime. It is going to sound odd but this is a Final Fantasy game with a very short playtime. I’m talking around 20 hours, roughly. Does that sound short to you? It will, especially since you’ll be enjoying the game so much. Oddly, the short playtime is a very good thing. While not all THAT short, it’s still short enough not to overstay its welcome but long enough to get you addicted to it. I’m not going to say it’s the perfect length, but it strikes a decent balance.

There isn’t a whole lot more to talk about. For a Wii game it looks fantastic as the world is solid and colorful and characters are lively and stand out and all that jazz. I recommend The Crystal Bearers and I’ll leave it at that. Parents, this one’s safe enough for just about any age of youngster out there, so don’t worry about it ruining their minds other than possibly being too “weird” for them to grasp. Still a fun game with a great story to like. For me, I’m satisfied.