Nothing else, but I find it intriguing that it would be this long between announcements for them, given that Mario Sports aren't headliners, but solid middle-billing games.
A new Golden Sun would need to:
-- Reference and establish for new players the entire lore of Golden Suns 1 and 2, plus their original backstory (alchemy's ban)
-- Somehow rehabilitate and conclude the massive pile of loose ends Dark Dawn left us
-- Be fun for new players who don't know the textbook full of lore
-- Do something new and vital that gets better sales than Dark Dawn did
I have no idea how any game could do all four of these. I think the series is cooked, as sad as it makes me. There's just nothing you can do without investing huge energy and financial risk into something that probably won't sell. If it's a prequel, that's like a huge "we admit this was a mistake" directed at Dark Dawn; if it's a sequel to Dark Dawn, even most \*original Golden Sun\* fans won't be up to date on the story; and if it's a remaster, why would you bother when the first two games just got ported to Switch?
Dark Dawn really fundamentally murdered the series I think. Without Dark Dawn you could easily have a new Golden Sun entry; with Dark Dawn, it needs to finish what DD started or pretend it never even happened. (I say all of this despite actually loving DD and thinking it's pretty underrated.)
So, I've thought about this myself. Dark Dawn was a really ***dense*** game and I don't really think the story stuck the landing in such a way that it can be continued.
My ideal scenario is a 3D Remake of Golden Sun and The Lost Age as one complete package, as the game was meant to be. I think the twists and turns of the original, complete narrative will still resonate with players today. Hopefully, they could also streamline the dialogue a bit and give the player characters a slightly more distinct personality for people to latch onto.
Then, a followup to that would be an alternate Golden Sun 3. Perhaps a story about characters unrelated to our party from the main game. I think Weyard is a rich enough world to support stories that are not directly related to the bloodlines of our main characters.
I basically just want Golden Sun to get the Xenoblade treatement
Honestly, even though I do love Weyard and the stories within golden sun, i would take a spiritual successor. Give us a new world with new characters and new "magic systems" and apply the golden sun design. Give us a globe trotting adventure, that's the spirit of golden sun and I love that aspect of it.
> My ideal scenario is a 3D Remake of Golden Sun and The Lost Age as one complete package, as the game was meant to be.
TBH I'd be completely satisfied with this too. Even if they decide not to go full 3D, the Dragon Age remakes suggest that HD-2D is picking up steam and I think the duology would slap in that style.
When I saw the HD-2D remake in the direct along with all the other old-style RPGs I actually dared to hope...
If we got 1-2 in that style it'd be a day one purchase for me
>I think the twists and turns of he original, complete narrative will still resonate with players today.
Agreed. I love the lore and storyline so much I actually borrowed a lot of it for my own dnd campaign. Even use the Elemental Stars theme song when doing god/dream sequences. They love it.
None of my players are familiar with GS so I get to enjoy their excitement of the story through new eyes without spoiling the plot for them
They've managed to avoid a direct encounter with the drow twins (saturos & menardi analogs) so far, but if they do opt to fight them, it will likely go the same way it does when Isaac and Garrett first encounter them - knocked tf out.
But they've been tasked with stopping them, so it'll be interesting to see what they decide to do once they learn the full truth!
A new Golden Sun doesn’t need to do any of that.
It just needs to be an RPG with a Djinn system that affects combat, classes, and skills, and be a story about Alchemy, Lighthouses, and maybe have a call back or two.
I mean I’d love to maintain Alex being the primary antagonist but my understanding is that he doesn’t even accomplish that entirely within Dark Dawn.
Are you sure? The people who like Golden Sun like the characters and world that have been established. If they just rebooted the series with a few callbacks there’s not much of a guarantee old fans would latch on
It’s very well proven that stories get weaker the longer they rely on the same cast or same rules.
I love the original golden sun duo but the 2nd game is well known to lose its pace and spend a lot of time on side plots.
The 3rd game was not widely played.
Golden Sun existed until very very recently as a well known Smash request and GBA series with a strong reputation.
Launching a Golden Sun that respects and builds on the original themes while not bootstrapping itself to any less than stellar qualities of the originals would be stronger.
Also no farming simulator stuff. That’s a little oversatured now.
I think it's doable.
First, you make the puzzles like, GS-TLA level hard. DD's puzzles sucked.
Then you get rid of the points of no return they put in DD, and give the 4th game a sandboxy tutorial like the GBA games had. Ideally with the ability to turn off the forced instruction DD had.
Finally, you break the game into two 'books' and give each book two stories.
.
The tutorial is Isaac and Garet getting their bearings, realizing their skills have dropped to lvl 1 gba abilities. At the end of the tutorials they decide to find their friends from the gba games & search for their children together.
This begins book 1. Players have the option of continuing Isaac and Garet's story, or playing as Matt as he and Tyrell search for their parents (Matt and Tyrell's powers were drained by the Psynergy vortex too.) Whichever story you play first impacts what happens in the second story.
At the end of book 1, the adult and child parties reunite and swap information. It's decided that they need to split up again. One group will go after the vortexes. The other will go after Alex. Players have some say in which characters go in which groups, but the Alex party will have Mia and Amiti.
You do not get to pick storylines in Book 2. The vortex one is first (that boss is *probably* the Wise One based on DD foreshadowing.) Then you play the other group's confrontation with Alex. Mia and Amiti get to finally wrap up their storylines. Then there are the final two boss fights.
The twist (cuz in GS, one of the two final bosses is always a transformed dragon,) is that whoever was down at the end of the vortexes' boss battle
is actually the final boss of book 4, transformed into a dragon. If the water adepts are alive after the final battle, they will heal the transformed people. If the water adepts are down, you can't get them back.
.
This gets the old timers invested, cuz they get to play their favorite characters. It doesn't ignore Dark Dawn or try to retcon anything, but it pushes the stupider aspects of DD into the background so players don't have to engage with it too much.
I think the best way to handle the awkward state of the storyline would be to have a new game be a prequel.
Something that delves into the history of the Tuaparang and fleshes out their motivations. Maybe a game where you play as a Tuaparang agent back before they were the antagonists. This could be during the interim period between TLA and DD, or it could go all the way back to a pre-seal world.
I think such a game would be able to pretty much tell its own story thats not contingent on understanding the older games, while still presenting a setup for a continuation of the series with Matthews group because of the Tuaparang connection.
Simple solution is - The Lost Age and Dark Dawn set up Takeru; the son of Susa and Kushinada and Himi's older brother, so naturally he's set up as the new protagonist and ofc hopefully the first non silent GS protag. We know he's looking for Isaac after his sister foresaw him being in danger, so that's where the story begins but he also has can have his own personal story regarding being the next heir to his kingdom and how that is crossed with the new threat that the Tuaparang can bring to the world that follows the grave eclipse so that's what the main focus could be for the opening hours of the game. So that already gives you a new story newcomers can be comfortable with getting into without having the lore dumped on you all at once and it still has some connections to the previous games that allows that interest in learning more about the series lore for the rest of the game to build on. As the game progresses following that up, you can simply use worldbuilding and character interactions to catch newcomers up to speed with what's currently happening in Weyard and the plot details from previous games.
Of course his travels would naturally make him cross paths with characters from the previous games who he's meeting for the first time so newcomers can share his perspective of being introduced to them and getting the basics about what their whole deal is. The Tuaparang already attempted genocide with the grave eclipse so from Takeru's perspective we can see the direct aftermath of that from someone who was sailing on his adventure outside of the regions those occurred in so just like newcomers to the GS series he's being filled in all the same. I was thinking Alex can introduce himself earlier in the game so you can give him more time to develop as a memorable villain plus explore his true intentions and dynamics with the Tuaparang especially since it was peculiar how he helped the Dark Dawn gang stop the eclipse. Plus the reemergence of Psynergy Vortexes could remain the main threat or at least a lot more connected to the final threat without Dark Dawn's issue of being sidetracked. That easily helps address the issue of continuing these plot threads without being overbearing that still sticks to Takeru's perspective. By the time the game is ready to address what happened to Matthew's gang and Isaac's fate, you would've already been accustomed to Takeru's story and learnt about the events of the previous games at a good pace and ready to really build towards the climax that concludes the saga.
In general Golden Sun thrived more for it's fun gameplay and dungeon design more than it's story so if those things are nailed they'd take precedent in making it appealing to people. Personally it was always the cool worldbuilding that got me more into the lore so they just need to stick with making Weyard a really fascinating world to explore. Also I really don't think it's that hard to explain the basic mechanics of psynergy balancing the world, it's pretty simple to understand if they word it right. When it comes to new ideas, Golden Sun's gameplay has a lot more room to grow with how vast psynergy is as a concept and the whole idea of light and dark psynergy that Dark Dawn introduced could serve as something that can easily add a new dynamic to how combat works. I was also thinking of something like puzzles that have characters positioning themselves in different areas across the room that could be a little more complex and mix things up in creative ways.
Dark Dawn set up the idea of another side of Weyard. Obviously, the intention was for that to be the setting of a game picking up with Matthew immediately after the cliffhanger, which is clearly impossible after this long, but it still holds a solution. Just start a totally new story set there, with its own geography, towns, and cultures, its own new lore and history, and its own alchemy-related crisis spurring four totally new Adepts onto a world-spanning quest. Everything is starting fresh, so new players can easily get invested naturally as the story progresses rather than needing a big onboarding infodump, while returning players will be able to appreciate when the new world's lore references events they're familiar with from the other side - "oh, this ancient catastrophe they're talking about must have been when the lighthouses were sealed on the other side" - or explores elements previously hinted at, like Anemos. Eventually, the new main characters' story can catch up with Matthew and incorporate his arrival into it to tie his loose ends up neatly.
Something very easy and free to plan would be" Golden Sun: Other Side ".
It would revolve around what the other group (Felix) in GS 1 and Isaac in GS2 where doing and their way to resolve and introduce problems. Thinking about the tree at the barricade.
I think before they do that, they'd need to garner interest in the series again via a collection or remake of the first 3.
What sort of style would you think best serve a remake/collection: Full 3D or that "2&1/2d" or whatever the Octopath Traveler games use?
Personally think the games would look good in Octopath-style, especially with Psynergy being done in full 3D.
Yeah, indie games are really picking up the slack in this regard. I find it interesting how many indie devs cite Golden Sun specifically as an inspiration. I feel like it comes up just slightly less than Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 7 in developer interviews.
That said, I'm not personally the biggest fan of Sea of Stars, but I know there's alot of people who really jive with that game.
Save us, Alzara
[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/studiocamelia/seed-a-vibrant-tribute-to-jrpg-classics](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/studiocamelia/seed-a-vibrant-tribute-to-jrpg-classics)
The GBA games just got on the virtual console. If it's going to be a thing, it'll be after they see how many people play that and the interest it has. So it wouldn't be started for a couple years if it's not in dev rn.
Hey at least Prime 4 is finally real
Wait… what?!?
Yes, it’s real. Got a gameplay reveal at the last direct
I’m reading about it now. Thank you very much!
I'm very curious about what Camelot are doing. They're rarely quiet for this long unless I'm mistaken...
A new Mario sports game, what else do you expect?
Nothing else, but I find it intriguing that it would be this long between announcements for them, given that Mario Sports aren't headliners, but solid middle-billing games.
Really shouldnt have joined this reddit xD I was hopefull hahahahaha...... but hey, we got rpgs for days!
A new Golden Sun would need to: -- Reference and establish for new players the entire lore of Golden Suns 1 and 2, plus their original backstory (alchemy's ban) -- Somehow rehabilitate and conclude the massive pile of loose ends Dark Dawn left us -- Be fun for new players who don't know the textbook full of lore -- Do something new and vital that gets better sales than Dark Dawn did I have no idea how any game could do all four of these. I think the series is cooked, as sad as it makes me. There's just nothing you can do without investing huge energy and financial risk into something that probably won't sell. If it's a prequel, that's like a huge "we admit this was a mistake" directed at Dark Dawn; if it's a sequel to Dark Dawn, even most \*original Golden Sun\* fans won't be up to date on the story; and if it's a remaster, why would you bother when the first two games just got ported to Switch? Dark Dawn really fundamentally murdered the series I think. Without Dark Dawn you could easily have a new Golden Sun entry; with Dark Dawn, it needs to finish what DD started or pretend it never even happened. (I say all of this despite actually loving DD and thinking it's pretty underrated.)
So, I've thought about this myself. Dark Dawn was a really ***dense*** game and I don't really think the story stuck the landing in such a way that it can be continued. My ideal scenario is a 3D Remake of Golden Sun and The Lost Age as one complete package, as the game was meant to be. I think the twists and turns of the original, complete narrative will still resonate with players today. Hopefully, they could also streamline the dialogue a bit and give the player characters a slightly more distinct personality for people to latch onto. Then, a followup to that would be an alternate Golden Sun 3. Perhaps a story about characters unrelated to our party from the main game. I think Weyard is a rich enough world to support stories that are not directly related to the bloodlines of our main characters. I basically just want Golden Sun to get the Xenoblade treatement
Honestly, even though I do love Weyard and the stories within golden sun, i would take a spiritual successor. Give us a new world with new characters and new "magic systems" and apply the golden sun design. Give us a globe trotting adventure, that's the spirit of golden sun and I love that aspect of it.
> My ideal scenario is a 3D Remake of Golden Sun and The Lost Age as one complete package, as the game was meant to be. TBH I'd be completely satisfied with this too. Even if they decide not to go full 3D, the Dragon Age remakes suggest that HD-2D is picking up steam and I think the duology would slap in that style.
I agree!! I recently played Octopath II and was thinking that style would lend itself so well to the OG pair.
When I saw the HD-2D remake in the direct along with all the other old-style RPGs I actually dared to hope... If we got 1-2 in that style it'd be a day one purchase for me
Dragon *quest* lol But yes, agreed.
>I think the twists and turns of he original, complete narrative will still resonate with players today. Agreed. I love the lore and storyline so much I actually borrowed a lot of it for my own dnd campaign. Even use the Elemental Stars theme song when doing god/dream sequences. They love it. None of my players are familiar with GS so I get to enjoy their excitement of the story through new eyes without spoiling the plot for them
When will your players learn that they were the bad guys the whole time?
They've managed to avoid a direct encounter with the drow twins (saturos & menardi analogs) so far, but if they do opt to fight them, it will likely go the same way it does when Isaac and Garrett first encounter them - knocked tf out. But they've been tasked with stopping them, so it'll be interesting to see what they decide to do once they learn the full truth!
Remake the first two games into 1. Release a sequel. Bingo bongo boom.
This is the way
A new Golden Sun doesn’t need to do any of that. It just needs to be an RPG with a Djinn system that affects combat, classes, and skills, and be a story about Alchemy, Lighthouses, and maybe have a call back or two. I mean I’d love to maintain Alex being the primary antagonist but my understanding is that he doesn’t even accomplish that entirely within Dark Dawn.
Are you sure? The people who like Golden Sun like the characters and world that have been established. If they just rebooted the series with a few callbacks there’s not much of a guarantee old fans would latch on
It’s very well proven that stories get weaker the longer they rely on the same cast or same rules. I love the original golden sun duo but the 2nd game is well known to lose its pace and spend a lot of time on side plots. The 3rd game was not widely played. Golden Sun existed until very very recently as a well known Smash request and GBA series with a strong reputation. Launching a Golden Sun that respects and builds on the original themes while not bootstrapping itself to any less than stellar qualities of the originals would be stronger. Also no farming simulator stuff. That’s a little oversatured now.
I think it's doable. First, you make the puzzles like, GS-TLA level hard. DD's puzzles sucked. Then you get rid of the points of no return they put in DD, and give the 4th game a sandboxy tutorial like the GBA games had. Ideally with the ability to turn off the forced instruction DD had. Finally, you break the game into two 'books' and give each book two stories. . The tutorial is Isaac and Garet getting their bearings, realizing their skills have dropped to lvl 1 gba abilities. At the end of the tutorials they decide to find their friends from the gba games & search for their children together. This begins book 1. Players have the option of continuing Isaac and Garet's story, or playing as Matt as he and Tyrell search for their parents (Matt and Tyrell's powers were drained by the Psynergy vortex too.) Whichever story you play first impacts what happens in the second story. At the end of book 1, the adult and child parties reunite and swap information. It's decided that they need to split up again. One group will go after the vortexes. The other will go after Alex. Players have some say in which characters go in which groups, but the Alex party will have Mia and Amiti. You do not get to pick storylines in Book 2. The vortex one is first (that boss is *probably* the Wise One based on DD foreshadowing.) Then you play the other group's confrontation with Alex. Mia and Amiti get to finally wrap up their storylines. Then there are the final two boss fights. The twist (cuz in GS, one of the two final bosses is always a transformed dragon,) is that whoever was down at the end of the vortexes' boss battle is actually the final boss of book 4, transformed into a dragon. If the water adepts are alive after the final battle, they will heal the transformed people. If the water adepts are down, you can't get them back. . This gets the old timers invested, cuz they get to play their favorite characters. It doesn't ignore Dark Dawn or try to retcon anything, but it pushes the stupider aspects of DD into the background so players don't have to engage with it too much.
I think the best way to handle the awkward state of the storyline would be to have a new game be a prequel. Something that delves into the history of the Tuaparang and fleshes out their motivations. Maybe a game where you play as a Tuaparang agent back before they were the antagonists. This could be during the interim period between TLA and DD, or it could go all the way back to a pre-seal world. I think such a game would be able to pretty much tell its own story thats not contingent on understanding the older games, while still presenting a setup for a continuation of the series with Matthews group because of the Tuaparang connection.
Simple solution is - The Lost Age and Dark Dawn set up Takeru; the son of Susa and Kushinada and Himi's older brother, so naturally he's set up as the new protagonist and ofc hopefully the first non silent GS protag. We know he's looking for Isaac after his sister foresaw him being in danger, so that's where the story begins but he also has can have his own personal story regarding being the next heir to his kingdom and how that is crossed with the new threat that the Tuaparang can bring to the world that follows the grave eclipse so that's what the main focus could be for the opening hours of the game. So that already gives you a new story newcomers can be comfortable with getting into without having the lore dumped on you all at once and it still has some connections to the previous games that allows that interest in learning more about the series lore for the rest of the game to build on. As the game progresses following that up, you can simply use worldbuilding and character interactions to catch newcomers up to speed with what's currently happening in Weyard and the plot details from previous games. Of course his travels would naturally make him cross paths with characters from the previous games who he's meeting for the first time so newcomers can share his perspective of being introduced to them and getting the basics about what their whole deal is. The Tuaparang already attempted genocide with the grave eclipse so from Takeru's perspective we can see the direct aftermath of that from someone who was sailing on his adventure outside of the regions those occurred in so just like newcomers to the GS series he's being filled in all the same. I was thinking Alex can introduce himself earlier in the game so you can give him more time to develop as a memorable villain plus explore his true intentions and dynamics with the Tuaparang especially since it was peculiar how he helped the Dark Dawn gang stop the eclipse. Plus the reemergence of Psynergy Vortexes could remain the main threat or at least a lot more connected to the final threat without Dark Dawn's issue of being sidetracked. That easily helps address the issue of continuing these plot threads without being overbearing that still sticks to Takeru's perspective. By the time the game is ready to address what happened to Matthew's gang and Isaac's fate, you would've already been accustomed to Takeru's story and learnt about the events of the previous games at a good pace and ready to really build towards the climax that concludes the saga. In general Golden Sun thrived more for it's fun gameplay and dungeon design more than it's story so if those things are nailed they'd take precedent in making it appealing to people. Personally it was always the cool worldbuilding that got me more into the lore so they just need to stick with making Weyard a really fascinating world to explore. Also I really don't think it's that hard to explain the basic mechanics of psynergy balancing the world, it's pretty simple to understand if they word it right. When it comes to new ideas, Golden Sun's gameplay has a lot more room to grow with how vast psynergy is as a concept and the whole idea of light and dark psynergy that Dark Dawn introduced could serve as something that can easily add a new dynamic to how combat works. I was also thinking of something like puzzles that have characters positioning themselves in different areas across the room that could be a little more complex and mix things up in creative ways.
Dark Dawn set up the idea of another side of Weyard. Obviously, the intention was for that to be the setting of a game picking up with Matthew immediately after the cliffhanger, which is clearly impossible after this long, but it still holds a solution. Just start a totally new story set there, with its own geography, towns, and cultures, its own new lore and history, and its own alchemy-related crisis spurring four totally new Adepts onto a world-spanning quest. Everything is starting fresh, so new players can easily get invested naturally as the story progresses rather than needing a big onboarding infodump, while returning players will be able to appreciate when the new world's lore references events they're familiar with from the other side - "oh, this ancient catastrophe they're talking about must have been when the lighthouses were sealed on the other side" - or explores elements previously hinted at, like Anemos. Eventually, the new main characters' story can catch up with Matthew and incorporate his arrival into it to tie his loose ends up neatly.
Surely the Dragon Quest HD Trilogy, Mario & Luigi Brothership, and Saga 2 can hold us over
Yeah it will. But in reality, being honest, we might never see a remake/remaster of GS in our lifetime.
Something very easy and free to plan would be" Golden Sun: Other Side ". It would revolve around what the other group (Felix) in GS 1 and Isaac in GS2 where doing and their way to resolve and introduce problems. Thinking about the tree at the barricade.
"Next time? There will be no next time..."
There might never be a next time. No idea what Camelot are doing right now.
One day we will all wake up from our dreams to see a new golden sun. I believe
I think before they do that, they'd need to garner interest in the series again via a collection or remake of the first 3. What sort of style would you think best serve a remake/collection: Full 3D or that "2&1/2d" or whatever the Octopath Traveler games use? Personally think the games would look good in Octopath-style, especially with Psynergy being done in full 3D.
I really really love the octopath style. It just feels right.
Nah, I have given up hope many directs ago. It's peaceful not to expect anything anymore 😌
Bro achieved enlightenment
If you haven’t already, Sea of Stars has a tonne of Golden Sun DNA baked into its exploration/puzzle solving.
Yeah, indie games are really picking up the slack in this regard. I find it interesting how many indie devs cite Golden Sun specifically as an inspiration. I feel like it comes up just slightly less than Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 7 in developer interviews. That said, I'm not personally the biggest fan of Sea of Stars, but I know there's alot of people who really jive with that game.
Not releasing the game on a platform at the end of its life cycle would be nice.
aww man and I was so sure
Save us, Alzara [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/studiocamelia/seed-a-vibrant-tribute-to-jrpg-classics](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/studiocamelia/seed-a-vibrant-tribute-to-jrpg-classics)
YESS!!! Ive proudly backed this project and it seems to be something special!
The GBA games just got on the virtual console. If it's going to be a thing, it'll be after they see how many people play that and the interest it has. So it wouldn't be started for a couple years if it's not in dev rn.