The Story

To be continued, these are the words that greeted each and every dedicated gamer who beat Camelot’s superb RPG, Golden Sun. These words brought much controversy to GBA forums everywhere. But regardless if you felt jipped or not by this game’s cliffhanger ending, you can’t deny the fact that you are extremely excited about it’s continuation in Golden Sun 2: The Lost Age.

One of the beauties of this controversial ending was how it was able to set up a huge amount of plot lines for the sequel in such a small amount of time. Your group of battle hardened adventurers, Isaac, Garet, Mia, and Ivan, have all set off in a ship of ancients, in search of the fabled Lemuria, to save doomed King Babi from death. Also you are known to be continuing your search for Alex, Felix, and the kidnapped Jenna, and Krader. These characters were last seen washed up on a mysterious moving island, along with Sheba, whom I feel will play a much larger part in this sequel.

What‘s New

Hard, but not impossible puzzles, an absolutely amazing monster collecting system, known as Djinn, and an actual fun turn based battle engine - as you can see Golden Sun really doesn’t have much to improve upon. However the RPG wizards over at Camelot are actually adding small, but interesting tweaks, to the already perfect gameplay. First off, the obvious mother load of new Djinn and Psynergy abilities will hit the great battle system. Also to keep the game exciting outside of the battles, there will be more of those famous Psynergy and non Psynergy-based puzzles. Even older Psynergy abilities, are being revamped for newer functions for use outside of battle, for example Whirlwind will now be able to make vines move, thus enabling characters to swing across chasms with them. But probably the most exciting of all, is the ability to control Felix and his party for part of the game, as some of the movies and screenshot have shown. Oh, I almost forgot the huge amount of new enemies, towns, dungeons, and characters (some that may even join your party!). Also because of all the new enemies and dungeons the world you trek through is even larger than the original version. So big in fact, that when you zoom out completely you can't even see Isaac Anymore!

What might be new

The Lost Age has been announced for US release in the beginning of 2003, so there is likely to be many new gameplay elements being made for the game that haven’t been announced yet. One of the main things people have been most excited about is the ability to transfer your old characters and stats to the new GamePak. Though it hasn't been confirmed by Ninendo themselves yet, it i pretty much decided that this will come to be. This is because of a little trick you can do after beating the game. Here's how you do it: At the end of the game when it asks if you want to save, if you do you canthe Data transfer screen in the main menu. After you save your data, go

to the main menu and do the following: press and holdthe L and R buttons, then press Left, B, Left in thatorder. This will make the transfer icon avaliable atthe main menu. There you can either transfer info.with a password or a link cable. Pretty cool huh? However nobody yet knows exactly how it will work in the U.S. version.

Also I would like to see an update on the battle arena; you know that multiplayer room separate from the game itself. For starters, I would like every character to be able to participate in the battles, because I found myself severely missing the powers of any of the people in my party. Also it would be great if there was an option to trade or sell rare items, amongst the buddy you link up with. And continuing on this idea, it would be much more exciting if the battles had something at stake, such as an item or money. Lastly I would like to see some rewards for doing the monster battles; such as if you beat 30 or so monsters you are able to get an item not found in the main adventure. These updates most likely will not happen, but I just really enjoyed multiplayer battles, and the idea of having something at stake would make them much more exciting.

Even without any of these small improvements, a new adventure in the Golden Sun saga is worthy of great excitement and I like many others can’t wait to pop this new quest into my GBA in 2003!

- Eman