Like your typical RPG, Golden Sun revolves around a somewhat unoriginal plot, and uses it's basic gameplay style to make the game very enjoyable.

Golden Sun is your absolute classic RPG. The storyline is unoriginal, the characters talk too much, the gameplay is great and the graphics look very, very nice. It's a mixed bag of love/hate. What does the game have to offer though? Well, we'll start with that "unoriginal" storyline. The game starts off during a storm, boulders are crashing down on our hero's town. He tries to save his father, "Kyle" but unfortunately he is lost in the river. It comes about that in three years time, he and his friend "Garet" must find their friend Jenna and return the stolen stone from the Mercury lighthouse, which has been stolen by two evil minions! You may say I left out some of the story's parts, but you get the general idea.

You simply wander around with Mia, Garet and Ivan trying to find out more about who has taken the mercury stone. Using the team's individual powers, they're almost unstoppable. Excalamation mark. There are numerous towns that you visit, each of them has a shop selling weapons, armour and other items like "herb" with restores valuble hit points. Using items to your advantage is very important, just keeping your characters alive long enough can be difficult sometimes. Nevertheless, psy-nergy powers that heal and things like "herb" can all help your team keep going in the hardest of times.

Well as it goes for gameplay, there's not much wrong here. Simply, travel about the land doing whatever you need to do and encounter numerous foes like "Skeleton warrior" and "Mushroom". Using a vast aray of psy-nergy and weapons, you must defeat these foes and move onwards. It's no great surprise that by doing this, you earn experience points and by using special moves that only Djinn can perform you earn either water, earth, wind or fire points. The more points you earn, the stronger you become. And once you get enough points you move up onto the next ability level, this continues until... well... it just continues. The stronger you become, the more easily you will be able to defeat enemies. The actual battles are a joy to watch/play. The graphics used for each individual attack are quite stunning at times. Watch a fatal blow crush your enemy into the ground, then take out his accomplice etc. etc. Well, after a few hundred of these battles you could say it becomes a little linear, but it's still pretty impressive even so. Of course, it's not just simple monsters you'll have to fight, there's a wide range of characters that, respective to the storyline, pop up at certain times during the game to challenge you. The battles are well developed and enjoyable, nothing wrong here then.

The battle graphics are gorgeous yes, and so is the rest of the game. Everywhere you go, whether it's a populated town, a mountainside or deep inside a cave, there are plenty of little effects to look out for. The graphics stay in top position throughout the game, and it's no-wonder too because the whole worlde is a great little place. All the towns, buildings and natural things are excellently constructed, top work from the developers at Camelot. The sounds are pretty average, but nice for this game. Effective battle noises such as "Cssshhhhhh!" and "Pffffffffffffhha!" are all to be heard in there.

So, finding those stones will be a tricky task then, no? But what makes it even harder is ultimately this games strongest point, puzzles. Some of them really are tough! And also, very good. They're great fun and they've been created perfectly for in the game. Using logs to jump across rivers, melting ice to get past... it's all in there, and more too. The first few are pretty easy to get past, but some of the later ones are Brain Burstingly Hard.

So while the game isn't great for story and plot ingenuity, the most important part, i.e., the gameplay, is very strong indeed. Camelot have succeded in bringing to life what can only be described as a true, classic, RPG. It's not too expensive and it's the perfect GBA game, buy it. Buy it now. CB