ducksaws

Golden Sun: The Lost Age is a frustratingly dissonant experience. Almost every mechanic is flawed.. All the same, years later, I still throw the soundtrack on to hear its unexpectedly epic sounding pan-flute synth rock and roll mixed with low, droning, tones. The oppressive KU-KRASHHH of the magical glowing blade of the Ragnarok spell smashing your enemies in an explosion of earth-element particles followed by the sharp CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! as each monster contorts in damage is objectively the best sounding and best looking thing to ever appear on a Gameboy. It may actually carry the whole game - It's hard to find anything else deserving of the critical acclaim Lost Age boasts. Story/Characters: 2/5 The story is... well. You are Felix and pals, on a quest to light two lightouses and awaken an ancient magic, without which the world will end. Officially, the cast from the first game are trying to stop you, but they do nothing show it. Amazingly, outside of a few contrived squabbles between these characters, the game goes without a primary antagonist. Except for a few tidbits of backstory that come up in dialogue once in a while, the protagonists are devoid of character. 90% of the dialogue delivered could come from any character - they are interchangeable. You may wonder how the game handles a final boss without a villain. One literally falls out of the sky. Combat: 4/5 Character powers focus around elemental spirits called djinn that can be assigned to any character. There is an incredible amount of depth to the system - mixing and matching elemental djinn can lead you to thousands of class combinations across your four characters. In short, combine lots of elements in one character to create a tanky physical fighter who can wreak havoc with a sword. Concentrate a single element to create spellcasters. Or find yourself anywhere in the middle of the spectrum for more flexible characters. It's a neat system! Unfortunately, the dichotomy I just described is not explained anywhere in the game. Without a proper guide, you'll likely make your characters weaker any time you deviate from giving your earth-character all the earth-djinn. The single most inexcusable aspect of the battle system is that a handful of spells actually do damage calculated from your attack stat rather than your elemental power stat. Imagine the physical/special split in Pokemon attacks - just entirely undocumented. Dungeons/Exploration: 2/5 The world is entirely open. Except, you cannot just explore wherever and expect to accomplish anything. Each dungeon revolves around puzzles solved with a utility spell gained in a previous dungeon. So, no, really, it's NOT open world. The path of dungeons you must solve is linear, but you the game won't tell you the correct path. Imagine Zelda if you could enter any dungeon at any time, but you get to explore the first few floors fighting past random encounters until you find out that you actually need the hookshot or boomerang to progress any further. Except, this is not Zelda. This is Golden Sun. The cues for when a puzzle requires psyenergy are not quite so obvious. Without a guide, all you can do is squint at a funny looking object, wonder if it's something you're supposed to do magic at, and then spend five minutes unloading every spell you've learned so far on it hoping that one of them is the key. Or hey, maybe it's not actually a lock. It's just a funny looking statue. Better go back into the overworld and find another dungeon to attempt. Did I mention there are 21 of these utility spells? And nearly every one is attached to an item that must clog up your limited inventory space for the rest of the game? Not to worry, the spells that aren't attached to items are made available with the djinn system... meaning you'll have to muck up your carefully tuned djinn-class system in order to get to them. Overall: For the time and the platform, this is a decent rpg. When you're in the right dungeon with the right spells with the right class setup, it's a great game. Just up until you leave that dungeon and have to drag your pack of teenaged, no-personality protagonists back into the overworld and click through a drawn out conversation with somebody who's not even a villain.

There's so little interaction between you and the computer players, it's boring. There's no culture interaction between civs. All you have are a few culture buildings that are a counter towards a perk tree, similar to Civ 5, but there are only 4 trees and they're all accessible from the beginning. Doesn't feel like progression. So no tourism, no culture victory. no great people either. No religion. No influencing your opponents through borders or trade or missionaries. I didn't expect every feature to cross over into the new game, but since there's not really any culture either, I expected there to be SOMETHING to pressure your opponents with besides military strength. No luxury resources. But there's still happiness (only it's called health). If your health is negative, all you can do is build more buildings or try get culture perks. Luxury resources were really fun in Civ 5. They were a great thing to expand towards or trade for because happiness was so important. And having extra luxury resources to trade was like 75% of the trading that happened. No city states. There are stations, which are basically a tile you can trade with. They don't provide any resources. You don't have influence with them. They don't go to war. They don't have units or territory. All they really do is take up space you probably wanted to settle on. Did I expect every good feature from Civ 5 to make it to this game? No. Did I expect there to be any interaction between Civilizations besides declaring war on them when you get bored? Yes. Because the lack of culture, religion, or world congress means that they had to come up with new victory conditions. The new victory conditions are terrible. They basically include researching a certain thing, building a wonder, and then waiting a certain number of turns until the wonder wins the game for you. This is a huge difference between the other conditions in Civ 5. In a culture victory you constantly try to boost your culture not because it's a winning condition but because having lots of culture gets you lots of perks and having cultural influence over other civs is strategically useful. In a diplomacy victory getting more votes means that you have a better chance at getting your way with international policy. A science victory comes with having the best and most technology. Here the winning conditions are so aimless. You can go on playing the game for hours with no idea what the winning conditions are and not doing anything towards them because they're so far removed from the core gameplay mechanics. You might as well be playing the game against a timer rather than other civs who are competing to have a stronger culture or diplomatic presence than you.

Don't expect high production values. Graphics, sounds, physics, voice acting, all terrible. This game proves that despite having a low budget, a game can be really, really fun. This game just hands you a ridiculous assortment of weapons and some enemies and a destructible environment and tells you to have fun. And by assortment, I don't mean a Call of Duty "there's a 100 guns but the only difference is their rate of fire and damage" assortment. Some guns have bullets that bounce off the walls, some shoot through targets, some a bunch of bullets at once. Some rocket launchers shoot a one projectile that splits into a million others and bombard an area. Others just shoot one, slow ass missile that packs a ridiculous punch. The most important part is that this game is SPLITSCREEN. There are not enough of these types of games. If you're looking for some casual couch action this game is a lot of fun.

The game feels really short, maybe unfinished. There's no good way to save your cars. You can put them into a garage, but if you take one out and drive it to a mission, good luck finding it again after the mission is done. This pretty stupid especially considering you can spend A LOT of money upgrading a car, only to have it disappear because you assumed the game would do something logical, like preserve the car while doing missions or put it back in your garage if you leave it somewhere. Speaking of money, it's handled terribly. Unlike other GTA games, money DOES have value (there are worthwhile things to spend it on), but the amount of money you have never makes sense. You start the game with next to no money; you can't afford to really buy guns, cars, or even a cool suit. Then you keep doing missions and not getting paid for them, which is incredibly frustrating. So ok, maybe this is the kind of game where money is really scarce. NOPE! after your first heist you are handed a ludicrous amount of money and can pretty much purchase whatever you want. There's no strategic thinking or saving up for a cool item. Money instantly goes from "I wish I had some but I don't have any" to "I have more than I could ever spend". You COULD actually drop a good load of cash on a fancy car or plane, but it will most likely explode or get lost somehow and your cash will be wasted. Speaking of heists now, it starts off good but becomes disappointing quickly. The first heist is really interactive, different ways to approach the situation, the choice for your crew members really matter, you could to case the joint and everything. And there's a big cash reward (probably too big). But that's pretty much the only real heist there is. The rest are basically just plot missions. Leveling up crew members which was expected to be important from the precedent and the tutorial of the first mission pretty much doesn't matter at all past the first heist. Also there are only like two extra crew members you can ever get in the first place and you get them from easily missed random events. The map is huge and is more than just a city, which is pretty cool, but it's pretty useless. There's nothing to find. No collectibles, easter eggs, not really any hidden missions. There's a tiny bit of wildlife but it doesn't really serve a purpose. Most of the missions will take place in the city or Trevor's town. The rest might as well not exist. The game is SHORT for a GTA game. It honestly feels like it's not finished. You should be familiar with the typical GTA formula: you meed a job provider, you do some missions, and then end up screwing up or something and killing them as their last mission. In this game, there are very few of these types of characters. It's pretty disappointing because those types of characters are usually the most interesting people in GTA games. There's one case where you meet this kind of mission giving character and literally the second mission is where someone screws up and then you have to kill the mission giver. Where's all the missions in between? This also goes for side quests. There are a few mission giving side characters, but there's (as previously mentioned) no cash reward. And they all end very anti-climatically. Literally the end of one of the quest lines is "aren't you going to pay me?", "no, go away". And that's it. You can shoot the guy if you want but... What actually IS in the game is done pretty well. The story, shooting, driving mechanics, characters, are all great. Length, number of interesting side characters, car storing mechanics, side quests, mini games, are pretty terrible.

This game is a lot of fun, regardless of any problems it may have. A few weeks ago, the rumors about performance issues were actually true, but i still managed to sink 30 hours into the game and had fun every minute of it despite them. But that was a few weeks ago, the developer has since put a lot of time into ironing out those issues (where performance would dip drastically once you got 4-5 hours into a game with lots of ships on the screen) and it shows. Now that we have that behind us, let's talk about the actual game. It's your basic 4x game setup. You start in your home planet, research technology to improve your agricultural and industrial capabilities, and eventually reach out to colonize a new world. Worlds are rated on three aspects, how many people they can support, how much food per person they can produce, and how much production per person they can produce. You need food to feed people and you need people to produce starships, buildings, research for new technology, and more food. At the start of the game your options are limited. You might be fielding some junky, tiny armored fighters and not even be able to kill off some pirates that will threaten your empire unless you pay them off. But soon enough, you will find yourself terraforming barren worlds and building starships with a dozen laser beam batteries or maybe missiles or railguns or energy cannons depending on what route of research you have taken), hangars to launch fighters, high tech armor, and shields. Ship building and combat is where the game truly shines. It's similar to Gratuitous Space battles in some ways. Incoming projectiles from enemies will hit precise spots of your ship. You need to have shields and armor protecting your power reactors because they may explode catastrophically if destroyed. You also need power from those reactors for all the weapons on your ship so you will have to run power cables to more remote parts of your ship. You can choose between different types of weapons, armor, engines, power sources, etc. You choose to have a fleet of ships that are very quick but lightly armored, behemoths that take forever to get anywhere but can take a beating, glass cannon ships armed with a million guns but barely any protection, or a mix between anything you want because you get to design these ships literally piece by piece. The only weaknesses to the actual game mechanics are that diplomacy options are functional but a little limited. You also start to fly through tech trees rapidly once you reach the late game because you may have a dozen or more worlds all researching. If this was a stagnant, done game, I would score it a bit lower. However, the game is very much a "living" product in that the developer is not going to just drop it and start working on a sequel like it's an installment of Call of Duty, the same way Minecraft is a completely different game than it was when it was first "released". There are also modding tools that the developer has encouraged people to use and quite a few mods already to add more research, guns, and ships. Overall, this game is really a bundle of fun. It has some problems in that there could be more weapon or research options, however the developer has not put the game away and there are ample modding tools to add on to it. The game is great as it is and only stands to be improved later on.