>>323354857
It was pretty progressive and nice for a handheld RPG back in the day

Still is but Golden Sun's plot and characters are a bit too basic even with its great town and dungeon design

It was praised for many years for almost every community, mostly because it was Nintendo's own traditional JRPG.

Now it's hated because fans moved on and new gaymers like Xenoblade and FE.

>>323354857
The GBA games were good at the time. I think the Djinn system was a good addition to the standard turn based JRPG system, and most of the puzzles were good.

DS game sucked because it was too much like the GBA games that it didn't feel like it made any meaningful progress on a technical level despite the 8 year gap.

Sakuraba is a great composer but it needs to tone down the synths in favor of actual instruments more often. It was fine on the GBA because it had a lower quality soundchip, but on better sounding systems his best songs are ones that aren't just all synth.

As a child I played the first one over and over and over again and was so excited when there was a sequel announced. Got 10 minutes into the sequel and dropped it. Never even tried the third one. I've always felt like I should give them another chance though as the original was one of my adolescence defining games.

>>323354857
Good but bland
Pretty much a poor man's Square Enix RPG

It was a special series. The good kind of special, not the retarded one.

Not without flaws, mind you, but it was very charming.

>>323355370
i call bullshit, besides the long ass stream of dialogue, there's no way to hate this game.

>>323355710
Are you me? To this day I still wonder why I can't bring myself to play the sequel. I have no problems playing the first one, but the second game feels like a chore for some reason to me.

>>323354857
Djinn system is great. Dungeon design is more than great. Story is ok. Characters look neat and have decent personality, if little actual growth.

Fun.5/10

>>323354857
a fun romp, with the game link working wonders. All the stuff in 2 was great, basic save the world story non with standing. Really wish they would have worked on dialogue with Isaac in the first and Felix in the second, as that would have been better than emotes. The endgame content in two along with entire soundtrack was good.

Story is needlessly WORDS WORDS WORDS and characters are flatter than paper

Combat mechanics are good but the game never really requires you to make any good use of them

Dungeon design is the one place it truly shines, especially in recent times where so many JRPGs have dungeons that are just bland corridors that all look the same with no puzzles or gimmicks of any sort

Dark Dawn gets more shit than deserved but the points of no return with permanently missable things were still bullshit, and battle mechanics were pretty much straight copypaste from the GBA titles in every way with no real progression made

Overall it's just alright

OP here, thanks for the replies!

>>323356164
just finished a run of The Lost Age yesterday. it has an action dip or two to work through, but once i powered through that, the last 12 hours were a breeze.

Getting all 72 djinn and all summons feels gooood.

>>323356164
>>323355710
The second one is a chore because you're thrown into a bigger open world from the beginning. It's not very clear about where to go once you start, and there's plenty of areas that you can't get through.

I needed a guide for the beginning but once you get past a few of the first areas it's a lot easier.

>>323357353
Not exactly, there's only a bunch of places to go at the beginning, so you just have to explore and see which ones you can do something at. You can't make any progress in most areas until you get an item or power from another of the available zones and so on.

>>323354857
I was late to the series and started with dark dawn. I thought it was pretty good but hated how you had areas you couldn't return to, at the end of the game it was easily about a quarter of the map inaccessible. Fights became quite easy too, only difficulty from some of the few story relevant fights.
Still, as i said it was fun and still has potential for a sequal.