Golden Sun: The Lost Age

Where the first Golden Sun ended mid-sentence, Golden Sun: The Lost Age picks up seamlessly – and in several respects even surpasses its predecessor. It is the second half of one grand saga, into which you can carry over your progress from the first entry via password or link cable and reap the fruits of everything you gathered.

The Lost Age takes the proven foundations and develops them. The elemental spirits Djinn return, customizing the abilities and classes of your characters, as does the psionic magic Psynergy, with which you continue to solve environmental puzzles scattered across the dungeons and the open world. In this respect the game adds new abilities and more ingenious brain-teasers, so exploration is even richer and more rewarding.

Visually and in design it is again the top tier of the Game Boy Advance. The magnificent summons (Summons) fill the screen with effects few would expect from a handheld, and the turn-based battles remain tactical thanks to the constant juggling of Djinn between attack, defense and spells. The world is more sprawling and more open, with an emphasis on sailing and discovery.

Story-wise, The Lost Age is interesting in that it shifts the perspective and deepens the motifs begun in the first game, so the whole duology makes sense only when taken together. Both entries were created by the studio Camelot, which here showed its more ambitious, storytelling side.

Together with the first entry, The Lost Age forms one of the most distinctive RPG experiences on the platform – for fans of the genre it is almost mandatory to play through both pieces as a whole.

Why play it: The culmination of an epic duology that improves everything good from the first game – more world, more puzzles and a magnificent finale to a single story.