Genre: RPG Developer: Camelot System: DS
0000000 One thing you'll notice about the box art for Golden Sun: Dark Dawn is the 4 little things that look like
Pokémon.
0000000 While the Pokémon series, has, in my own mind, itself become a legitimate RPG series in its own right,
I generally still see it as a children's game for a variety of reasons. (I'll get into those later if I ever end up reviewing one of those games)
0000000 The Djinn are not Pokémon, they are magic creatures that the player has to solve puzzles or battle them
in order for them to join you. Once joined, they give the player powerful summons, which will be needed for the end boss. They also sometimes will
let the player learn new spells, which the player learns sometimes after gaining a level.
0000000 The game difficulty is mostly trivial, all the way up until the very end boss battle, which is nontrivial.
The difficulty for that battle is artificial, though, because you're forced to use the summons, as they are the only way to do serious damage. However,
using summons will sometimes randomly take away your ability to use your healing spells, which are mostly the only useful spells for this battle. Oh,
and there is one particular spell, called "Healing Gust", which will heal your whole party; however, this spell seems to be taken away first as you line
up your summons against the end boss. The end boss has about 4 turns that are interspersed between your own characters, many of which will do more damage
than you can reasonably heal. Fortunately, the boss is not that difficult because you can simply use all your summons and it doesn't have enough HP to
give you serious trouble.
0000000 Finally, the story is engaging enough to keep you interested and wanting to play through to the end, which comes
to about ~44 hours of gameplay. But you're going to want to put this game away once you're done, for sure.
~ Adam Henderson
Game Difficulty Rating:
5/10 AVERAGE
68% Pretty good given the limitations of the DS
70% Nothing special, but well done.
38% A bad attempt at innovation with the Djinn system
80% Easily this game's strong suit. Classic RPG battles and story.
38% 44 hours. I tend to expect double that for a good score.
50% Some parts difficult to follow. Other parts were good.
OVERALL SCORE = 63%
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