They just don't make games like Golden Sun anymore. After Camelot and Nintendo released the much-lauded RPG for the Game Boy Advance in August 2001, the genre began a slow decline both in volume and innovation. The genre shrank, and its eventual regrowth, in trying too hard to recapture past glories, has largely fallen short. Which is a shame. Golden Sun deserves every bit of praise heaped on it, as one of the only examples of a modern (at the time) RPG that built on its inspirations and turned them into something wholly new and captivating.

Golden Sun's premise is simple. A bunch of fabulously dressed rogues want to reignite conduits for elemental energy called lighthouses. Except that's a bad thing, or so you're told. It could destabilize the world, and since the baddies' actions cause a cataclysmic disaster in a small village at the start of the game, it seems pretty clear they should be stopped. They kidnapped a couple of folks too, which is usually not what nice people do.

So Isaac and Garret, childhood friends from the village where the disaster happened, set out to stop them and rescue the kidnapped. They meet a shy wind mage and a spiky cleric along the way and run into a lot of really weird stuff. Talking trees that magically drug an entire village. Sea monsters. A traitorous healer who may or may not be from a place a lot like the legends of Atlantis. Pirates and evil bandits and magic monks. And most important of all, magical Djinn, elemental spirits that grant our heroes special powers for use in and out of battle. As disjointed as it all seems, Camelot deserves credit for giving this world and its oddities........

© Polygon