An unnecessary sequel to a long finished series.
First off, a word to the developers who will never read this because they don't care about low-life scum such as myself; what were you thinking?! The Lost Age had a nice conclusion that tied together all the lingering plot points and left little to the imagination! There was absolutely no reason to make another Golden Sun! And yet here we are, with another Golden Sun that does nothing except untangle the knot that was at the end of the last game and tie more strings onto the end. The plot doesn't have much going for it; the idiot established as your friend decides to break a really valuable artifact for inadequately explained reasons and you must drag him along to find the extremely rare replacement parts. Then, while in the middle of this pointless journey that's barely worth writing about, some stupid plot intrigue is thrown in that involves the whole world, blah, blah, blah, we've all done this before. Basically, you start off with a goal that's really quite pathetic when compared to pretty much every adventure game ever, only made worse by the fact that it's treated like a journey that was as grand and epic as the one that took place in the first game, and then forced to do the exact same thing you did in the last two games. It wouldn't have been so bad if all of the characters hadn't kept banging on about how this journey is just as important as the one in the last two games. The plot could have been replaced with a bunch of road signs reading "This way, Stupid," and it would have been a vast improvement! Oh, yeah, and it ends on a cliffhanger, with no promise of a sequel in the near future, as far as I can tell at this point.
The characters haven't seen much improvement, if any, either. The first four you're introduced to are basically exact replicas of the main cast from the first game, right down to their basic personalities and roles in the gameplay department, only some effort was made to expand on the characters, which only made them worse. In fact, if it weren't for their names being different, you could convince yourself that you're playing a pathetic remake of the first Golden Sun. And the other four playable characters don't turn out to be all that interesting, either; at the end of the whole thing, I only liked the last two characters to join the motley band of idiots, and one of them had absolutely no personality at all. And to top it all off, many of the returning non-playable characters are either dudes you met in the last games, or rip-offs of dudes you met in the last games. They brought back the annoying old man who couldn't shut up for five seconds, and the unlikable wimp who's ass you never got to kick. The two new bad guys are basically Agatio and Karst from The Lost Age, who were in turn just rip offs of the two villains before them, Saturos and Menardi. Dialogue has only gotten worse, since the writers thought that every single character needs to state the completely obvious plot points that Grandpa just got finished droning on about, and none of the endless dialogue sections are helped by the fact that they can't be skipped or sped up, regardless of whether or not you need to hear any of the garbage their establishing. This only gets more and more tedious as the game progresses and you find more and more people to drag along with your merry little group.
The gameplay is infinitely stronger, even though it hasn't been changed in the slightest, either. The environments are much larger, but the puzzles are a let down. They have changed a bit, since they now focus on astronomy over the four elements thing, but they're a lot more simple now. There are also a lot less utility spells floating around, which would explain the lackluster puzzles. Combat hasn't seen any changes either; basic JRPG turn based combat with the special pets from the first games that added a wide variety of classes to keep the combat varied. Also returning from the last game are all of the old, over-the-top summon techniques, plus one new one, that have only become more spectacular because of the better graphics quality of the DS. And, unlike the cutscenes and dialogue, the battle sequences can be sped up, but, since the class and combat systems are the only parts of this game that make it worth playing, it's kinda pointless. The biggest mistake that was made, however, seems to be that there is substantially less combat. Since there's more dialogue, the only logical conclusion I can draw is that they cut back on the fun parts of the game to add more terrible dialogue. Thanks for that, you utter morons!
So, after seven years, you idiots came up with a game that has no right to exist. There was no need to tack on this pathetic excuse for a plot, you didn't make any worthwhile changes to the gameplay, and you didn't even bother to fix the problems that the first two games had; lengthy dialogue sequences and an old fart who's mouth was constantly moving. The saddest part of all is that you had seven years to think of changes and improvements and didn't even bother to try anything new! For the next game, and there has to be one since you threw in a bogus cliffhanger ending, if you look through your work and think that it looks exactly like one of the past three games, scrap the thing, and start from the top. Otherwise, don't even bother publishing the game and just send a bunch of apologies and chocolates to anyone who knew what Golden Sun was before the year 2010.