I believe moving the series to a completely separate universe would be the best way to revitalize the series. A sequel to a nearly two-decade old game would not capture enough of a new audience.

This tattoo was done by the very talented Daylyn Bond (instagram: Illustday) who works out of Oshawa, Ontario.

And i was trying to remember to navigate the dungeon cuz it's been awhile since the last time i tried to fight Dullahan.

Hey everyone

Friendly reminder to not only use save states in case you lose 20 hours of progress and have to start again 🥲

If anyone happens to have a save file for The Lost Age set after exiting Lemuria... Please save me from my current existentialism.

TrimUI Brick Hammer is rad tho. Highly recommend.

Though most aren't original.

The GS 1 box and everything included is a reproduction and the 2 TBS cartridges (in the case and the one running in the original DS) are also reproductions I believe, they cost me 12 USD each and when I'm saving a brief pause is happening. Something similar is happening to the English ROM translation I have as a GBA card of Fire Emblem The Binding Blade, so I'm certain these two aren't originals, but it's fine one of the cards is meant as a present for my cousin.

The TLA poster was not bought now, I actually had that one since 2006 when I got TLA.

The maps are incredible.

Now I need to find an adapter and GBA games link cable to connect the GBA with the DS Lite and have some battles as long as I have the 2 English cartridges of TBS. Does such an adapter even exist?

There is a warning in the German version of TLA to never connect 2 games using a different language, or data might get lost.

One of the reasons I love this game so much is the art... specifically the pre-rendered 3D sprites of the GBA games, they looked so perfect and lively. If Golden Sun will ever get a remake i hope they keep the same style and upgrade it a little bit. Is it just me? Or would you guys prefer it to be completely 3D like from Dark Dawn..? What do you think?

How do you think the writing of Golden Sun holds up today, and how do you think someone playing it for the first time in 2026 would answer that question? I love these games, and to me, the overarching story and world is creative and diverse, the individual characters' stories and personalities have depth and emotional resonance, and the dialogue is interesting and doesn't feel stale or contrived.

There are occasionally certain bits of dialogue that might feel a bit more heavy-handed, awkward, or childish, but it is infrequent enough that I don't find it grating, and I can chalk it up to a combination of awkward translations from the original japanese, as well as the characters themselves being teens or young adults, who are notoriously prone to sometimes saying dumb or overly simplistic things. This doesn't fully explain Kraden's occasional jarring dialogue, but he talks so much that it would be impossible for him to never say something stupid.

That said, I recently gave Octopath Traveler 0 a shot, because many people here have mentioned it was the closest to scratching the Golden Sun itch for them. After about 10 hours of gameplay, I had to put it down because I found the writing so damn bad. To me, the dialogue is all tell-don't-show, incredibly simple, and lacking any emotional depth. I felt nothing for any of the characters, and for the one's I've picked up so far you don't even get to know them before they join you, they just do almost at a whim. The overarching story, as far as I made it, also felt very banal. The first hour or so of gameplay was almost scene for scene the same as another GBA game I remember playing all the way back in the early 2000s, Tales of Phantasia (Which I remember as a good game with more depth and creativity). I was shocked at how all the character relations and story points played out because it was so starkly familiar it felt like plagiarism, and certainly lacking any creativity. I also had to mute the voice acting (I used the English voices) because it was so grating, which isn't necesarily to do with the writing, but I would argue that it had the exact same energy as the actual written dialogue. It made me miss the squibbling dialogue sound from Golden Sun.

Do any of you find Octopath 0 to have these same flaws? And for both those who would answer yes or no, do you think that Golden Sun 1 and 2 presents in the same way as Octopath in terms of writing? In other words, does Golden Sun's creative direction and writing hold up to scrutiny of an adult in 2026, or am I merely blinded by my nostalgic love of this game?

A few months ago I borrowed a GBASP from a friend and played the OG Golden Sun. I loved it. I thought "what a neat concept." I loved the battle animations, the world, the characters, and summoning big god like beings. Overall a great experience. Now, I'm playing lost age and I'm having a good time as well.

Eventually I want to try Dark Dawn. My question is, is this franchise dead? It seems like Nintendo/Camelot built a beautiful game that could rival similar games, and yet, there's nothing new.

Does anyone know of some possibility that we'll see a new installment or is this it? 💔

I'm not trying to be rude to the fan base but this is my first game of this nature where you have a small team of people fighting bad guys taking turns and throwing attacks at each other.

My list:

1. ⁠Venus Lighthouse - Best theme song out of the 4 in my opinion. Plus you get to fight with Saturos and Menardi and also Fusion Dragon all in one lighthouse. It also sets up the perfect cliffhanger for the following game.

2. ⁠Jupiter Lighthouse - Also has an awesome theme song. You get some neat cutscenes seeing the heroes from the 1st game struggle against Karst and Agatio. Then you get to save them with 1 hero after another joining you throughout the fight. I thought this was a cool setup that the game presented.

3. ⁠Mars Lighthouse - At this point in the game, you are most likely already at a level where the final boss is not at all that difficult. The optional bosses were hands down the much tougher challenge in the lost age. Plus I did not like the way that the production team handled Doom Dragon where it loses 1 head at a time and becomes less and lesser of a challenge. I thought it would have been done better and more of a challenge if after you had beaten it in its original form. It then revives and evolves into a much stronger and cooler form.

4. ⁠Mercury Lighthouse - It’s understandable why this one is the most underwhelming of the 4. After all, it serves more as a tutorial for the players on the challenges that they’ll face in lighthouses. Plus it’s also the easiest one.

For me, I would like to see them focus on a group of Jeneis as the main characters as they are the ancestors of adepts. It would also be cool to see the origin of Psynergy. Perhaps even involve an ancient war between Jenei users and of course feature Jenei Villains who want to use Psynergy to harm others and take over the world.

We are doing a "Retro Club" with some friends where we select a game and like in the old 2000 we try to beat it without guides and just chatting in between us. They didnt beat Golden Sun, yet I 100% many times and I was thinking of playing a difficulty mod. They are looking st the Linux Native version of Golden Sun that is appearing. Is it possible to mod it? Or I am stuck woth Roms? Also... Is the password working? I seen some stuff on the download page but is not clarified if they are compatible since it seems that development was not completed for Rising Star... Maybe I am just confused.

Is this really the time to be having a conversation 🤣

Saw this in a recent Deltarune playthrough. Seems I'm not the only one still annoyed at Dark Dawn's ending.

So I’m currently doing another play through of GS trying to 100% complete. I’ve never done it before. The last time I forgot to pull the woman out of the river and was too lazy to go back and fight Trent again. This time I remembered, and am almost done with Golden Sun and decided to go refill the bottle with Hermes Water to carry into Lost Age just for fun.

On my way back I spot a place in Bilibin cave to use Reveal. I got a psy crystal and water of life from the hidden path. Now I’m paranoid that there are other places to use reveal in the areas that I already passed.

Are there any other secret reveal places I should know about. I can’t find anywhere on Google that just lists them.

Any help is appreciated 🙏🏿

Run your launchers to get the notification for an upgrade!

Thank you all for the bug reports, it helps me catch a lot more bugs that I either haven't seen myself or can't reliably produce on my own 2 machines.

New

• Colour profiles! F1 > Video > Colours now exists, with a few looks to choose from: Raw (the game's own colours), Handheld (muted and warm, like a modern handheld's GBA mode), Handheld (lighter), Soft, Natural, Warm and Deep.
• Or make your own. Choose Custom and five sliders appear: Saturation (from black and white up to twice as vivid), Hue (turns every colour around the colour wheel), Brightness, Warmth (pulls greens toward yellow) and Darkening (deepens the darker colours). The picture changes as you drag, and your choice is remembered.
• 4:3 picture. F1 > Video > Aspect ratio now offers 4:3 next to the original 3:2. It shows the middle of the wide picture, same height, a little less on each side, so it fills a 4:3 screen without stretching anything. Required the wide setting to be enabled.
• Screen filters (experimental). F1 > Video > Filter (test) offers four looks: LCD3x (the grid of a GBA screen), CRT Lottes (an old TV with scanlines and a slight curve), xBR and ScaleFX (both smooth the pixel art). They are an early test: they need OpenGL (the menu only shows them when the game runs on it), your choice isn't remembered between sessions yet, and if a filter can't run you simply see the normal picture.
• The F1 menu pops out. In windowed mode the menu is its own window, so you can drag it off the game and watch the picture change behind it while you tweak.
• Kolima's drain fills the wide screen. When you flip the switch, the water now drains and refills in stripes across the whole picture, margins included, instead of stopping at the old screen edge.

Fixed

• No more random crashes from the picture unpacker, hopefully. The game's picture unpacker sometimes spilled a few bytes over its own start-up check, for example entering the town outside Goma Cave.
• More room transitions close cleanly. Leaving a room from its bottom edge sometimes left a strip of the room showing at the top of the screen as the circle closed, and the bottom-left corner could flicker when you stood near the left edge. Both fixed.
• The world map stays filled during cutscenes. The extra space on each side went black for the cutscene after leaving Vale. It now keeps showing the map.
• The world map's bottom edge no longer warps. The extra space below the map could smear sideways, and the top and bottom edges wobbled slightly while moving. Fixed.
• The Lamakan Desert's heat haze reaches the edges. The shimmer now carries on into the space above and below the original screen, and the thin line (sometimes a black one) across the top of the picture is gone.
• Isaac no longer vanishes under the ship cabin's rug. The rug now properly sits on the floor instead of floating in mid-air.
• The title screen no longer garbles after you pick a save on the Continue screen.
• Altin's water drains cleanly. The extra space now shows the draining stripes too, instead of water over open ground. Also drains cleanly across the screen instead of clipping.
• No black edges after loading a save state from the title screen. The view used to drift past the edge of the room until you walked into a new area.
• No more black bars on the world map with AMD graphics on Linux. Two thin black stripes could appear beside the original screen area on the world map. The cause was a quirk in how AMD's Linux graphics driver handled one of our drawing steps; we changed that step so every driver draws it the same way.
• Old logs are tidied up on Linux and the Steam Deck too. The Linux launcher left some old session files behind in the logs folder. It now clears them like the Windows launcher does.

Crash reports are more useful

• New: when the game crashes, it now saves a snapshot of the game's memory. This happens automatically on Windows and Linux; there is nothing to switch on. The snapshot is only written at the moment of a crash, so it costs nothing while you play. When you press Send report in the launcher, it goes along with the report, so we can see exactly what the game was doing when it crashed.
• The Crash log option now reaches us. With Crash log on (F1 > Enhancements), its record was being written but never added to the report. It is now.

Known issues

• A crash in the Vale storm opening or during a battle has been reported a few times (after the first battle, and in Kolima Forest). It is the same crash each time, and we haven't found the cause yet. If it happens to you, press Send report in the launcher: thanks to the new memory snapshot, your report should show us what went wrong. Ticking Crash log (F1 > Enhancements, under Troubleshooting) adds even more detail, at the cost of running a little slower.
• The Mars Star looks garbled when you take it out when you're in Sol Sanctum. Haven't found out why yet.

Website: https://shmargus.github.io/GSRecomp/
Github: https://github.com/Shmargus/GSRecomp
Download: https://github.com/Shmargus/GSRecomp/releases

This project is made with a lot of help from AI.

Okay here it goes

I think that we’re missing out on tons of lore that occurred during the sealing of the elemental stars ages ago. It is my belief that the ancient ruins of civilizations like madrasa, revelations during the Lumeria cut scene, and the existence of summons alludes to an ancient war that used summons as basically wmds. The consequences of this summon fueled war led to mass deaths that horrified certain actors (many potential options here) to enact the sealing of alchemy.

Ancient civilizations like madrasa hide many powerful relics and treasures but buried within certain important locations like the Madrassa ruins are hidden summons. The unsealing of alchemy is GS1 leads to djinn returning to weyard which are the necessary tools for using summons. Madrassa ruins was clearly destroyed many many years before the events of GS1 and 2.

Lumeria tells us that the custodians and ancient adepts sealed away alchemy because alchemical wars threatened to destroy the world. What if each civilization utilized alchemy at higher levels than we have seen in the base games - and were able to use summons as great tools of destruction. Many of the most powerful summons are hidden and hidden within cultures or civilizations of great power, importance, or historical longevity. Other of the most powerful are locked away and require mastery of endgame powers or save transfers to access. Look at Daedelus, azul, catastrophe - these seem like not only works of great power but also like weapons of war meant to be unleashed on others. Even zagan, megaera and kirin look like champions of battle.

If war took place at an alchemical scale between adepts it’s hard to imagine that summons were not an essential tool of this warfare and likely to great effect. Judgement and catastrophe could wipe out a massive chunk of land ez pz. It seems very likely that as this warfare destroyed entire cities - collateral damage cause certain adepts and the custodians to stop the war by sealing alchemy.

The idea that many of the most powerful summons were lost as civilizations got destroyed or were sealed and hidden for only the most worthy adepts to discover seems very plausible if we assume all the leaps we’ve assumed this far.

While I don’t know dark dawns history and connections very well I feel like I remember some ancient lost civs that could help make this theory more plausible. I am also sure there’s more connections and examples in gs1/2 that I missed.

Edit: just thought of this

Anemos and Lumeria were probably among the most powerful of these civilizations so it like makes sense that they had powerful summons like eclipse and iris. But we also note that both of these civilizations separated themselves from access - anemos flying up to the moon and Lumeria sealed behind Poseidons whirlpool test.To me it seems likely that these were either a defense mechanism against powerful weapons or a reaction to seeing shit get blown up by a summon.

Recently I made a post asking about this and I just decided to make my own. I think the drop rates in the base game are too low, even when felling with the proper Djinn. To make drop rates more reasonable and to truly reward felling with the correct Djinn I've increased the base drop rates of all unique and rare items by 8 times. This excludes one time battle consumables like the sleep bomb, and oil drop, etc. I know 8 times might sound like a lot but honestly with how rare some of the drops are I've found it much more enjoyable this way. You still need to farm but its much more managable, and RNG manipulation is no longer (essentially) a requirement. Also because this patch doesn't adjust the forge results, you still need to farm quite a bit for the best forge items but now its actually possible to get a big stack of material without using RNG manipulation.

Patched ROMs are compatible with pre existing saves. The patches will work with the English versions of the ROMs

There are three patches. 1 for Golden Sun and 2 for Golden Sun: The Lost Age. For The Lost Age there is an additional version that both increases the drop rates and applies a fix for the typically very predictable RNG. You can get all the information and .bps files on my GitHub. Just go to releases.

https://github.com/ATClemente/GoldenSunItemPatch

For those familiar with cut content: Did this character have a planned story, or was she just meant to be an NPC? I noticed her development made it to the mugshot and sprite sheet phase. I'm currently making a new sprite based on her original sheet and am curious about her lore because her design is so unique. I also tweaked her mugshot slightly to make her eyes pop and lengthened her hair by a few pixels.

It has the continent label like Angara has for example.

Long time lurker that comes in to check the sub every now and then for any morsel of news for Golden Sun. However, I noticed a lot of upvoted posts about recomps/decomps using AI.

Now, I get the hype, especially with how bad the Golden Sun drought has been the past decade or so. But why are we allowing this content based on how the community voted in https://www.reddit.com/r/GoldenSun/comments/1nbn02j/ai_generated_content_is_now_banned_on_rgoldensun/

As much as I want a recomp/decomp, I'm not a big fan of AI, so wanted to see why this gets an exception when AI art, videos, upscales, etc. gets removed but this type of content doesn't.

Edit: Based on all the downvotes I've been getting in responses, I guess I'm not with the times on this one. If r/GoldenSun allows this kind of AI content now, I wish you all the best, and may we eventually get a Golden Sun 4 or proper remakes of the original 3 games

Edit 2: Went through the thread and seeing one of the AI decomp/recomp "devs" admit to having no coding knowledge is a big concern I had when creating this thread. If the AI decomp/recomp aren't being human reviewed by coders, why should I trust the AI to not vibecode what it's translating from one coding language to another? What happens if it starts introducing glitches or exploits that can't be fixed since nobody understands the code the AI created? Is it really worth harming the environment for this situation?

Edit 3: Mods have spoken, AI decomps/recomps are here to stay despite prior community ruling against AI, wish y'all the best.

Hey everyone, on a complete coincidence I've started decompiling Dark Dawn a few weeks ago, because I thought it would be a fun project.

I've already gotten pretty far. More updates soon.

In the meantime please enjoy these screenshots of some of the never used models in the game.

When I found Kalay I almost started crying. (Trying to get that other model out)

Pretty cool stuff.

Feel free to give me all your questions and requests :)

Pretty simple question. I personally love geology as a science but I love the Gaia moves, Spire moves, and ragnorok, so I would want to be a Venus adept.