The JRPG (Japanese Role-Playing Game) genre gets ripped on far too often for being unimaginative, dull exercises in the neuroses of effete Japanese teens, tied to a rigid structure of "save the world from the evil empire" and turn-based gameplay that refuses to get with the times. While I of course don't buy into that view, as it doesn't encompass the many subtle variations that occur in the genre (and those types of subtle variations are seemingly enough of a change for fans of even more glacially-changing genres such as the First-Person Shooter), there is a bit of merit to the idea of the JRPG as unchanging. It's popular with its target market, and it has become almost as culturally ingrained as Kabuki theatre.
So you could look at Golden Sun: Dark Dawn as a bit of a retread in the lineage of Golden Sun games – the gameplay is the same turn-based combat, Djinn collecting, and Zelda-esque puzzle solving combination we've seen before in the last two games in the series – or, you can do as I choose to, and see the Golden Sun games – nay, the entire genre of JRPGs – as storytelling delivery mechanisms first and foremost, and on that plane, Golden Sun delivers an interesting and relatively memorable experience. Look, this isn't one of the greatest games in the genre, nor even one of the greatest games of the year. But it's certainly one of the best JRPGs of the last few years, if only because it understands a few, simple gameplay design truths.
If there's one word that describes Dark Dawn, it's "refined." Every single gameplay element coalesces to make for a supremely polished adventure. Instead of pushing the battle system into some new, crazy direction, the team at Camelot instead took the solid foundation of the previous games and made it as simultaneously accessible and deep as possible. Combat is a combination of physical attacks, element-based magic called "Psynergy," and the ability to use Pokemon-like creatures called Djinn to either do standard attacks or giant monster summons. If you've played any of the previous Golden Sun games on the Game Boy Advance, this is a formula that is instantly familiar, but here, it's so refined (that word again) that every battle is a tightly constructed symphony of tactics, which is unusual for the genre. The myriad options that the Djinn give to your strategies makes every battle so much fun, if not particularly difficult (at least until the last third of the game).
A number of JRPG cliches pop up, of course. Random battles are abound, though not nearly as frequently as in more "classic" adventures; the first half of the game is a very linear romp through the countryside, while the latter half is about exploration with your ship, and trying to figure out where the game wants you to go; the characters, while generally quite endearing, don't exactly have very deep personalities, though thankfully the game avoids the kind of "deep emotion" that characterizes the worst Final Fantasy games (I'm thinking post-Sakaguchi, for the most part). But you know what? It doesn't matter. The game feels like your favourite sweater – it's comfortable and warm, a perfect game to release in December, actually.
Simply traversing the landscape is a joy, because this is a really well-realized world. Weyard feels like a real continent, with real topography, and Dark Dawn is likely one of the very prettiest DS games released. The lighting and the architecture and the character design all come together to create a wonderful fairy-tale land. While the gameplay at times feels like a Playstation-era Final Fantasy game, minus a lot of the brooding and self-importance, it certainly doesn't look like one. Outside of some pixelization that happens in extreme close-ups, you could occasionally be forgiven for thinking that the game was a PS2 game. I'm not commenting on this because I think that graphics are important in and of themselves, but because this attention to detail really sells you on the world that you're in.
The story, while not quite as innovative as the "switch in perspective" trick that happened in Golden Sun: The Lost Age, still has some really cool stuff going on. While its "dread force of Psynergy" is very similar to the dread force of Mana in so many JRPGs, the way in which the heroes of the first two games basically consign the land to doom is kind of an interesting turnaround of convention. You actually play as the first game's protagonists' kids, and throughout, you come across people who remember the earlier games' protagonists, the "Warriors of Vale." Initially, your quest is quite straightforward – you have to retrieve a Mountain Roc feather (a giant bird who lives on top of a mountain) because one of your friends, Tyrell, broke a flying machine that needs it to function. Along the way, though, your characters get caught up in the political turmoil of the land, as with the shifting of the continent after the release of Alchemy, new factions and political allegiances have formed.
The most interesting feature of the plot happens about two-thirds of the way through the game. I don't want to spoil anything, but essentially, your characters become responsible for a cataclysm, and all the way leading up to this, you, as the player, are aware that you're about to do something very bad. It's actually a little bit harrowing, and a very interesting approach to narrative "choice," further cementing my thoughts about the power of linearity to do interesting things with game narrative.
Look, though. If you pick up this game, you have to be made aware of the fact that if you've played a few JRPGs, that nothing new or exciting is going to come out of this game. It's not going to change the world. It's merely a very good example of its genre. Oddly, this is both the game's biggest flaw and the biggest reason to recommend it. Doing the "town/overworld/dungeon" thing is done about as good as it can be here, and it's incredibly enjoyable and fun to take part in a well-worn tradition. But the reason why games like Final Fantasy VI (and even VII, to a degree), Chrono Trigger, or even the released-earlier-this-year Dragon Quest IX are so successful is because they take serious risks with their formula, and it pays off, either in character development, plot innovations, or completely overhauled gameplay. None of that happens in Golden Sun: Dark Dawn. So it's not as good as those classic forebears, but it's certainly better than the strained "innovation" of a game like Final Fantasy XIII.
As I said earlier, it's the perfect Christmas holiday game, then: something that will keep you occupied, engaged, and having fun for many hours, that you can take inside your bed and play underneath the covers. It's warm and it's beautiful, and most of all, it's comforting. That's nothing to turn one's nose up at. Genres need to be broken, sure, but sometimes an incredibly solid genre exercise can have its own merit, and that's exactly the case with Golden Sun: Dark Dawn.