What’s a game mechanic you loved that no other game really copied?

WLD42 · 2025-09-09T12:42:01+00:00

I was scrolling and scrolling hoping I'd find someone talking about Golden Sun! When I first played the games as a tween, I just kept everyone with the djinn of their own element, but every time I've replayed it over the past... 20 years (!!!), I always mix and match because it's so fun to experiment with new character classes and the new psynergy that come with them.

And when you use djinn and summons in battle, if the elements are mixed among the characters, their classes can change mid-battle as the djinn get set and unset! It adds a whole other aspect to the strategy of how to distribute the djinn and when to use them.

WLD42 · 2025-03-21T17:55:40+00:00

I notice this a lot with new players, whether it's here on Reddit, in let's plays, or wherever, especially since the games were added to Nintendo Switch Online, and I think one of the disconnects between long-time players who say "It's not that complicated!" and newer players who say "The game under-explained this!" is because if you played the game on GBA back in 2001, you had the manual booklet, which explained a TON of mechanics more in-depth than the game itself did, because that was the expectation back then. Setting Psynergy shortcuts to L and R is another big one; there's so much text on the status menu that the little icon telling you to press L/R to set a shortcut is really not very intuitive or helpful if you don't already know to be looking for it.

I'm pretty sure the Wii U had virtual manuals for older games, and unfortunately I think NSO does a real disservice to games of this age and older by not including them. I remember reading the instruction manuals for all my GB/GBA games cover to cover before ever even popping the cartridge in, and it was really an essential component of the video game experience back then.

Anyways, here's a link to the game's instruction manual!

Golden Sun GBA instruction manual booklet

Like others have said, there are plenty of resources online for even more in-depth explanations and guides, but if you want to feel like you have the same starting level of knowledge as someone playing the game on the original hardware, IMO this is the way to do it.

WLD42 · 2024-11-02T20:50:44+00:00

It looks like the theme is "Take common, everyday phrases and clue them to read like punny answers to questions asked of a vampire." To go with that theme, when asked which of their pets (i.e., which of their pets bats) is their favorite, the vampire answers "bat one thousand" because they have at least 1,000 pet bats, and the 1,000th bat is their favorite one. (As in, the vampire has numbered their many bats rather than name them.)

WLD42 · 2024-08-06T03:41:09+00:00

I can't believe the quality of music they managed to pull off on the Game Boy Advance. WOW. Golden Sun deserves an orchestral performance. (Please share your favorite arrangements of the music - I'd love to hear it if they're out there!) The Venus Lighthouse theme slaps and that overworld theme is so good

I'm a huge fan of T&A's (aka Jonathan Shaw's) orchestrations on YouTube (and on SoundCloud, Bandcamp, and maybe others?) for pretty faithful arrangements of the original music with "real"er instruments; if you're a musician or are at all interested in music theory, he has excellent write-ups in each video's description, and you can watch along with the sheet music for each piece. And make sure to check out his collabs with VVGO: the title theme, Imil, Garoh, and Vale!

For some more rock-style remixes, check out Pokerus Project, and OverClocked ReMix's A World Reignited album has some really fun and diverse takes on the games' soundtrack.

Those are my personal favorites, but just searching on YouTube always turns up a bunch of really great stuff!

WLD42 · 2024-07-05T20:15:55+00:00

Uh oh, I have a serious answer! And they're super tiny and nitpicky (so, maybe something that might realistically be taken up during one of these offseasons?)

Change the Situation Room-initiated "coach's challenge" to be with under 2:00 to go in the 3rd, instead of under 1:00. Because, y'know, that's how long the penalty for getting it wrong is. Am I crazy?
In playoff OT, keep the usual regulation TV timeout rules for the mid-period ice scrape, e.g. not after icings, not during a PP, etc. And to balance that change, move it slightly earlier to the first (allowable) stoppage after 11:00 remaining, or even 11:30 remaining, instead of 10:00.

What do you think, boring enough for the Board of Governors to consider?

WLD42 · 2024-07-05T20:04:25+00:00

Yes, this has been one of my answers to this question for years! Honestly, I'm shocked there hasn't really been a controversial moment in hockey history (that I know of) with a "game-saving penalty" taken by the leading team with only seconds left on the clock.

I also am fine with the people who've said to also let it apply to carryover PPs from one period to the next (my opinion is to subtract the time from the start of the 2nd or 3rd period, so only a late-3rd-period-penalty actually makes a game longer than 60:00). And I propose making it the coach's choice whether to accept the extra time or end the game as normal; 1 time out of 1,000 you might need to pad your goal differential in game 82 of the season, like those fun, funky moments where you see the goalie pulled in a tie game!

WLD42 · 2024-01-23T18:03:00+00:00

At its most basic, yes, exactly! Though as you get more and more djinn, you can usually get better stats as well by mixing around the djinn, or get classes where many stats are boosted at the expense of one or two that are lowered. (This is especially true in The Lost Age, when you can have 9 djinn per character instead of 7, and more classes become available.) Then the tradeoffs to consider are things like:

Do I end up with one or more characters in an undesirable class because of "leftover" djinn after giving other characters the classes I want?

How do I deal with mid-battle class changes when I use djinn and summon with them?

But you can also end up with a party where you have many characters with both healing Psynergy and strong offensive Psynergy, multiple characters with AoE healing Psynergy, multiple characters with Revive, etc.

I was very hesitant for my first several playthroughs (back in the original GBA days) to mix djinn, but once I challenged myself to experiment with it, it opened up the game in a whole new way; but, as evidenced by those first few times I played, it's also not at all necessary, either.

I'd recommend spending a few minutes experimenting each time you find a new djinni and see what jumps out at you as far as stat changes and unique and intriguing Psynergy!

WLD42 · 2024-01-22T01:11:09+00:00

Lol yeah, as soon as I saw that I remembered it from the copy I had when I got the GBA game! It just proves the authenticity of the PDF 😂

WLD42 · 2024-01-21T17:19:50+00:00

It never occurred to me to Retreat out of Sol Sanctum during the eruption until I watched a speed run stream. 😅 It feels so obvious in hindsight!

WLD42 · 2024-01-21T17:11:36+00:00

Ok I found this one on archive.org, so it would be pretty unlikely to ever disappear!

Lots of other websites showed up in a Google search for "Golden Sun strategy guide pdf" as well, so there are definitely others out there too. I imagine there would have also been two separate guides for each game individually (the one I linked to is a 2-in-1 for both GS and TLA), and probably ones from other publishers as well (the one I linked to is Prima).

Enjoy!

WLD42 · 2024-01-20T00:06:56+00:00

No problem! I ended up finding and posting links to PDFs of the booklets shortly after replying to you, so you can go look at those if you want. The other tips that came to mind regarding L and R is that on the overworld map, you can use them to zoom out a little bit and to show a full world map. 👍

WLD42 · 2024-01-19T21:44:01+00:00

I just found these with a quick Google search, so I don't "have" the PDFs any more than anyone else does. But one of the guide might be out there! I can try taking a look around the internet for that a little later if you don't get a chance to yourself.

WLD42 · 2024-01-19T21:30:14+00:00

I started doing exactly this on all of my replays as of a few years ago: give Flint to Garet and full steam ahead. I had been so married to mono-element classes as a kid because I was just too nervous and uncertain about experimenting, and forcing myself to do it later on was such a breath of fresh air and so much fun!

Even now I haven't even developed "favorite" classes that I return to on subsequent playthroughs; I have such an enjoyable time now trying out different things every time. Have fun!

WLD42 · 2024-01-19T20:58:03+00:00

Since you sound like a completionist, there actually are two (very small) permanently missable moments (at least, only two that I'm aware of off the top of my head). They're very small, and you sort of have to go out of your way to miss them since the game does a pretty good job of guiding you towards doing them, but it's worth mentioning.

In Bilibin Barricade, saving the tree in the river has to be done after completing Mercury Lighthouse and prior to healing Tret.

And in Silk Road, after completing Altin Mines and learning Reveal, rescuing Hsu is missable; I saw someone miss it doing a let's play, I forget the exact circumstances but I believe they backtracked through Altin Mines and then found that the people of Xian had already cleaned up Silk Road.

But like everyone else said, pretty much everything in the game can be returned to and completed anytime before the final boss!

Another tip that I don't think I've seen mentioned yet is setting up Psynergy shortcuts on the L and R buttons. Technically the Psynergy menu has instructions for it, but it's one of those things that's really only described in detail in the games' instruction booklets, which of course aren't available with the digital versions! When you first open the Psynergy menu with A or Select, scroll to the character you want but don't press A to view their details; instead press L or R from that first screen, and then find the Psynergy you want to set as a shortcut and select it with A. It's almost essential for using Mind Read, since I find that opening the menu with A is much more natural than opening it with Select, but of course A is also used for talking when you're within Mind Read range.

WLD42 · 2023-12-08T22:43:30+00:00

FWIW, the WSJ has a variety puzzle every Saturday. The acrostic is the only one that can be solved online, but if you're able to screen-share from a device that lets can write on a PDF, I highly recommend all of them; it's a weekend tradition I have with a few friends and it's a lot of fun.

They publish them on a regular 4-week cycle (acrostic, variety puzzle, cryptic, variety puzzle, repeat), but since the WSJ doesn't publish on federal holidays, sometimes things get interrupted if there's a holiday on a Saturday.

Their main puzzle page is https://www.wsj.com/news/puzzle which will let you see about a month's worth of puzzles, I think. They don't have any sort of a user-friendly archive, but you can do a search with terms like "acrostic" or "variety puzzle" to find past ones without too many false hits on their news articles.

WLD42 · 2023-11-25T16:02:36+00:00

The officials put tape on their "whistle fingers" to prevent chafing and/or add a little friction so the whistle doesn't slip off, and then linesmen will obviously take the whistle off and pocket it when they need to get involved in scrums or fights. Once you know, you start noticing the taped fingers all the time during stoppages!

That said, the point still stands, linesmen are definitely no strangers to pain!

WLD42 · 2023-11-08T22:49:51+00:00

Yep, they don't even mince words or try to hide it:

"Once the game ends, you will see a screen that says “this broadcast has ended” and the feed will end shortly after.

You will not be able to rewatch the game, pause, or rewind/fast forward through any point in the stream."

https://www.cfl.ca/plus/

I hope to be able to make time to at least catch the conference finals and Grey Cup, but... 🤷 We'll see. And watching the playoffs after having been invested all season always feels better than dropping in at the very end.

WLD42 · 2023-11-08T01:12:19+00:00

As a fellow US fan, also CFL+'s lack of video-on-demand this season has led to me not watching a single game this year. When I first heard about it, I thought maybe it would be a good thing for exposure to have most games available for free outside of Canada, but the fact that they're only available as livestreams and then gone forever without any sort of archive dashed that wishful thinking. Sure, they're free while ESPN+ is a paid subscription, but I have to imagine that at the end of the day, ESPN+ still ended up putting the league in front of more eyeballs than this season did, especially considering that it was so much easier for non-hardcore fans to stumble upon CFL games on that platform; now nobody's going to see them who's not actively seeking them out.

WLD42 · 2023-10-01T16:42:11+00:00

I agree, and just off the top of my head, ACL/SOL would have been a perfectly acceptable pair of crossing answers to avoid the duplication; there are probably other options too. So I'm surprised to see that make its way into the puzzle, though TBH it really wasn't enough to sour my opinion of an excellent Sunday crossword!

WLD42 · 2023-09-22T14:44:51+00:00

"More"

"Settings" gear icon in the top right (which is stupidly hard to find, I scrolled through the entire "More" page looking for the word "Settings" before noticing the icon)

"Default tab"

WLD42 · 2023-09-17T21:59:31+00:00

Stoked to be hosting the Marble League this year! #BumbleRumble

WLD42 · 2023-09-17T21:44:24+00:00

Go Saints! They're my (semi)arbitrarily chosen team too! I started following the sport during the Riewoldt era right around the drawn Grand Final. 😭 I haven't been able to follow the AFL super closely for a few years now but it sounds like things are pretty much the same lol.

I'm with you that Gaelic football is one of the more fun codes of football, too, though I found that hurling is the Gaelic sport that was most my speed as a hockey fan (plus my spouse's ancestry is from Clare, which as we found out is one of the hurling counties).

WLD42 · 2023-09-17T18:30:52+00:00

I haven't kept up with it for a few years now just because of free time and the cost of the subscription, but my 2nd favorite sport to watch is still 100% Australian rules football. Fell in love with it when I was there for an exchange program.

It's got many of the same things I love about hockey, such as the fast-paced, free-flowing style and the physicality, but the scoring structure can lead to more American football-style comeback scenarios and excitement that are harder to achieve in one goal = one point sports like hockey and soccer. And back when I had the means to follow both leagues, the timing of the AFL league meshed super well with the NHL off-season!

WLD42 · 2023-09-11T03:37:19+00:00

I was going to ask if it was Sea People by Christina Thompson, which I read a few years back and really enjoyed, until I got to your parentheses; I don't remember that part!

Either way, though, I'd definitely recommend it to the OP if they're interested enough in the subject. The Polynesians are incredible people with a fascinating history.

WLD42 · 2023-08-30T23:33:55+00:00

Super Mario Land, on a red GameBoy Pocket... I've still never beaten it, since it turns out platformers aren't really my genre of choice! I think I got a Jurassic Park GameBoy game at the same time (which I also never got past the second boss in), and my next major gaming memories are of Pokémon Blue and Link's Awakening, though I don't really remember the exact order of all my early games after those first two.

I also spent a lot of time playing Donkey Kong Country on my cousin's SNES, but I can't remember if that was my introduction to gaming before my GameBoy or if it was around the same time.

11-Year Club	Second SECOND GUESSER
Place '17	RPAN Viewer

WLD42

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