Golden Sun: Dark Dawn/Tricks, glitches, and other minutiae

A collection of details concerning Golden Sun: Dark Dawn that players often find intriguing. Also see Golden Sun/Tricks, glitches, and other minutiae and Golden Sun: The Lost Age/Tricks, glitches, and other minutiae.

Fight later enemies earlier

 * From Kaocho, head to the small forest area south-east of the town and walk along the edge of the mountain. Occasionally you will fight monsters you would normally fight later (mostly Rat Warriors or Plated Rats).

Fall through the Endless Wall to reach unreachable areas
Late in the game, when traveling the Endless Wall toward the Apollo Ascent, stand on the line dividing the vertical road to Apollo Sanctum from the horizontal road at the T intersection, and position yourself exactly until Matthew's shadow seems to disappear and the horizontal road appears to overlap his feet slightly. Save here and reload the game file, and Matthew should appear to immediately drop through the ground and fall a fair distance into the black abyss below the game world. You can now walk under the road and bypass various natural obstacles that prevent you from accessing certain areas late-game in normal gameplay. It's easy to find yourself glitching back onto solid ground while walking underneath land, but it is possible to get into areas normally blocked off by points-of-no-return and find Djinn you missed this way, but the only way to return is to die and return to a Sanctum. This is not a problem when returning to the first area of the game, as you can walk through the first roadblock when returning and reach Harapa, so dying will move your ship to that location. However, in northern Angara, the only way out is to return directly to Tonfon, which means that if you enter any town while you're there, you'll become permanently trapped in Morgal. A variety of other functions for this glitch exist as well, such as accessing Crossbone Isle early.

Other minutiae

 * The unreachable half of Carver's Camp features an accessible house with a fully coded interior. One of the pots there contains a Lucky Pepper that can never be acquired during normal gameplay.


 * There are at least three unused portraits of existing characters in the game code: one of Briggs looking deathly pale with his eyes closed, one of Sveta looking shocked and perking her ears straight up, and one of Hou Zan looking tense and sweating.


 * A pre-release screenshot shows the party fighting what appears to be a group of Stone Soldiers, enemies from the previous games that are not present in Dark Dawn.