Golden Sun: The Lost Age

Golden Sun: The Lost Age (黄金の太陽 失われし時代 Ōgon no Taiyō: Ushinawareshi Toki / Golden Sun: The Lost Age in Japanese) is the second installment of a series of role-playing video games developed by Camelot Software Planning and published by Nintendo. The game was released in April 2003 for Nintendo's Game Boy Advance, being a direct sequel to the Game Boy Advance Golden Sun. Players can transfer their characters and items from Golden Sun to The Lost Age by means of a password system or Game Link Cable, and players are rewarded for fully completing both games.

Picking up the story during the events of the previous game, The Lost Age puts the player into the roles of a magic-attuned "Adept" named Felix and his allies as they seek to restore the power of Alchemy to the world of Weyard. Along the way, the player uses magic to defeat enemies and discover new locations, help out local populations, and find elemental Djinn which augment the character's powers. Upon release, The Lost Age was generally praised, although most publications found that the game was not as good a title as Golden Sun. Nonetheless, the game ranks as the eighth best Game Boy Advance title of 2003 and the 22nd best GBA game of all time.

Setting
Golden Sun: The Lost Age takes place on the same fantasy world as its predecessor: The world of "Weyard", a massive earth-like environment modeled off the old Flat Earth idea of the world; it is a flat, vaguely circular plane whose oceans perpetually spill off the edge of the world's entire perimeter into what seems to be an endless abyss, although no one knows what is over it. The plot progression of Golden Sun: The Lost Age spans many continents, islands, and oceans around the two main continents where the previous game takes place. All matter on Weyard consists of any combination of the four base elements: Venus (Essence of rocks and plants), Mars (Heat, fire, and lava), Jupiter (Wind and electricity), and Mercury (Water and ice); magically-attuned Adepts can manipulate these elements.

General Storyline
The Lost Age begins with a prologue summarizing the events of the previous game and explaining all the major plot points. Afterwards, players take the role of Jenna moments before Venus Lighthouse was lit. Alex tells Jenna and Kraden to go to Saturos and Menardi's boat, then he leaves to keep Tolbi's soldiers at bay. Once the three regroup at Idejima, Venus Lighthouse is lit, and the following tremors tears a rift in the mountain range, causing Idejima to drift into the ocean.

Soon, Alex discovers Felix and Sheba washed up on the beach. As Jenna and Kraden try to wake them up, a tidal wave strikes, and Idejima is sent crashing into the continent of Indra. Felix wakes up and gathers Jenna, Sheba, and Kraden, and they go search for Alex.

For more information on the game's storyline, see this page.

Characters
For much of the game, the player controls a total of four characters: Felix is an eighteen-year-old Venus Adept from the village of Vale, who was an anti-hero in Golden Sun but serves as the game's new silent protagonist. His younger sister, Jenna, a seventeen-year-old Mars Adept also from Vale, and a fourteen-year-old girl and Jupiter Adept named Sheba, as well as a sharp-witted elderly scholar named Kraden, are all hostages that Felix was forced to take with his now-deceased masters, the Mars Adept warriors Saturos and Menardi that served as the previous game's antagonists. In this game the player takes the role of Felix as he strives to complete Saturos and Menardi's original objective to restore Alchemy to the world of Weyard, and joining them is a Mercury Adept named Piers, a mysterious young man whose ship Felix's party uses to explore the world throughout their journey.

Several groups of characters serve as Felix's antagonists in The Lost Age. He is at odds with the heroes of the original Golden Sun, led by the young Venus Adept warrior Isaac, who pursue him across Weyard under the belief that Alchemy would potentially destroy Weyard if unleashed. One of Saturos' original companions, a powerful and enigmatic Mercury Adept named Alex, allies himself with a second pair of powerful and imposing Mars Adept warriors, Menardi's sister Karst and her partner Agatio. They keep the pressure on Felix to ensure he proceeds with his quest as he is supposed to.