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 Rat Warriors, monsters you would normally fight later.
 * After the Grave Eclipse has occurred, dock in Tonfon and walk along the bottom of the Endless Wall. You will be able to fight enemies from the Endless Wall, and the background battle scene will show the Endless Wall.

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 is 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 are there, you will become permanently trapped in Morgal. A variety of other functions for this glitch exist as well, such as accessing Crossbone Isle early.

Other minutiae

 * A hidden image in the code that depicts some sort of crumbled ruins resting on top of a semi-sphere is apparently an image identifying the Anemos, seemingly representing the story of how the City of the Anemos rose up to become Weyard's moon.


 * 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. When the oven and cupboard here are inspected, the message "It is translating." will be shown. Outside the house is a log that can be rolled left so that it falls into a designated space hanging over the chasm; all of these suggests this area may have been planned to be accessible during development. Full visual details here.


 * At the start of the game near the Lookout Cabin there is a Travel Log titled "Stop Tyrell from flying!", that is completely inaccessible in a normal playthrough due to the player only unlocking the ability to view the Travel Log after Tyrell has already flown away with the Soarwing. To access it, the player must to use a cheat device to walk through walls and leave the starting area without Tyrell flying away, unlocking the ability to save the game early; upon saving the player will see the hidden Travel Log written into view.


 * 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.


 * Four item icons and the items they are attached to are present in the game code that cannot be gotten in normal play. The first two are the icons for the Encyclopedia and Djinn Guide, suggesting these may have been planned as separate items at some point, while the bag of gold can safely be guessed to exist to represent when you find coins out of a chest. However, the round sun emblem is not seen in the game in any form. It is apparently coded as a Quest item because it cannot be dropped. All four of these items have blank inventory descriptions.