User:Marandahir

Hi! I'm Marandahir, or Gwydion Marandahir as I'm often seen in other places. That spawns derivatives like Mar, Gwydd, Gwee, Wood, Dion, and many others. You may know me from Temple of Kraden. I've also appeared elsewhere as trueLOTM – such as on the now defunct Golden Sun Syndicate – and as Dagda429, but Gwydd or Mar are what I'm most known as these days.

Here on GSU, I have mainly concerned myself with accurate translation from the Japanese version of the game. Seven years ago [note: original wrote 1 year – Seriously!? I wrote this bio back in 2011; wow], I managed to acquire carts of both both games in Japanese while living in Kobe, Japan. Many of the articles in the wiki did not have Japanese language names attached to them, and for deeper understanding of people, places, items, monsters, Psynergy, and concepts in the series, I have been doing Japanese playthroughs to acquire all of the Japanese names in their kana, romaji, and transliterated forms.

I have played Golden Sun since 2002, and was an avid fan back in the day, and it's still my favourite RPG of all time. With the [no-longer recent] release of the third installment in the series, my excitement and interest in the franchise increased tenfold. Likewise, I have taken part in writing of Dark Dawn articles and cleaning them up on GSU. After acquiring an imported Japanese cart for Dark Dawn in 2011, I set to task with adding and/or cleaning up the Japanese language names for all the Dark Dawn articles as well.

Another top interest in the games have been the lore and real-world correlations hidden within the game's text. Sometimes, such connections are not as evident in the translated game, hence my concern with the Japanese original text. Golden Sun is surprisingly deep with it's knowledge of real world history. I imagine the writers spent a lot of time researching different cultures and locations, because there's a lot packed in there, and beyond just the superficial first layer as you might see in other RPGs with a world map based on Earth (here's looking at you, Dragon Quest III).

More recently, as of 2015, I've been going back through the articles as I'm made aware of them by my needs from my most recent playthrough of the GBA titles on the Wii U. There are a still a handful of articles with profound deficiencies, and as I've been finding them, I've been editing and updating them – especially as the wiki's traffic and need for refinement has been decreasing with age.

I wish I could put in a Apolloshipper / Soulshipper / Spiritshipper user tagbox. ;)