Let's Play: Golden Sun: The Lost Age

[Rune Lai]

Kazyr: What's she doing over there?

Ghaleon: I think she's trying a Let's Play.

Sadoul: At her age?

Rune: You know I can hear you guys... >



Since I'm playing an old school game, I figure it might be fun to chat about its charm, or its lack thereof.

My main beef with GS1 was that plot-wise it was thirty hours of the first third of any other game. You meet the bad guys, the adventure starts, you meet the bad guys again, questions are raised, and nothing is answered. The mission is to stop the bad guys from lighting the four elemental lighthouses, which would restore the dangerous art of alchemy to the world, and rescue the kidnapped hostages, who are Isaac's childhood friend Jenna and the scholar Kraden.

The game ends after main character Isaac has failed to stop two of the lighthouses from being lit and without rescuing anyone and he doesn't learn why Jenna's brother Felix partnered up with the bad guys to light the lighthouses. (You can see how this was incredibly unsatisfying given that I didn't even know a sequel was coming when I finished the game.)

GS: The Lost Age picks up shortly before the first game ends and covers the first game's epilogue where Jenna discovers that Felix and another former hostage Sheba have washed up on the beach of their newly made floating island (created when the second lighthouse shattered part of the continent). Now Felix is the main character for the second game.

In theory this should answer a lot of questions with the player in control of someone in the know (why is it good to light the lighthouses? why did Felix defect?), but all we really learn is that Jenna isn't really a hostage anymore and that Felix believes that lighting the lighthouses will help save their parents (who had died, or looked like they died, in the prologue to the first game).

I don't know how that works, or why Felix helped the first game's bad guys, but now that Felix is controllable he turns into a silent hero who doesn't speak, which is terrible because we don't get details now that we're on the other side of the story.

This is probably one of the things that annoyed me with early 16-bit RPGs. It doesn't immerse me in the game. It's just frustrating. Fortunately, Felix did talk in the first game, and he looks a little bit like a seasoned warrior, so I fill in all his silent moments pretending he's a moody older brother who knows exactly what he's doing or someone's getting an axe/sword to the face.

Floating islands being incredibly unrealistic to begin with, shortly after everyone wakes up, the island is hit by a massive tidal wave coming from almost the completely opposite direction of the originating earthquake and pushed into a small continent hard enough that everyone on it knows something hit them. This has the side effect of making their boat disappear and apparently washing away their fifth traveling companion, Alex, who was one of the bad guys in the first game as well, though he doesn't come across as particularly villainous. I know he's a bad guy though because it's in the instruction manual.

Since Alex is clearly a badass everyone assumes he went off to look for a replacement boat instead of needing to be saved and so they look around the new continent they're on.

With no further explanation now that the player is in command of a completely different set of characters with different motivations, it's off to explore.

One thing I'd forgotten about that I do not miss is what I call "dumb targeting" in combat where the party members do not automatically switch over to attack a second enemy if the first enemy they were originally targeting dies. Instead you lose a round to characters sitting on their butts (defending in this case, which is still pretty useless). Phantasy Star II did this back in freaking 1991, and GS:tLA couldn't in 2003?

The game also assumes the player has rolled fresh off the first GS and does not bother running over what Psynergies are available or how to use them. Between the instruction manual and my rant on the first game I remembered how this world works, that there is no magic except for Psynergy and most of the world doesn't know it exists. Psynergy allows spells in combat, but also allows the player to manipulate certain objects in the world to solve puzzles. Getting back in to the habit of using Psynergies (which can be mapped to the L and R trigger buttons) took some getting used to.

Fortunately, it's a short trip to the first town, a village called Daiba.

[Rune Lai]

Daiba is the village of puddles.

The tidal wave has flooded the village, and being that this is a 16-bit RPG this means the party can neither wade nor walk over areas covered with water, turning the town into a little bit of a maze. Not amused. The tidal wave also washed away everyone’s boats so obtaining a new one doesn’t look good and all anyone talks about (besides the tidal wave and earthquake caused by the floating island ramming into their continent of Indra) are the disappearance of two village boys who went out playing days ago and some monk worth visiting if the party has any spare time.

In following the complete lack of narrative direction of other early RPG games, this means that if the hero must address any problems the village has or nothing else will happen. So I wander around the world map.

I find a cave close to the village and a monastery farther away that requires some maze-like navigation to get to, so naturally I go to the monastery first. Guards at the gate to the walled off compound tell me to go away because the master monk isn’t seeing anyone. So I do.

But then I go to the cave. Yay, the kids are there. Boo, one of them is stranded up on a ledge and though there is coiled rope nearby, I lack the Psynergy to make it cross the chasm. Clearly I am missing something, and mind reading all the villagers in Daiba doesn’t turn up anything. (Ah, silly Wind Adepts. Sheba is one. I forgot that they had Psynergy that lets them read minds, like every NPC you can speak to in the game’s minds. I abuse it with every NPC I can talk to.)

Annoyed, I turn to a FAQ. Really annoyed that I had to do this for my low stress GBA game. Especially right after the first village. And apparently there is a hidden passage around the backside of the monastery that is not immediately noticeable at first glance. (Really? This early in the game?) So I go there, crash some student monk’s test to learn his master’s ultimate technique (why? because Felix clearly doesn’t have anything better to do!) and as a result of passing it instead of the student, the master monk is honorbound to give Felix an item that allows him to use a new Psynergy technique. Conveniently enough, it’s called Lash and it moves ropes.

With that done, it’s a simple matter to go back and rescue the kids, who despite having been gone for days, don’t seem to be hungrier than anything a single dinner wouldn’t fix. Maybe they had supplies?

Alex shows up in Daiba, looking for a boat, which we already confirmed the village no longer had, while Alex was out doing… something. He declines to rejoin the group, saying he works better alone, and disappears again. So the party heads off to Madra, the village on the other side of the continent (because a continent only has room for two villages), which is on the other side of a treacherous plateau. Goodie.

Other items of note, I hate the world map. There is no reason for a world map to be a maze in itself, especially with battles every 4-8 steps. Most of it just feels like a lot of empty space walled off by rivers, mountains, and bridges. Was it always this way with 16-bit RPGs?

On the bright side, combat is super-fast. I’m pretty sure most of them take less than 30 seconds. I need more RPGs with no muss no fuss combat. Even the little intro where the enemies and the party pan in… completely skippable. It probably helps that on a cartridge there’s no loading.

[Rune Lai]

There is no boat to be found in Madra either. Apparently the tidal wave that hit the continent of Indra was so amazing that not only did it take away the boats of everyone on the continent, but it shoved Indra into two other continents forming a land bridge! Is the ground made of pumice in this world? Because apparently continent size rocks can float.

And the poor town of Madra was attacked by foreigners from the west and pirates from the East, the pirates coming to rescue their leader who was imprisoned.

In the aftermath of all this, Felix and company arrive and discover the villagers witch hunting a fellow Adept who they believe is one of the pirates despite the fact that he looks nothing like them on account of his fair skin. (The pirates are a dark-skinned ethnic group called the Champa.) The Adept, Piers, is mostly being accomodating by the misunderstanding, and the village elder has departed to chase after Briggs, the pirate leader, and prove Piers's innocence.

Chasing after the elder (because we have nothing else to do since there are no boats here either) takes us over to the next continent to the east, Oreinas, where I promptly discover a podunk village that has nothing to do with where I'm going. But they have some equipment upgrades, so I buy them, which is nice because it turns out there's a large desert dungeon between me and the town of Alfaras where the pirates are presumably going to try to get a boat, since they need one too.

...

Seriously? I'm crossing continents in search of a boat? I dunno but... wouldn't it be faster just to hire people to build one?

There are also these little elemental spirits called djinn that the party can equip to boost their stats and unleash to use summons in combat. I found one in a small pen on the second floor of someone's house in Madra. Here is a rare mystical creature that I cannot reach because I cannot step over the railing nor open the gate, but do the people downstairs say anything about their unusual co-habitant? Nope!

[Rune Lai]

The desert dungeon is long! But it's forked, which turns out to be a good thing because I end up backtracking through it later (so I only have to pass through half of it on my way back).

I get to Alhafra where I find out the pirates have purchased the town's one ship from the mayor. But for a bunch of guys trying to get a way, they are doing a sorry job of it since the ship is busted and the mast is pinned under a boulder in the shallows. (How do you even do that to a ship?! It's broken off to the side of the ship and under a rock!)

Apparently the ship's been like that for a while and the pirates are trying to fix it.

The pirates are mostly buffoons of the cartoon show variety, so their leader explains in convenient earshot of our heroes that they only take a little bit of loot from a bunch of small towns and avoid the big towns because the big towns might get mad and kick their collective asses. (That's why they bought the ship from Alhafra, using the money they stole from Madra.)

Party member Jenna decides this is a lovely time to chime in with her opinion and the pirates overhear, resulting in the first tough boss battle of the game. I lose, having not expected to enter combat and my characters weren't fully healed, but soundly beat them the second time around.

By this time the mayor and elder of Madra have met with the mayor of Alhafra and everyone has learned that these men are pirates who have stolen from Madra, though the pirates are sporting about it and surrender. Apparently they only became pirates because their prior life as fisherman started to disappear and they needed to feed their families. (They are still locked up. No sympathy from these mayors!)

Since the pirates stole the money to purchase the boat, the mayor of Alhafra agrees that the boat now belongs to Madra, and the mayor of Madra is happy because they need a boat, but they have no way to get it home due to the mast being caught under a rock. (How do you do that? I really want to know!) Alhafra's major doesn't seem keen on repairing it either, using the money from Madra to repair his own town which was ruined by the amazing tidal wave at the start of the game.

After deciding it's not possible to fix the boat using my current Psynergy skills, I decide to head back to Madra and pick up Piers who was supposed to have been released. This is when I'm happy that the desert map is shorter due to the fork.

Unfortunately, Piers is already gone by the time I get to Madra. Clearly the man is in a hurry and not inclined at all to thank the guys who cleared his name.

This leaves me with two places to go. There is a place called Airs Rock on the same continent as Alhafra, which I didn't go to because I had no plot-related reason to do so, or I can follow Piers to the western continent of Gondowan.

I decide I should pick up Piers so I can get my fourth party member (he's totally a Water Adept and that's the only element my party is missing), but promptly get my butt kicked in the cliffs connecting the continents. Sooo... probably not the way to go. Much too deadly.

Disappointed, I trek back to the desert to take the side path to Airs Rock. So much for looking like an unrelated area. Looks like there's something semi-mandatory to do here.

[Rune Lai]

Air's Rock is clearly modeled after Ayers Rock, looking at it on the world map, but there's supposed to be nearby village called Garoh that's filled with werewolves (according to the podunk village I stopped by on my way to Alhafra) so I go there first. Because who doesn't want to meet a village full of werewolves?

It's a long climb up a hillside to the village, during which there are some nifty (for this gaming era) effects where it turns from day into night, so it's night time by the time we get there are catch a glimpse of a werewolf, who promptly runs away into the village.

All the villagers outside are cloaked, though when we go inside their homes they all look human. From their dialogue they are suspicious of us, but they don't appear hostile. But in the back of the village there is a large mound of stone. A large werewolf in robes walks out of it through a hole in the rock, notices us, and disappears back into the rock, which no longer has a door in it.

The villagers talk a lot about Airs Rock and an ability called Reveal. It sounds like the test for the position of the village leader is climbing to the top of the rock and seeing things as they really are, which normal humans (who visit Air's Rock as a tourist attraction) can not.

I head over to Air's Rock, and the dungeon at the base of the rock face is tricky maze with a lot of Psynergy puzzles and backtracking, but I figure it out eventually. The problem is that it becomes apparent that I will have to climb Air's Rock as well, making this a second part to a terribly long dungeon, and the climbing is something of a maze of Psynergy puzzles as well.

I am not thrilled when I get almost to the top and realize that by unlocking the passage to the mesa, I also unlocked a treasure chest that will require about five minutes of backtracking to get to. But I backtrack anyway because that's what the completionist in me does.

Finally at the peak I sing Hallelujah, but what's this cave here? It turns out there is a third dungeon component to Air's Rock. Fffffffffff...

The interior of Air's Rock is mazelike to no end. It's by far one of the most unpleasant 16-bit dungeons I've ever played. It's not just because it's long. It's because it's complicated, and there is backtracking, and things you can't get until you've unlocked other things, and no the game doesn't deposit you back where it's convenient to pick up the extras you missed on your way back.

If it wasn't for the fact that the enemies are the same as those from the desert area (!) this could have been deadly, but the nifty thing about Psynergy Points (vs the usual Magic Points) is that they are necessary to completing dungeons, so they regenerate to make sure the player can't get stuck in a dungeon unable to proceed. When fighting enemies of the not-terribly-lethal variety the party can survive indefinitely.

In my party Felix is the default healer (odd that the sword-wielding male MC is the one with the heal spells, and his sometimes staff-wielding sister isn't, but hey, I'm happy for a break from the norm), and his Psynergy abilities are cheap, so I'm never in danger of dying from anything other than tedium.

I gain a few levels just grinding through the dungeon and in its heart Sheba learns the Psynergy ability "Reveal" by reading some tablet on a wall.

I'm a little underwhelmed to be honest. After going through an enormous three part dungeon, each of them long enough to be a dungeon on their own, I don't even get a boss or some loot at the end?

I grab a few things as I backtrack out, and thankfully Felix has a Return spell that takes the player allllllll the way back to the entrance of the first segment of the dungeon, so leaving Air's Rock is easy.

Back in Garoh I use Reveal on the rock to force my way into the hidden passage used by the robed werewolf. There I meet Masa, the leader of the werewolves, and learn that the people of Garou are similar to Adepts, their powers being influenced by the wind stones in Air's Rock like the people of Vale (where Felix and Jenna are from) were influenced by having all the elemental stars stored there.

The werewolves of Garou are just people, but can also use Psynergy to some degree due to their exposure, but their control is weaker than an Adept's since they don't live as close. This exposure also causes them to turn into wolves if they look at the full moon, which is why all the villagers outside were wearing cloaks.

This was all fine and dandy (and I like werewolf people), but not really related to the plot so I can't think of a single in character reason why Felix would have taken a trip to Air's Rock when there are lighthouses to light for reasons I still don't understand. But hey, we have a new Psynergy ability and that's bound to be useful somehow.

So I head back to the Gondowon Cliffs, which no longer kick my butt thanks to all the grinding in Air's Rock, and I'm on my way to exploring a third continent.

It's then that I realize... damn, we still haven't gotten a boat.

[Rune Lai]

The continent of Gondowan is pseudo Africa. Except that the game can't afford to have multi-ethnic merchant portraits so the merchants all look white when you speak to them even if they don't when you look at their sprites. The people are all very tribal and the northern village is led by a doofus witch doctor. I probably would be annoyed if I was of African heritage.

Anyway, said doofus witch doctor led a raid that stole a gem from the village Madra while the pirate attack was going on. Apparently Madra was just in a really bad location when the continents got sandwiched together and everyone decided to attack it. The gem is a magic steering gem that controls Piers's super ship (which I had seen on my way to Madra) so naturally when Piers was freed he went to Gondowan to retrieve it.

The mountain dungeon between the two Gondowan villages is actually a little fun because it has stealth elements. The Kibombo people who stole the gem are attempting some sort of ceremoney so they're guarding the mountain pass leading to their village. Rather than going balls out like in other games and murdering all the Kibombo on the way to their village, we sneak around them.

They stand guard and patrol a little bit, and if they see the party, Felix and company are tossed out at the start of the mountain pass. Most of the time it's pretty clever, except for the fact that the Kibombo do not react to moving boxes. As long as the player is out of sight it's all good. Which results in stupid things like the guard is on one side of a crate, the party is on another, pushing the crate in front of it to stay out of sight, and the guard doesn't care.

There's even a dog towards the end of the pass where there are two (!) ways to prevent it from alerting the guards. You can drop a crate in front of where it paths, trapping it in a dead end, or you can use Psynergy to get a bone to fall down from a crate so that the dog has something to chew on.

I didn't like getting tossed out as much as I did (dog caught me twice), but otherwise it was a pleasant change of pace after the marathon of Air's Rock.

After the mountain pass I expected to go directly into Kibombo, but it actually was a bit of a walk on the overworld map, during which the sky turned ominously dark. Clearly this was a hell of a ritual.

Or not.

In Kibombo we find out the witch doctor is a guy named Akafubu, who in actuality is more of an apprentice witch doctor. The big god statue in their village has yet to acknowledge him and that is what this ritual is for. To be accepted, a witch doctor needs to present a gem to the great Gabomba, who will then open his mouth and swallow it. But Akafubu failed the last time he tried it, so he stole the gem in Madra to try again. (How he knew there was a special gem in Madra when the continent just rammed into his a few days ago, I don't know...)

Lurking around the fringes of Kibombo is Piers, who reluctantly accepts the party's help to get his gem back in exchange for taking us with him to his homeland of Lemuria, which is thought to be the only place in the world where the power of alchemy was never sealed. The civilization there is supposed to be very advanced, and we learn that Babi, one of the side characters from first game had visited Lemuria a long time ago and stole one of their ships when he left (said ship is used by the heroes of the first game at the very end when they depart to chase after Felix).

I'm quite thrilled to have my party filled out to four people and since Piers is a water adept this means I can now revisit old areas and presumably get some loot. But first... getting Piers's gem back.

[Rune Lai]

Some judicious use of the Scoop Psynergy ability in obviously marked places uncovers a hidden ladder off to the side of the Gabomba statue (conveniently out of line of sight of the villagers). Wonders of wonders, it leads to an underground passage into the statue. And its full of gears and stuff.

So... if this statue is really just a big mechanical contraption that someone built a long time, who the heck makes a side entrance where you have to climb down a ladder and go underground to get inside? Wouldn't it be easier to... I don't know... have a back door at ground level? And how did a ladder get covered in dirt without the whole passage getting plugged up?

The inside is a big of maze with a lot of puzzle elements, which is actually kind of fun until I get stuck. Like really, I'm clueless stuck. Relucantly I break out a FAQ and it doesn't help. I search online for another FAQ, a third FAQ, and finally I realize I'm missing something brainless.

In Golden Sun you can jump. I don't do it often though, and it's usually between two clearly delineated points (one pillar to another). But actually you can jump across any gap one tile wide and there was a long stretch of missing floor one tile wide that I had viewed as an obstacle. It was really easy to jump over and apparently I'm the only person to have ever had this dissonance.

The party gets to the top of the statue at which point the scene cuts away to show what's going on outside. The wannabe witch doctor (and latent Adept) Akafubu lifts the gem into the air up to the statue's mouth and the statue's eyes open, but its mouth does not. Disappointed, the witch doctor asks for more drums to please the Gabomba.

Inside, the Adept-saturated party realizes what the real problem is. The Psynergy interface inside the statue is broken, preventing Akafubu's ritual from completing. Yes, the Kibombo are really just worshipping some contraption someone built a long time ago and the statue doesn't care one whit about the people who worship it. African characters are so seldom portrayed in JRPGs that it's just sad that this is what GS gives them. (Not to mention that the designers couldn't be bothered to give their merchants separate portraits so only the witch doctor is dark-skinned and all the merchants look white regardless of the look of their sprites.)

Anyway, fixing the statue is a short puzzle that is kind of fun, and then the ritual goes off as planned. The gem is swallowed and falls into a little groove in the floor and as everyone in the party stands and watches, it disappears into a hole in the base of a statue inside the room. Clearly, the concept of grabbing the gem right away before something like that can happen does not occur to anyone, even Piers who needs the gem so badly so he can get home.

The ritual also results in Gabomba's tongue being extended out to the waiting Akafubu so he can do inside, which he does, and promptly meets the party. You'd think he'd be a little surprised to see a bunch of strangers monkeying around inside his sacred god, or that his god is just a big machine, but Akafubu is rather blase about the whole thing and tells the party they can have their gem back if they want. He doesn't care. He's a witch doctor now!

Akabufu opens a hidden passage behind the statue and runs off to face his destiny, and the party follows.

Deep inside the bigger statue, they find a room with another smaller statue, now holding the gem somehow (how did it get up there?). This statue speaks, pronounces Akafubu a witch doctor, and Akafubu runs off... before the status finishes speaking.

Disappointed, the statue says he was going to bestow some power on Akafubu, but since he ran off he doesn't object to giving it to someone else. He just asks that the party let Akafubu know he missed something so he at least has a chance to claim it first, and after that the status doesn't care. The statue then gives the gem back.

Naturally, once we get back outside, Akafubu doesn't care squat about what the statue said because he's a witch doctor now! So we head back in to a new cavern dungeon below Gabombo. Unfortunately it seems to be walled off due to lack of the right Psynergy abilities, so I'll have to come back later.

Now that I have Piers though and I have his boat-controlling gem (we have a boat!) it's time to do some backtracking! On another note... Seriously? I've spent the first ten hours of gameplay on a quest to find a boat?!

[Rune Lai]

On the way to Piers's boat (which we had seen on our way to Madra oh so long ago) we stop in Madra because I remember there was a dungeon there that I could not complete. Now that we have Piers, I figure we can go back!

But it turns out we can't. We're blocked by a door and Piers has freezing and dousing magic (seriously, he drops a bucket's worth of water in one place and that's a puzzle-solving spell). Seriously lacking a door opener spell or a battering ram, we go back into the town proper.

On our way to the mayor's house there is a suspiciously fancy-looking sprite mumbling about Menardi, who was one of the end boss villains in the first game, and it turns out that she's a gal by the name of Karst. She's Menardi's sister and once she finds out Mendari's dead she's out for Isaac's blood. We are not Isaac though so she leaves after some additional non-sensical griping.

We also hear around town that Isaac and company from the first game have passed through. It would be really nice to meet up with them right now, combine our parties to go light some lighthouses for some reason I still don't understand. But my previous party ended the game at level 30 something and I just hit level 20 with Felix and company so I have the feeling that the team-up isn't happening anytime soon.

It turns out the mayor has come home, bummed about the ship he couldn't bring with him (the one with the mast trapped under a rock), but gives me a reward for having helped him in the form of a trinket that gives me the Psynergy power of Cyclone, which sounds amazing until you read the description and says that its power is to scatter weeds.

...

Yes, I now have the medieval fantasy equivalent of a leafblower.

But hey, I've got a boat, so I get on the boat (which takes me longer than it should due to conception issues of what is and is not walkable terrain) and discover there are squid monsters all over the place! We clean them out and Piers says he has no idea how they got on board, but figures once we start up the ship (by placing his orb on a stand on what appears to be a small rocky cavern in the belly of his boat!) that all the remaining monsters will leave.

Which they do, because we don't see them anymore. We're out on the open sea, people are celebrating, and then Piers tells us it's no good going to Lemuria right now because it's all covered in protective mists. Wut? Then how's he supposed to get home let alone take us there?

The scholar Kraden has the brilliant idea that Felix should practice sailing around the ocean now that we have a boat (not that we've got anything better to do!) and with that, control is restored to me.

Well crap. Where do I go next in this directionless RPG?

So I start exploring. Alfaras with the broken boat is the first stop, though it turns out I can't do anything there yet. So I hit up some of the islands in the middle of the ocean, which don't really tell me anything interesting except that the Sea of Time is difficult to navigate and no one has done it successfully due to the mists, but I should look for some red rocks for a path.

On a whim, I take a stab at the mist and find the entrance to a boat dungeon. Yes, you steer through the dungeon on the boat instead of walking. A bit novel. I'm not sure I've seen it done before, or since! And it's made possible by having a reef maze with one way ocean currents.

I find a large brown rock which looks like a puzzle piece to me, because I've seen it blocking my way elsewhere, but I can't move it yet, so that ends my journey to Lemuria.

My final stop of the night is towards the northwest on the continent the first game was on, though on a stretch of land separated by some mountains so I can't just traipse into old territory. I find the town of Champa, where all those pirates came from, so we can see how down on their luck they are.

But pirates families aren't the only ones in Champa.

Alex is here, with a chip on his shoulder, making snide comments about us replacing him with another water adept. Jenna rightly points out that he ditched us not the other way around, and Alex decides that since everyone's cranky he might as well start acting like a evil villain instead of just a traveling companion of questionable morals.

He calls in his new stooges, Karst and some other fire adept guy whose name I've already forgotten, and use them as a show of... muscle? intimidation? to remind Felix that he needs to light the lighthouses and to kindly hurry his butt over to the Jupiter Lighthouse, which is next.

Which is completely unnecessary because Felix is still planning on doing this anyway, so why piss off an already reluctant ally?

Karst and Fire Clan dude get backhanded comments from Alex as well. They're only working with him because... lighthouses.

Alex also lets it drop that Babi, Kraden's employer, has passed away so Kraden's quest to find Lemuria no longer has a point (I'm guessing Babi wanted to extend his lifespan some more). If this was a more subtle RPG I wouldn't believe Alex, but Golden Sun seems as blunt as a brick so I think Babi might acually be dead. Of course, the last time we saw him was during the epilogue of the first game and he didn't look that old, so who knows?

After Alex leaves, I look around town and load up on new equipment (new gear!) and meet the grandma of the pirate leader, but no new clues where to go so it's time to sail to my next destination.

I'm going back to Kibombo and looking under that statue, because now I can blow some weeds.

[Rune Lai]

I'm finally have a two day weekend in I don't know how many weeks, so I came back to Golden Sun: The Lost Age figuring I may as well work on finishing it. Cross one more item off my backloggery list.

Between when my job overwhelmed me and now I did the dungeon under Kimbombo where I vauely remember being annoying, but not as bad as Air's Rock. I got... something at the end of it. I think a job change item, and I never use those because it blocks off too many elemental attacks, so it was kind of a waste.

When I loaded up the game today I found myselkf outside Kimbombo, still directionless, and figured I might as well continue my tour around the world map since I'm obviously not getting to Lemuria just yet.

I did a lot of sailing (sailing is not fast), and got to a little ice island at the bottom of the map where I reunited two forlorn penguins who had been separated when one of them had broken a leg (I am not kidding, that really happens). There wasn't much else to do there though so I went to the eastern half of the Osenia continent that was previously blocked off by mountains (the same continent as Alfaras) and find the new village of Yallam.

Where my adventure meets a premature end...

You see... townspeople don't like to deviate from the paths they walk. If you're in their way, they just keep trying to move there. And if they're in your way, you can't push them out of it. Most of the time it's possible to just walk around so this isn't a big deal.

...except for this one small house I go into and get trapped in a deceptive "dead end" between a bunch of boxes and a townsperson. I tried everything; all my items, my spells that might theoretically teleport me (i.e. the dungeon escape spell), saving the game in a different slot and then reloading to see if the townsperson's path would be reset long enough for me to squeeze out.

No luck.

I lost about an hour of gameplay thanks to that stupid townsperson, and while it wasn't dungeon-running, which is why I hadn't saved since the start of my play session, I had gotten a nice chunk of experience while wandering around killing thing.

I'm going stew for a bit before coming back to this one. Maybe there's something else in my backlog.