It’s fair to say that Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, which made its playable debut at E3 last month, has taken a bit longer than expected to see the light of day. “With the previous games we intended to craft the prologue for a series that could extend for a long while story-wise,” explained Hiroyuki Takahashi, scriptwriter for the series, in an interview in this week’s Famitsu magazine. “The idea was to spread the main story out around this core, but in the end, it took quite a bit of time.”
In fact, it’s taken just about eight years, something that Dark Dawn director (and Hiroyuki’s brother) Shugo Takahashi has more than a bit of regret about. “We’ve received a lot of encouragement from fans regarding their expectations for a sequel, and the fact we’ve finally been able to get the environment together to start developing it is an emotional moment for me,” he said.
What makes Dark Dawn a Golden Sun game? Partly it’s the Psynergy system, which both serves as your magic repertory and provides you with ways to manipulate stuff in dungeons and such. “We came up with the idea for Psynergy,” Shugo explained, “as an answer to the inherent contradiction where you have enough power and magic to blow up the planet during battle, yet can’t break a locked door open in a dungeon.”
