Sometime around June of 2011, my family was preparing to embark on a Long Car Ride. In the interest of keeping his elementary school aged children from being too obnoxious during the drive, my dad took us to the nearest GameStop and informed us that we could each choose one new DS game.

While methodically going through every single game on the rack, I discovered a used copy of Golden Sun: Dark Dawn. Despite not being very well versed in video games (yet), I actually recognized the title: I had seen fanart of Karis posted on the Warriors forums I frequented. Seeing as the game had been endorsed by a fellow fan of Warrior Cats (a series that could only be appreciated by those with truly refined tastes), I obviously decided to buy it. And so, my fate was sealed.

To truly understand the lifechanging impact this game would have on me, there are a few things that should be noted about myself in 2011. One: while I definitely enjoyed video games, my exposure to them was mostly limited to the likes of Mario Kart and Wii Sports; I had never played a traditional RPG before, and I also did not know what a "RPG" was. And two: while I would read quite literally anything, my favorite genre was most definitely fantasy novels. I consumed vast quantities of literature about children with magic powers, and these informed the premises of the majority of my games of "playing pretend" (most of the other premises revolved around the aforementioned Warrior Cats).

All of this is to say that when I booted up Dark Dawn on that car ride, circumstances were perfectly aligned for it to blow my tiny nerdy child mind. By the time we arrived at our destination eight hours later I was convinced this was the best game ever made. Dark Dawn has been (somewhat rightfully) criticized for its incredibly easy combat and overabundance of pointless dialogue, but I remain grateful for them, since I had absolutely no clue what I was doing, and was continuously amazed by the fact that the game had actual characters who actually talked to each other.

I spent the rest of that summer engrossed in the world of Golden Sun, becoming more and more enamored with its abundance of mysterious ancient ruins and teenagers with colorful hair. At one point I got so completely stuck on a puzzle in Barai Temple (I have no idea how), that I looked up a walkthrough for the first time in my life. When Sveta was introduced, she instantly became my favorite character, due to her being a cute girl who was also a werewolf but also a princess and who fought using both magic and brass knuckles (a truly peak character concept to 10-year-old me, and also to me now). When I finally managed to beat the final boss and clear the game, only to be greeted with that maddening "The End...?" screen, I once again turned to the internet, where I learned that, while there was no sequel yet, the game had been released less than a year ago. Disappointed, I resigned myself to waiting another year or two for the continuation of the story, and went back to sailing around Dark Dawn's postgame world. Little did I know, that sequel would never materialize.

The story should reasonably end here, with me, now enlightened to the existence of RPGs, going on to play ones that were not Golden Sun: Dark Dawn. Instead, I mostly just replayed Dark Dawn over and over for the next few years. Eventually, I managed to acquire and play the first two Golden Sun games as well, which only served to further fuel my obsession with the series. I started slowly expanding my gaming horizons during highschool, but, for reasons that are honestly not entirely clear to me, Golden Sun always remained at the forefront.

At the peak of my obsession, I had an encyclopedic knowledge of Weyard, which I would not hesitate to talk about at the slightest prompting. I drew piles of fanart, and was constantly doodling the characters in school. I made various AUs and OCs and theories. I extrapolated as much as possible from the games' fairly simple characterization, which is a fancy way of saying I created so many headcanons and made-up scenarios that the characters may as well have been my OCs. In the end, they actually did become my OCS: one of my first DND characters was a red dragonborn named Karst (as in, the character from TLA), which I then followed up by running my own extremely ill-thought-out campaign that followed the plot of The Broken Seal. This is all fairly embarrassing to look back on, but I guess it's not the worst way I could have spent my time as a teenager.

Now, after playing many more games, and maturing (at least a little), I'm no longer quite so hopelessly obsessed, but Golden Sun is always going to hold an extremely special place in my heart. When I first picked it up, I was younger than Dark Dawn's youngest party member (12). I've yet to surpass the oldest member (32), but it's definitely a strange feeling to have grown past the rest of the party. Funnily enough, something like this is mentioned in the game itself:

Had I picked up any other game in GameStop that day, perhaps I'd be very different. Maybe I would have never gotten so into JRPGs, or maybe without Golden Sun consuming 99% of my attention, I would have played more of them sooner. Maybe I'd have been slightly more normal in my teens, or maybe I'd just be overenthusiastic about Pokemon or something instead (if I was like this about Pokemon, that would probably also make me seem more normal, but for no real reason besides that Pokemon is less niche). Who can say. All I can say for certain is that Golden Sun ended up having a huge impact on me, even if it was only by chance.

Few pieces of media have been as constant in my life as Golden Sun; for better or worse the series is tied to so many of my childhood and teenage memories. The characters are like old friends to me, the world feels as familiar as the house I grew up in. No other game that has managed to have such a monumental impact on my tastes... even if it's because I barely played any other games during my most formative years.

In the end, they never did make another Golden Sun game after Dark Dawn, a fact which continues to aggravate me. Its final scene leaves the characters in the middle of a bridge, eternally frozen just before they can finally return to where their journey started. But in a way, it doesn't even matter. Every time I boot up a turn based RPG, or a game with pixel art, or really, any title that can be played on the Nintendo DS, it feels a bit like coming home.