One of the first things that comes to my mind when I have to decide how I rate games is whether the game has staying power (or replay value, in gaming terms). If I spend my hard-earned money on a game, I want it to be the kind of thing that will provide enjoyment beyond a single weekend. I want it to be long enough to immerse me, and fun or varied enough to keep me coming back even when I've completed it. On this level, Golden Sun shows potential, but fails to do anything with it.
The biggest problem I have with this game is the story (or lack thereof). You play Isaac, a silent protagonist from a town of mages. Isaac's hot-headed and rather dim friend Garet joins him on a quest to restore balance to the world after a group of shady magic-using thugs kidnaps Isaac's friends and steals the magic stones that keep the forces of nature in check. Along the way you pick up two more party members: Ivan, a mind-reader, and Mia, a healer. It's hard to describe the story more than that, because I can't really describe something that isn't told well in the first place. Over the course of the game, we barely learn anything about the world or its history, who and what these thieves and their motivations are, or anything that could contribute to a sense of lore or character development (which is nonexistent). There were a few times I actually got visibly angry at the stupid things the protagonists would do, and a few minor characters did plenty to make me mad as well ("Hi, Mom! I'm back from my dangerous journey to visit you while you're sick! Alright, alright, I'll save the world, and I promise not to come back until I do. You don't have to yell at me, you ungrateful cow.")
After the intro, you go from town to town on various, tangentially-related errands, only occasionally encountering the group from before. Without getting into too much detail, the game seems to treat its own main plot as a subplot, only occasionally referring to the thieves you're chasing and instead focusing on Isaac as he solves the problems of each town he passes through. When you finally do catch up with the thieves, you fight them, and beat them, and...wait, why are the credits rolling? We haven't saved our friends yet! What's going on?
Remember what I said before about a game needing to feel like it's substantial enough to immerse me? Not only does the game fail to establish its own setting, it can be beaten in about 20 hours, and it ends on a cliffhanger. You read that right. A game that fails to establish any sort of plot can't even be bothered to have an ending. There was plenty to work with from a story perspective, and the game's failure to develop it is baffling. (Side note, please stop making me do these pointless "yes or no" choices in dialogue that have no bearing whatsoever on the game or conversation.)
From a gameplay level, the game works out alright. Turn based battles, attacks, magic, standard JRPG fare. Okay. Summons? Cool. The big gameplay feature here is using your magic (psynergy) to solve puzzles in the overworld, which is a neat idea, but executed in a rather imprecise manner - ironically, by requiring players to be TOO precise in their placement, or the spells will do nothing. If you aren't standing in EXACTLY the right spot, nothing will happen, and you'll assume you're not using the right spell, which will cause you to exhaust all possibilities until you realize that you were just standing one pixel to the left of the spot the game arbitrarily decided you had to stand.
Another big gameplay feature is finding Djinni, which are summonable elemental creatures that can be found throughout the overworld. Equipping them to your characters increases stats and provides new spells, and they can even be mixed and matched between your party members to change their character classes, giving them different stats and spells. Only two problems with this: First, these Djinni can be difficult to find, with some of them being randomly encountered in unspecified locations on the otherwise-featureless overworld map. Gotta sell those player's guides, right? Second, each of your 4 party members has an inborn affinity for one of the 4 elements, and the classes gained from playing mix and match with different elemental summons are worse than sticking with just one element. So if you give your Earth character a Wind Summon, not only will all of his stats take a nose dive, but he'll lose access to some of the most powerful attack and healing magic in the game, only to have them replaced with inferior attack and healing spells. In short, customization exists for its own sake, since the game punishes you for straying from each character's pre-defined role. I've heard that you can get some pretty good mixed classes once you find all of the djinni, but by that point you'll be so far in the game that you'll be strong enough to handle anything anyway.
My last major gripe with the gameplay is that it's too easy; On my first playthrough, I never got a single game over, and I barely had to do any grinding. The only time I even USED healing items was in some of the later boss fights, but even those were pretty pointless when I have magic that does the same thing AND won't take up my inventory space.
The graphics and sounds don't deserve much mention because they aren't that memorable. They're not bad, but not spectacular.
Overall, Golden Sun is a game that could have been made into something better with a little more polish. The core game isn't awful, so I can't bring myself to hate it. At the same time, I remember that Pokemon Red and Blue were vastly superior in terms of music, story, difficulty, and gameplay, and the main story by itself lasted twice as long as this entire game, not counting the time it took to catch all 150 Pokemon. When your handheld RPG is lagging behind handheld RPGs released for the original Game Boy, you know you made a mediocre game.