I think it's a shame Golden Sun starts out so incredibly slow, because that may turn off some people who would love the game's real content. Yes, the reports you've heard are true: Golden Sun starts off with a lengthy prelude whose forced dramatics fall utterly flat, simply because you haven't had time to relate to any of the characters yet. Once the intro sequence is over, you see the title screen for the first time, and then you fast-forward to the present. Even then, it's another hour of incredibly long dialogues and confusing cutscenes before you're given full control of your party and access to the world map.

Trust me when I say that it's worth the trouble. Yes, the game starts off annoyingly, and counting all the distractions that happen while playing any handheld game, it took about two hours to get through all the opening stuff and into the real game. However, I fell in love with Golden Sun rather quickly after that point. The story is interesting and manageable once you're in control of its pace.

The game's graphics are totally refreshing, the kind of style we saw a lot in the first one or two years of the PlayStation's life. Colorful, detailed pre-rendered sprites and backgrounds are surprisingly animated. The battle system is even better that I'd imagined from screenshots; the camera works just like those in popular polygonal RPGs like Final Fantasy VII and the special effects are applied liberally, but there are no problems with slowdown. Oddly, the World Map is displayed as a Mode-7 bitmap, and it shifts slightly when you walk East or West...the effect is kinda unsettling, if you ask me. The World Map also looks grainy when the camera zooms in, but since that only happens during cutscenes outside of town (which are presumably rare), I don't anticipate it being an issue.

The music is also wonderful, and in a quirky move, Camelot decided to give each character his own "voice"...think Banjo-Kazooie. Some of the voices are a bit irritating, but they do a great job of helping to distinguish which character is speaking, since cutscenes often contain six or more characters.

What about the gameplay? It's hard to define non-battle gameplay in RPG, but I will say that the shop interface is excellent, the status menus are fairly easy to navigate, and I already love the use of magic outside battles. Even early in the game, there are some fairly difficult puzzles (or at least harder than I expected at the beginning), and you have to think creatively about your "Psynergy" powers to find a solution. My only gripe so far in this area is that your character's running speed isn't very fast...I'm hoping there's a special item later on that will fix that.

The battles are sheer joy. Camelot has put together a seemingly traditional battle mode, but it plays very quickly and intuitively. The Djinn system (in the same vein as FF's Materia and Junctioning systems, although much different from either of those) is confusing in theory, but it's really simple in practice, and it adds a lot of strategy and variety to the fights. This has to be the first RPG I've ever played that gives you a summon before you even reach the second town. Despite how that sounds, the Djinn are really very balanced, and the battles so far have been of average difficulty, with some tougher boss fights where appropriate.

So far, Golden Sun strikes me as looking very much like Chrono Trigger, playing a little like Illusion of Gaia, but with a battle mode like Final Fantasy's...on speed. I'll definitely be reviewing this game once it's finished (might be a while, thanks to GameCube!), so look for that in the future.