Re may be a drop of golden sun, but “Golden Sun: Dark Dawn” is not one of my favorite things. Arriving seven years after “Golden Sun: The Lost Age” for the Game Boy Advance, the third entry in Nintendo’s fan-favorite role-playing game series gets a graphical upgrade but never strays from the shallow waters of its predecessors. The result is an RPG that is unimpeachably competent but delivers little more than the reptilian enjoyment of seeing your characters’ power, health and magic statistics improve as you play the game longer.
An RPG’s battle system is always the core of the game, and “Dark Dawn’s” is founded on the notion that little Poke-like companions your characters collect can easily be toggled “on” and “off,” which changes your character’s attributes on the fly and allows for some degree of customizability. The problem is, you’re switching these critters from “active” to “standby” (saving up their power for summon spells) so often that your main characters’ altered characteristics rarely last more than a couple turns, and pretty soon you forget about these changes entirely.
