my review for golden sun was ... not entirely kind, perhaps, but not terribly cruel either. i think i gave it credit where credit's due. however, for it's sequel / part 2, the lost age, i am feeling less merciful towards.

i started playing this one right after finishing the first, and i remember thinking, "yeah, there's some improvements here! this doesn't feel as bad as the first." but then i took a several months-long break, and upon returning ... i just found it intolerable. it's boring. it has the same agonizing problems in the first game -- characters say the exact same things over & over to keep conversations from ending, ultimately saying nothing; battles are far too frequent, making overworld puzzles annoying to complete; traversal is REALLY frustrating, requiring mandatory backtracking through completed dungeons ( which in themselves require tedious menuing to access psynergy to solve the same puzzles over & over again, as they reset every time you leave an area ); and any quests you are given are unclear as to where you need to go or what you need to do, which compounds with the previous point & makes passage through this world feel absolutely, utterly awful.

my problems with the djinn remain in this game. i just don't think i like a system that leaves your party members feeling so faceless & volatile, as much as i enjoy the freedom to swap classes & experiment. the new cast themselves are not terribly interesting people, either, relying on bland & sometimes inconsistent tropes to write characters rather than any sincere ideas.

there's a lot of pointless design choice in this, too, including the things i mentioned earlier. we spent the time importing our previous save's information from the first game, presumably to get our items & our old team back, but you don't get to see these things for several hours of gameplay; in fact, we dropped the game before ever getting them.
there's also the matter of unlocking the ship, which you'd think would open up navigation to you & let you traverse the world more easily. no no, not in this game! many port towns have access blocked in the sea by huge rocks, meaning you STILL need to backtrack through those freakin dungeons to reach them. and nearly all the new little islands you can visit on the ship either have no information, or require, yes, that's right, more god damn back tracking ( which you have to access by land ) ( not ship ) ( not the thing you just spent forever unlocking ) to even start doing shit in. it's just ... it's exhausting!

if this game had anything going for it, we'd probably have stuck it through to the end. but the plot was never interesting, the characters were never interesting, the gameplay itself teetered between Kinda Cool to Painfully Boring ... there was just nothing driving any kind of desire or intrigue.

so despite me saying that i think this one had things going for it that the first didn't -- which is true, they did minorly improve on some features -- i'm ranking it lower than its prequel. it just failed to win me over, and has left a bitter taste in my mouth.