i played this with my partner, who had fond memories of playing it as a kid but hadn't ever beaten it; i had only heard of it by name, and knew nothing else about it. after seeing it through to credits, i'll say that it was a good time ... but it wasn't exceptional.

golden sun's primary downfall is its writing, i feel. the dialogue is unbelievably droning: characters consistently repeat each other, and conversations take long pauses so that everyone's sprites can express themselves by wiggling or speaking with a tiny additional "emotion" bubble -- an ultimately pointless feature, as these expressions could more easily & succinctly be conveyed through their dialogue ( which would better convey character than a generic ":(" appearing over everyone's heads, too! ). as a result, cutscenes both take forever to get through, and impart very little information. despite spending the entire game with this party, by the end, i feel like i had a very surface-level understanding of who they were, just because any character moments were overshadowed by the fact that i had to wade through literary mud to get there.
it's a shame, because rpgs are, more than other genres, driven by their stories & their characters. i have a grasp on what's going on, of course, but i feel no stakes in the story nor care for the main crew due to the writing.

also: i think the djinn system is cool in theory. in practice, i found it too confusing to wrap my head around & really utilize it. being able to swap your character classes on the fly & really fine-tune your party i LOVE, but being able to do that in the middle of battle was not something i ever got used to. having your stats, spells, resistances & weakness all change if you use a djinn a certain way i really did not like, because with how complicated & how many moving parts there were to the djinn system, i never really figured out why shit was happening. having to manually re-activate them after battles was annoying, too, and for the majority of the game, we just didn't bother experimenting with classes & djinn combinations because it just felt pointless or otherwise not worth it.
i would prefer djinn either let you summon OR let you use a special skill, not both. i want to be able to get to know my party & strategize around them, and i felt like i couldn't really do that when their builds were so volatile. it wasn't a major detriment during gameplay, though; we never game overed or felt overwhelmed by encounters. i'm more lamenting how this intruiging system ended up feeling too busy to really encourage me to play with it. i can see the spontenaity really working for someone else, though.
( and speaking of encounters ... WHY is the random encounter rate SO HIGH?? in a game with overworld puzzles, why did we run into giant groups of enemies every 3 to 5 steps?! EVEN WITH THE REPELLANT FEATHER??? i felt like i couldn't think straight just because encounters would constantly halt any train of thought i was forming! )

but it's not all bad. i think the graphics are interesting -- background art is really quite nice, and although i don't tend to enjoy prerendered 3D sprites, aesthetically, i think they still work well enough here. music is nice, as well, in spite of the track list being kind of small.
enemy encounters felt pretty balanced for the whole game, we never had to grind or anything, which was great. the battles are presented cute, too ... i like how cozy your party is during fights, crammed together in the wee real estate of the gba's screen. and i think the monster designs are cute too! it's kind of just a cute game ... and maybe that's all it's got going for it.

but, despite all my griping, i had a nice time & i'll be checking out the sequel, which is feeling more like a "part 2" rather than a true sequel at this point. i don't have a ton of faith that it's going to do things differently or change my opinion in any meaningful way. still ... you never know!