ok i think i played for at least 1 hour and i still haven't seen the first proper dungeon... so the game is a direct sequel of golden sun 2 and in fact it's set 30 years later,apparently when the heroes saved the world,they also fucked it up because well... that's how things work when they make a sequel 7 years later,so now they have to fix it up again
in the meantime the heroes of the first game have grown a lot of facial hairs and had kids,so you now control their little kids instead... the first bit of the game (which come after a somewhat boring and long intro which retell the event of the first game) is a dungeon that is somewhat tutorialish and since you are accompained by two of the heroes of the first game,it's basicaly impossible to die
after that you finaly get to go on a quest of your own altough this just send you to a place called "psyenergy training ground" where basicaly the game retells you once again the plot of the first game (tough in a little more detail this time) trough a lot of cardboard cutouts and some puzzle solving,in fact the whole affair ends up in a boss fight against a cardboard version of golden sun 2 final boss.... and so far that's all i played
the rest of the game can be easily described as golden sun in 3D,the music is still the same,character still do that really annoying squeaky sound when they talk (thank god you can disable it) and you still find djinn on a cliff that you reach by using your magic
the only difference's worth a mention are
1) during dialogue everytime a character mention a place or person it gets underlined,you can check more info about underlined words by tapping them with your stylus,this extra info then get added to a database,even tough the game doesn't really need such a feature it's a lot better than similiar RPG like xenosaga where they just dump a lot of unrelated info all at once and then they expect you to read it
2) weapon now have skills in them,the game hasn't told me how to unlock these and they also seems to trigger at random so i'm not sure it will ends up making a lot of difference in the end
3) the animation in this game is awesome,summons in particular are reminescent of FF7-8-9 summoning sequence and unlike final fantasy they are also skippable! here's a video showing some of them
[youtube=560,345][/youtube]
