What's the word?

It's been freaking months, what's the DEAL with Nintendo and Camelot?

On topic: the bird.

We barely heard about the original two games before they were released, why would this one be any different? Let it surprise you!

Screw surprises, we want to know stuff!

Alternatively, the word is love.

I see the status of my mind and mood in regards to this issue is contagious. ;D (And it was just two days ago when I noted in the Cbox that it was the 20-week anniversary since Golden Sun DS' announcement.) Every day, several times a day, I click on my bookmarks on the Camelot Software Planning site, Golden Sun Realm, and Golden Sun Syndicate, no joke.

Thus I shall unload my pre-constructed counter-argument: It's easy to forget the various reasons why the silence does not actually mean anything bad at all. I mean, it IS frankly out of the ordinary by the standards of the game industry to be completely silent for this long a time following an E3 announcement, but one would do well to remember: This IS the small-ish company that took 6 years to follow up on their games to begin with, and this IS the company whose development cycles for the GBA games themselves were unusually long for handheld videogames to begin with by industry standards. And it's not just Golden Sun; the Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess as well IS a perfect argument for longer development times. So we really should grant them the further time.

BTW, I half-expected the contents of the first post of this topic to be "BURRRRRRN!!!" based on the topic title. I got lyrics to a Little Mermaid song on the mind >_<

A bit unrelated, but what are the odds that GSDS could be cancelled? A friend brought it up.

I'd say low, since they bothered to make a hullabaloo about it at E3.

E3 is not what it once was though...

Then again Tales of VS. came out of left field... but that was a second string series title.

I'm inclined to think that somewhere, Nintendo is leaning harder and harder on Camelot and they're all "SSSSSSHIIIIIT"

See if that guy's going to get any blessings from Kraden anytime soon. >.>

But when trying to come up with an answer that's as unbiased as possible, I nonetheless conclude that chance to be "low" based on the economy; canceling what sure looked like a well-animating product from the trailers would mean investing a lot of money into nothing at all, which is something a company can't afford. I'd have to say that it will have to be released so that the game will have the chance to yield returns, thus potentially keeping Camelot afloat; better that than ensuring the company falls financially by randomly pulling that game's plug.

Of course, all that's based on my assumptions on how the ecomony works and SHOULD work in my opinion...

Well, if Hollywood can keep pouring money into shittastic movies and hoping that they'll draw enough from their probably-expensive trailers to make money... then I'd imagine that if game companies care enough to make a trailer for a game that isn't Duke Nukem Forever, they'll make the game itself.

Dude, I was JUST about to draw a Duke Nukem Forever parallel. XD

My post would've said "Well, we're a little better off than those that've been waiting for Duke Nukem Forever, right?"

Hopefully we'll get something at the beginning of next year. Although the fact that they say 2010 implies some information of some kind sooner.

Incidentally, this month's polls on the Golden Sun wikia has a poll on how the readers are taking the complete lack of new GSDS information over the last 22 weeks. Intriguingly, the option "I am being driven to insanity" is the most popular opinion by far.

If anyone here sees this poll, voting in it would be much appreciated.

*voted*
Yeah the lack of new information is totally irritating!
Although my greatest fear is just that camelot will not make up to our exceptations.

I sure hope thiss won't be just another rpg.

Just another rpg?

JUST ANOTHER RPG!!?

There is no way in hell this will be JUST ANOTHER RPG; this is the long awaited sequel to OUGEN NO TAIYOU (aka GOLDEN SUN)!!! THIS WILL BE AN EPIC AMONGST EPICS!!!!!!!

According to MLIA, today's word is... puddle.

Seriously, remember that this is Camelot. I've reminded people over and over again, one thing that Camelot nails pretty much every time is sequels. Shining Force 2 was better than the first game, and while Shining Force 3 may not have been as good as that, was still pretty damn good. (Sans voice acting, which is notoriously atrocious.) And when have you seen a Mario sports game that wasn't as good as the last one that came out? The only thing I'm worrying about is how the game is presented. Under normal circumstances I wouldn't be worrying about that at all, but one big appeal that Golden Sun had was how fantastically it looked and sounded. I normally don't care, but I do hope it's up to snuff.

Something else I'd like to bring up is what it was like when the first GS game was initially showcased in its beta form: At that time, it was Mia that was the female lead living in Vale with Isaac and Garet, and Jenna apparently didn't exist yet. Saturos and Menardi were differently designed then as well. And the second hidden portrait of Alex that was discovered over half a year ago via Atrius' editor suggested that he was once considered as a playable Mercury Adept along with Felix, Jenna, and Sheba, but that was scrapped when it was decided he would be an NPC while Piers was created for the second game. It was even said by Camelot once that they originally were planning to have just one GBA Golden Sun game, but found that insufficient to serve what they wanted to do with it, so they developed it into a two-part series, with the way they would link up with each other all planned out even before the first game's release.

My point with all that is that, since major decisions on important things like characters were being decided on and finalized all throughout development of the first GBA game right up to its release, perhaps that's what's going on here with GSDS; rather then spending all these months just on straight polish, the developers could be changing aspects of the story around, redesigning characters, adding new characters altogether, and possibly doing all this with a second GSDS installment in mind. It's a safe bet that with development histories like the ones Camelot's RPGs have, the only preview content a game like GSDS can safely show to the public is finalized content that won't end up being changed/dropped in the final product. :/

Apologies for the double post, but today hereby marks the half-year anniversary of the announcement of Golden Sun DS in June 2. 6 months, 26 weeks, 183 days, however you want to view the figures involved - it's now become that long without a single smidgen of information.

I don't think it's really exaggeration at this point to say that these six months have been at least as difficult to wait through as the six years before that. Now, by the time the fall semester started about 10 weeks after GSDS, I was like "AWWWW" because it was like we ran out of time for the game to make the summer further awesome. I was honestly NOT expecting the lack of information to extend up to and beyond the end of the year, though. X_X