Gaming news: How RPGs like Golden Sun teach players to think strategically

Nintendo marked ‘Golden Sun’s 25th birthday this year as a milestone that was commemorated by the addition of the Game Boy Advance classic to Nintendo Switch Online.

This particular RPG’s structure was built around planning and resource management that resulted in the evaluation of consequences after the act.

This structure was the established standard for a long time before the concept of ‘critical thinking’ was considered as a useful selling point for educational games, writes Sports News Blitz’s gaming expert Takudzwa Mawera.

Djinn turn stat-building into a trade off

In the world building lore of Weyard, there are small but very important elemental creatures that players collect throughout their many quests called Djinn (The best known system in Golden Sun).

Each of these Djinn, have a ‘Set’ and ‘Standby’ command function that result in either elevating a character’s stats to unlock stronger Psynergy abilities or to unlock a unique single powerful attack, defensive move or summon before switching to ‘Recovery’ for one or more battle turns depending of the number and combination of Djinn used.

This is a permanent and unalterable system where setting Djinn raises all party member’s Health and Psynergy points in and out of battle in the long run.

Unleashing their individual abilities on the foe or foes greatly aids in winning the battle but temporarily weakens the party for the duration that the Djinn are in the recovery phase.

This means that every battle demands a weighting of short term vs long term gains and costs.

The aforementioned weighting is accompanied by another layer of strategy which is elemental type. All characters, NPCs and enemies in ‘Golden Sun’ are aligned to four different elemental designations which are Venus, Mars, Mercury or Jupiter.

Understanding these designations is essential in battle given that players who are skilled in reading and analysing the enemy’s strengths, weaknesses and battle styles will also be able to read the flow of battle and even predict wins and losses.

Thus adjusting each party member’s Djinn and Psynergy accordingly is more effective than employing a strength based approach (A.K.A brute force and opposed to a measured strategic approach).

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Psynergy makes puzzles a planning exercise

In this game, Psynergy is essential as it doubles as a puzzle mechanism and progress depends on being able to finger out which specific ability matches a situation or obstacle and in what order.

An example of this is players using abilities like ‘Move’, ‘Frost’, ‘Reveal’, ‘Whirlwind’ and ‘Lift’ to shift boulders, freeze water, reveal hidden pathways and clear dense vegetation.

The abilities themselves cannot be configured, which means that progressing through dungeons in ‘Golden Sun’ requires repeated testing of various ideas and strategies until there is success. Over time this repeated sequence directly contributes to improvement of problem solving abilities.

The idea has research behind it

Real world thinking is in fact sharpened by strategy driven games according to a 2013 study in the Journal of Youth and adolescence, by researchers Paul Adachi and Teena Willoughby, that highlighted an experiment demonstrating that out of 1492 teenagers attending high school over a four year period, those who played strategic video games (role playing games included) reported heightened problem solving skills that in turn predicted improved academic grades.

This game was never designed as an educational tool but its Djinn and Psynergy systems are a great fit for what the research has described, which is that execution of repeated low and high stakes decisions in game produce real life consequences.

25 years later this straightforward but detailed, complex game design has outlasted combat systems that are tailored for spectacle rather than thought.

Its return to Switch Online has now given a new generation of players the opportunity to experience the game.

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